Online Movie-Watching in 2017

Earlier this year, I wrote about signing up for FilmStruck, the online movie site owned by Turner Classic Movies that offers classic and more obscure art house and independent films, including Criterion Collection films, from Hollywood and across the globe. I had meant to keep track of the films I watched, and in the earlier blog post I noted a few, but I figured, as is the case with Netflix, that the site itself kept a running list of all the films I watched. Unfortunately, they do not; or rather, they do retain the films that are not cycled off the site.

So here, mostly based on memory, are 21 of the films that especially stood out for me. I know I am forgetting a few, and I intend to keep a better list of my own this year. Nevertheless, here are my standouts, a number of which were by directors, like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Nagisa Oshima, whose films I have almost all seen, whereas others were my first forays into the work of the director, as were the cases with Jacques Demy and Jacques Tati. The list is heavily male (and European); I do hope that FilmStruck will add more films by women, directors from across the globe (especially Latin American and Africa), and more by openly LGBTQ filmmakers.

In keeping with my longstanding aims and because it's the end of the year, I'll aim to be as brief as possible.

***

1) Luis Buñuel's 1962 film The Exterminating Angel: I'd seen many of his films but not this one. Buñuel handles the scenario, which involves a group of socialites who, for unknown reasons, cannot leave a living room, leading to a breakdown in mores, with utter mastery. The metaphysical horror of their enclosure steadily mounts, functioning as a subtle yet harsh critique of elitism and self-satisfaction.

2) Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1975 Fox and His Friends: Until last year, I had watched nearly every Fassbinder film but not this one, a powerful early post-#Stonewall gay film, with social class at its center. As with so many films on this list, Fassbinder's vision, and in particular, his embedded social critique, would struggle to gain funding or support in today's Hollywood.

3) Djibril Diop Mambéty's 1973 Touki Bouki: A little gem of 1970s West African cinema, Mambéty's Touki Bouki depicts Senegal's post-independence urban-rural divide, through the prism of alienated youth. The protagonists, Mory and Anta, a student, yearn to escape Senegal for Paris, and drive around on a motorcycle devising schemes to flee. The brevity of Mambéty's career feels especially tragic in light of his achievements with this film.

4) Nagisa Oshima's 1969 film Boy: Oshima often depicts some of the darker sides of human existence; in the early 1960s he was showing young miscreants rolling johns for money, and later took up themes such as suicide, bestiality, and sex addiction. Boy tells the story of a family faking car accidents, using their young children, particularly the older son Toshio, all across Japan, until the law catches up with them. One gets the sense that Toshio may not have learned the right lesson as a result.

5) Peter Weir's 1977 feature The Last Wave: I'd always heard this was a great film and it lived up to its advanced billing. The premise is a white lawyer defends an Aboriginal man charged in a mysterious bar crime, as portents visible at first only to the Aborigines loom. The lawyer, played by Richard Chamberlain, experiences premonitions that become hallucinations, but the film suggests a broader view as well, that a post-colonial, metaphysical confrontation is underway. The enigmatic ending is especially powerful, though I wondered how Aborigines viewed their depictions in the film. 

6) Jacques Demy's 1964 film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: So many people have raved about this film over the years so I was glad to finally see it. It is about as sweet as a musical can get, starring a very young Catherine Deneuve, with a lightness that differs from American musicals of the time. The Algerian War hovers inescapably in the background, while class issues and the changing ethos of the era are in its foreground, so it is less cotton candy and more a complex confection that delights even as it enlightens.

7) Jean Cocteau's 1950 Orpheus: I found this queer dream masquerading as a film visually astonishing. To cite one specific moment, Orpheus dons surgical gloves and descends into the underworld, through a mirror, a moment that outstrips many a subsequent CGI attempt to transform reality before our eyes. It is truly lyrical, oneiric cinema.

8) William Klein's 1969 Mr. Freedom: Klein is mostly forgotten today, but he produced a number of distinctive films in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mr. Freedom is a cartoonish, overtly racist, hyper-nationalistic, rightwing white superhero. Put him in a suit, make a real-estate heir and pseudo-titan, and he could easily be the person a minority of voters, 62 million or so, elected in November 2016.

9) François Truffaut's 1968 charmer Stolen Kisses: One of the Antoine Doinel series I'd never seen, Stolen Kisses, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud in his third turn as Doinel, a troubled veteran struggling to fit into society, is delightful in a way that American movies have completely forgotten is possible.

10) Éric Rohmer's 1986 The Green Ray: Yet another strongly heralded film, I was not so sure how it would turn out given its unpromising start. Is it a feminist comedy? Something more serious? Something ominous? Ultimately, Rohmer's confection turned out to be very simple, but also very moving, and ultimately sublime. In any other hands this might have been a throwaway; in Rohmer's and his actors' and crew's, it a model of film art.

11) Basil Dearden's 1951 film Pool of London: One of the first British films to depict an interracial romance, Pool of London also introduced Jamaican-British actor Earl Cameron, who, impressively, is still acting at age 100! The film is not Dearden's best, but its points to his cinematic triumphs to come.

12) Derek Jarman's 1978 reverie Jubilee: Another very poetic and political film, using time travel, Shakespearean characters, and musical performances, Jubilee merges authentic British punk culture & dystopianism as a protest against the monarchy and stagnation in Callaghan-era UK society. As much queered cinema as queer cinema, Jubilee is another film that probably would and could not be made today.

13) Tomas Gutiérrez Alea's 1968 hybrid Memories of Underdevelopment: A landmark Cuban film, which I've seen before several times, the first on PBS back in the 1990s. Among its many questions a chief one is, what place exists for a bourgeois white liberal in a post-bourgeois, multicultural, socially egalitarian, revolutionary society? The apolitical man--or self-assumed one--may really have no place in the post-revolt world. Gutiérrez Alea's collage approach and use documentary also still feel innovative today.

14) Nagisa Oshima's 1960 hybrid Night and Fog in Japan: This strange, powerful political film explores a psychic and political reckoning, several years on, among youthful revolutionaries. It wraps this around what appears to be domestic touchstone, a heterosexual marriage, but it is probably fair to say that taken as a whole, there was little like this film in theaters during its era and nothing like it anywhere today.

15) Susan Seidelman's 1982 feature Smithereens: 3 years before releasing Desperately Seeking Susan Seidelman debuted with this portrait of young, underemployed wannabe punks, embodied in Susan Berman's Wren, one of the most unlikably mesmerizing characters to appear on screen. One hallmark of this film, which appeared during my high school years, is its glimpse of a long-gone NYC.

16) Ousmane Sembène's 1963 Borom Sarret: I had not realized this film is considered to be the first theatrical feature by a sub-Saharan Black African filmmaker, but its significance extends beyond its groundbreaking status. Sembène's very simple but not simplistic masterpiece about a cart driver gave strong clues about the remarkable career to follow.

17) Louis Malle's 1958 crime drama Elevator to the Gallows: This thrilling drama, brought to life by a skillful director, was worth the advance billing.  Jeanne Moreau, as always, burns up the screen.

18) Roger Corman's 1962 The Intruder: Oddly or not so oddly, this portrait of a white supremacist who arrives in a sleepy Southern town to stir up racial resentment against looming desegregation and school integration rarely appears on film. I'd never heard of it. But William Shatner, who plays the agitator, is superb in the role, and it is not a performance you'll forget if you see it.

19) Hollis Frampton's 1970  Zorns Lemma: This is experimental, structural cinema at its purest. 5 minutes of a voice with a black screen, then 45 minutes of 2,700 images flashing by, depicting aspects of a 24-part alphabet, then 10 minutes of a receding snowy image. You can either turn it off or watch it. I did the latter, and was entranced by the film's end.

20) Jacques Tati's 1967 feature Playtime: There are few words strong enough to extol the singular vision Tati expresses in this or any of his later works. Ostensibly another Mr. Hulot vehicle, Tati constructed an entire mini-city for the purposes of this film, and paid a steep financial and creative price. It remains remarkable on every level that he pulled this off.

21) Todd Solondz's 2009 Life During Wartime: The newest film on the list, this also is one of two films by him (Wiener Dog is the other) that I'd missed. Solondz continues to buck the conventional US filmmaking trends, with his acerbic portrayals of suburban life in contemporary America. I thought his 1998 film Happiness, for which Life During Wartime is the sequel, was more disturbing, but this one, which reprises all the characters but with different actors, is not far behind.

FilmStruck

Although FilmStruck has existed since 2006, I only discovered it last fall when I happened upon an online mention and decided to explore the website. A streaming service like Netflix, FilmStruck is owned by Turner Classic Movies and features classic and more obscure art house and independent films from Hollywood and across the globe. A significant portion of its movies are part of the acclaimed Criterion Collection, which struck an exclusive deal with TCM and FilmStruck this past year to take over Criterion's US streaming from Hulu. As a result, FilmStruck's cinematic cornucopia now includes feature, short and documentary films by major 20th century international filmmakers ranging from Michelangelo Antonioni, Catherine Breillat, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Costa-Gavras to Nagisa Oshima, Yasujiro Ozu, Peter Weir and Wim Wenders. Unlike Netflix, though, there is no DVD option, nor any original series, as far as I can tell. (MUBI is another cinephile service, like FilmStruck, that I've downloaded the Apple TV app for, but haven't experimented with it yet. Green Cine, which I belonged to years ago, was a DVD subscription service, and did not have a streaming component.)

One of the curated mini-festivals,
films based in the City of Love, Paris

I've only been using the service for a few weeks, but I've been impressed by the movie selection and additional features available so far. The site organizes the films by general FilmStruck and Criterion Collection offerings, and by genre (with the total tally of films in each), newest arrivals, and most popular viewer choices, while also offering curated micro-festivals organized by theme, concept, filmmaker or cinematographer, aesthetic style, and more. If you didn't know anything about Dusan Makavejev's oeuvre, or perhaps have only seen a few Alain Resnais or Chantal Akerman films, FilmStruck provides a quick tutorial. As with Criterion DVDs, additional features, such as trailers, interviews with filmmakers, clips on film production, and so on, also are sometimes available. 

I do wish, however, that more sub-Saharan African, Asian and Latin American films, more films by women and more LGBTQ-themed films were available on the site. The search tool, though it works fine, doesn't allow searching by country or region, so it has often been through the "related titles" list of suggested films that I've been able to find and bookmark films I want to see. (I realized that another option for Criterion Collection films was to go directly to Criterion's site, identify as many of the films I wanted to see there, and then add them to my watchlist if they were on FilmStruck.)

Now playing

What's also not clear is whether and when most of the films's runs online (based on the site's licenses for them) expire. The curated mini-festivals do vanish, but do all the films in them remain online in perpetuity or for some fixed period (one month? three? six?) that only the site knows about? Clearly not all the Criterion Collection films are on the site, which I attribute to licensing and copyright issues, but is there a key or guide somewhere to let a viewer know which ones are on the site and how long they'll stay up. (This would be very helpful for planning the order in which to watch them.) I do know that a number of sites list which Netflix films are arriving or disappearing--didn't Netflix used to post this info on their site?--but I haven't found a similar calendar for FilmStruck. I also like the simple, easy-to-navigate interface. The site is more streamlined than Netflix, especially after the latter's "upgrade." Please keep the design intuitive and user-friendly, FilmStruck! Also, based on my recent experience, customer service has been sterling. When I was having trouble with my registration, I used the contact form, and promptly and repeatedly heard from FilmStruck to ensure that everything was operating smoothly.

Genres (and available films
in each category)

In terms of the films I've watched so far, they have been a mix of films I've always wanted to see, some I've seen before, and some I've just stumbled upon. In the first category, Djibril Diop Mambéty's 1973 masterpiece Touki Bouki has been a revelation. A vibrant narrative about a young straight couple's desire to emigrate to France for better opportunities, Touki Bouki succeeds in fusing some of the formal experimentation of the French New Wave with the poetic realism and social commentary of 1970s sub-Saharan African cinema. In its imaginative play with editing, and its frank and comical depiction of queer hustling, alone, it it feels more daring than the vast majority of what is being produced in either Hollywood or Nollywood these days. I would say the same about the aesthetic daring and the political component, though with a rather different content and focus, about Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971), which I also had never seen until a week ago.

A few films on my watchlist queue

In the second category, I watched David Cronenberg's still disturbing Scanners (1981), which holds up in terms of its visionary and horror qualities decades later. I know Cronenberg has shifted away from horror and science fiction, which in his body of work usually had a conspiratorial component, but I hope that he returns, even if just for one more time, to the genre in which he made his name. In terms of sheer awfulness, though, his 1979 film The Brood, which I hadn't seen before, wins the award. There is a scene that truly embodies the term "horrifying," and it was so disturbing that when the film first appeared that the worst of the horror was edited out in the US. Thankfully FilmStruck is screening the complete version, but again, as graphic as many Hollywood films now are, nothing comes close to Cronenberg's presentation of motherly love as literal monstrousness at the moment of trans-human post-parturition.

One of the films I'd never heard of but decided to watch that also fits the "horror" category, with a twist, is Czech director Jaromil Jires's 1970 film Valerie's Week of Wonders. Hybrid in genre, surreal in form and style, the movie explores a teenage girl's sexual awakening, if lived in a Hieronymous Bosch painting. Let's just say that films of this sort, whether under the horror or fantasy genres, or some other, simply don't get made any more. Another was Nils Gaup's Pathfinder (1987), a historical thriller and Academy Award nominee about a peaceful group of indigenous Samí residents of what is now Finnland, circa 1000 AD, whose tranquil existence undergoes a shock when an all-male troop of Chudes, ancestors to Russians, arrives, with brutal consequences. A teenage hero steps in, and its his canniness, rather than physical prowess, that proves decisive. A third was Avie Luthra's 2012 film Lucky, about a young rural Black South African boy who loses his mother to AIDS, then moves to the city to live with an uncle who despises him and blows through his school money. Lucky craves and will do anything for an education, and bonds with an older, racist South Asian woman. This film was painful to sit through at times, but in the end moved me to tears.

Other discoveries: films I'd never heard of or had been intending to watch by Youssef Chahine, Victor Erice, John Frankenheimer, Aki Kaurismäki, Martin Ritt, Ken Russell, Carlos Saura, Jacques Tati; and by directors I'd never heard of, including Luis García Berlanga, Juan Carlos Cremata, Ahmed El Maanouni, Metin Erksan, Pierre Etaix, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Mikio Naruse, Edgar Morin, Kundan Shah,, and many others. Next up, I think, Pedro Costa's widely acclaimed docu-fictional trilogy about Fontainhas, in Lisbon, Portugal: Ossos (1987), In Vanda's Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2006), and as many of the Chantal Akerman movies as I can get through before classes start next week.

Marfa Film Festival

One of the highlights of being in Marfa in July was catching this past week's Marfa Film Festival. Running from July 13 through 17, it featured six dozen films, by my count, ranging from shorts to full-length feature films and documentaries. What better way to take a break from writing than catch a few films that might in their own way spark some thought and creative possibilities? Though the festival passes, merchandise and information book were in the Marfa landmark Hotel Paisano, most of the films screened at the Crowley Theater a few blocks away. A few specially designated films, however, like the singular Belladonna of Sadness, about which I'll say a bit more below, ran at more atmospheric spots like El Cósmico, an outdoor restaurant, bar, semi-drive in, and recreational space with--I kid not--charcoal-fired hot tubs. Despite the fact that it was a small-town event, the festival's weeklong passes were pricier than I forecast, but I indulged and purchased one to ensure hassle-free entry into any film or related event.

On the festival's first day, which began with an afternoon screening of Greg Kwedar's feature Transpecos, there was a free outdoor Opening Night Party, on one of Marfa's two main streets, the north-south artery Highland Avenue, which had been blocked off to create a plaza in front of the Paisano Hotel. The event aimed to commemorate the 60th anniversary of George Stevens' movie Giant, which was filmed in and around Marfa; stars Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean stayed at the Hotel Paisano while filming, as a large photo attests once you walk past the hotel's foyer. The party included a historic room tour, a red carpet photo booth, revelers sporting 1950s Hollywood style, and a dance party DJ'd by local turntablist "Manolo Black." It started slowly but within an hour or so the plaza was brimming with people.

After I grabbed a drink and settled at one of the long tables, I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with Antonio García Jr., a young actor, writer and director. Garcia is a California native now resident in Brooklyn. He was in Marfa because his short, Flying Eggs, which he'd written and starred in, was among a series of films screening Wednesday morning. After my conversation with Garcia I took in a little more of the revelry, though I didn't dance, pose on the red carpet or take the Paisano room tour, then headed home to read and write a bit more before tucking in early so that I could catch García's film and a few others I did not want to miss.

Downtown Marfa blocked off for the
free Opening Night Party festival  

People gathering on Highland Street 

Many of the film were shorts and screened in continuous blocks, so the range in quality was bound to be variable. One judgment I can offer without hesitation was that the overall visual quality of every film I saw demonstrated polish, even if the content was lacking or not up to. None of the films looked too amateurish, despite the youth of many of the filmmakers, and several were clearly filmed on limited budgets, using digital video. Among the 11 am block, García Jr.'s film, Flying Eggs, directed by Sheldon Chau, and a documentary short, Train Surfers, about Mumbai-based daredevils, directed by Adrien Clothier, was the strongest of the many offerings. Set in New York City, Flying Eggs took a premise that many pedestrians--someone harassing you from a façade window as you walk underneath--would dread, and turned it on its head, with a horrifying revelation in store for the lead, played by García Jr., once he decided to confront his tormentor. This was anything but your light-hearted metropolitan diary. Train Surfers gave glimpses of a world with which I am only passingly familiar, and its strongest elements were the mise-en-scène moments when the daredevils were undertaking their stunts, and its decision to let them speak. I would have loved a bit more context, though, about their lives and prospects outside this activity.

The other films I found less compelling, and two really rubbed me the wrong way. One, Baby Doll, a short by John Valley, entailed a Freddy Mercury-costumed white man lipsyncing to the eponymous song by Austin-based pop-rock band Sweet Spirit. He dons a blond wig (of course) before a captive audience of...captive young women! By captive I mean literally so: bound, ball-gagged, and forced to watch as he frolics, in grating fashion. An ironic twist resolves his presence, but the film ends with the young woman still bound and gagged, so it wasn't enough to redeem the premise or the imagery, at least for me. Another, Brix and Bitch, a short by LA-based filmmaker Nico Raineu, could serve as a textbook example of what liberal misogyny might look like. In it a white woman, "Bitch," must participate in fight club matches with men to pay off a debt. At one of the fights, they lustily chant "Bitch," etc., as a man repeatedly wallops her. (Yes, she fights back, but still--nope.) The white male debt-holder decides that if she can beat one final opponent, she's off the hook. Her partner, a black woman, "Brix," decides to help her out. You can probably guess where this is going. I should note that many in the audience thankfully did not applaud when it ended. 

Several other films were visually striking but fell short in terms of content. In Max Barbakow's short The Duke, a black former football player suffering from the effects of CTE damage, cannot remember the violence he wreaks in every day life. In another, Oh My God, Forgive Me, a world premier by Alex Coblent, a young interracial couple's argument takes a grotesque turn. Both were striking to look at, particularly The Duke, but neither struck me as more than a bizarre anecdote transposed into visual media. Outside of the documentary short Nascent, by Lindsay Branham and Jonathan Kasbe, and filmed in the Central African Republic; filmmaker Alisa Cacho-Sousa's Circunstancia, which poetically explored the Caribbean's duality as an isolating and liberating figure for Cubans; and Swiss filmmaker Nicolas Siegenthelar's beguiling science fiction short Starfall, which I wish were a full-length feature, several other short films and films had the same effect on me; each felt well intentioned, but limited by the constraint of not pushing the idea far enough, even if the film itself had only a few minutes to do so. Again, the technical quality of every film I saw was high, and many of these filmmakers are still at the early stages of their careers, leaving me with the thought that if they can find writers operating at the levels of their cinematographers and producers, they could have strong careers on their hands.

A DJ's booth

Dancing in front of the Marfa Film Festival logo 

I want to comment on two highlights of the festival that I won't soon forget. One was the evening outdoor screening of the newly restored Belladonna of Sadness. Originally debuting in 1973, this animated fable represents Eichi Yamamoto's and Yoshiyuki Fukuda's riff, in combination with the artist Osamu Tezuka and the Mushi Production animation studio, on Jules Michelet's 1862 tome Satanism and Witchcraft, though set several centuries before in a peasant village somewhere in France. In it a young couple, Jean and Jeanne, suffer a devastating blow to their connubial bliss when a local Baron and his allies brutally rape Jeanne on her wedding night. Jean consoles his wife and urges her to look to the future, but a phallic spirit urges her to avenge the attack by allying herself with the devil. As a famine strikes the village and the Baron prepares for war, he demands that Jean, who has become the local tax collector, to press more money out of the locals, and when Jean cannot, the Baron severs his hand. The spirit cajoles Jeanne into taking Jean's place, which she does, to great success, and as a result she provokes the ire and envy of the Baron's wife, who denounces her as a witch. When Jean will not accept Jeanne, she flees to the forest, becomes the lover of the spirit, who turns out to be Satan, and when she is captured and burned at the stake, she marshals her powers and sparks a revolution that overthrows the standing order.

As the above summary suggests, the fairytale elements of Belladonna of Sadness's plot quickly curdle into what is essentially a horror story. Tezuka's images are Klimtian in their mixture of flatness and complexity, and the larger tableaux enrich the plot, often in complementary fashion but sometimes in imagistic counterpoint. Much of the animation consists of pans and small variations on the still drawings, with vibrant use of composition and color, such as when the Baron's rape of Jeanne precedes a red line between her legs that turns into a widening river of blood. The graphic sexual material, which includes ribald jokes and a Dionysian orgy near the film's end, signal it as a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Manga and anime artist Osamu Tezuka's stylistic sensibility, at least in this film, appears to derive in part from late 19th and early 20th century European and Japanese visual art traditions. 

Two unappealing throwbacks were the blatantly contrasting color scheme for Jeanne, whose skinned was presented white as snow, while the Baron, particularly when raping Jeanne, and later Satan, when having sex with her, were pitch black, as the images I post below attest. Another obvious and repugnant throwback was the depiction of the "usurer," who helps Jeanne establish herself as the tax collector after Jean's behanding; imagery drawn directly from anti-Semitic templates that circulated in Nazi Germany made me want to walk out. I cannot believe I'm the only one who noticed these aspects of the film, but nothing I've seen online mentions them. Belladonna of Sadness ends with an homage to the French Revolution, evoking Eugène Delacroix's famous painting, Liberty Leading the People; Jeanne, we are supposed to believe, has morphed into Marianne, France's liberation icon, but the leap feels politically incoherent. In fact, the overall effect was a bit stupefying: unforgettable, often trippy visuals paired with a simplistic, moralistic narrative that was both misogynistic and exploitative. On the one hand, I am glad I caught it, particularly at El Cósmico, which was an experience in itself, but on the other, I could stand without ever seeing it again.

Scene from Burden (2016)

Another standout for me was Burden, Richard Dewey's and Timothy Marrinan's 2016 documentary about the late conceptual and performance artist, engineer and sculptor, Chris Burden (1946-2015). Perhaps best known for his controversial 1971 performance, Shoot, in which he arranged for a fellow artist to shoot him with .22 rifle from 16 ft. Utterly simple, utterly dangerous, and thus quite innovative as this art act was, it constituted only one of many such groundbreaking interventions by Burden, beginning when he was still an art student at the then very new University of California, Irvine. The film canvassed his entire career, cutting between past highlights that included his notorious grad school stunt Five Day Locker Piece, which brought him immediate notoriety, and 1974's Trans-fixed, in which he nailed himself to a VW Bug and had it travel in and out of a garage, and contemporary moments with the artist, who kept striking out for new territory--though leaving corporeal performance behind--right up until his death from melanoma a year ago.

Along the way, Burden showed how his work from the beginning often involved taking a very simple idea to its logical, or illogical extreme, as well as his intrinsic merging of the visual, the sculptural, the bodily, and engineering; how integral his wives were to his career, with his first wife, Barbara Burden, supporting him financially by working a full-time job and even stepping in when no one else would participate in what were at times quite scary performances; how gallerists, peers and audiences found themselves continually astonished, and times terrified, of what Burden imagined and then realized as art; how crazed drugs and fame made him at one point; and how he embodied one of the principle insights of many great careers in art, which is never to lose the playfulness and wonderment of childhood, though doing so may create a personal hell for those close to you.

While the filmmakers were too coy about his background and the social capital it provided him, they thankfully did not hesitate show the complexities of his personality and behavior, including one of his ugliest moments, when he angrily struck out, with racist and misogynistic epithets, at his second ex-wife and the art dealer she was seeing, after she'd fled him. Nor did they fail to note the irony that when one of Burden's students brings a loaded gun to class, perhaps in echo and tribute to Burden's earlier landmark piece, the artist complained to the school, and then retired. Imitation in such cases is not flattery but possibly the prelude to real danger. (A second irony is that as a young man, Burden actually said on camera, "Everybody fantasizes about being shot," though this is not true and also must be understood within the specific context in which Burden was creating art.) The film ended on a bittersweet note; shortly before Burden passes away, he completes one of his most beautiful and lyrical pieces, the inflated, self-guiding mini-dirigible that he envisioned as a tribute to the great Brazilian aeronaut Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873-1932). Though he does not live to see the piece's début, it embodies in compelling material fashion the spirit of his later work, and his overall vision.

Photos in front of the Palace Theater

Brooklyn-based actor
Antonio Garcia Jr. 

Peering into Arcade 

When the Marfa Film Festival concluded, I felt glad that I had been able to catch more than a few of its films. One thing I noted throughout the festival was how few filmmakers of color were involved; even films with subject matter that explored the lives and concerns of people who were not white were mostly the product of white filmmakers. The festival's organizers clearly tried to schedule a range of films, for which I give them tremendous credit, so the issue is less the festival itself, but rather the film industry, including indie filmmaking, which I imagine still presents a number of challenges, primarily financial, to transforming creative visions into cinema reality. I also give the filmmakers themselves credit for attempting to stretch their perspectives and to a degree cast a wider net, particularly compared to the Hollywood mainstream, in terms of the subjects they seek to explore, the characters they write, and so forth. Yet I wonder whether a woman director, particularly a queer filmmaker of color, would ever have written, let alone filmed, a movie like Brix and the Bitch. Perhaps yes, though I doubt it. All of this also underlined for me one of the challenges Hollywood faces; it's one thing to add diverse faces to the Academy's rolls, and another to change the system that keeps a wide array of talented people from making films that reflect the rich diversity of lives and experiences in the US and across the globe.

At El Cósmico, where Belladonna
of Sadness screened

A still from Belladonna of Sadness

Another still from Belladonna of Sadness

Oscars Whiteout (Again)

Who really cares about the Oscars? Clearly some of us care about the Oscars. Should we care about the Oscars? Should we care about the fact that the #Oscars(Are)SoWhite--again?

For the second year in a row, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that awards out the annual gold-plated Oscar statuettes, considered the pinnacle of the multibillion-dollar American film industry's honors, have nominated an all-white slate of actors in the Best and Supporting categories. Ten slots, ten white women and men, and even in two films, Creed and Straight Outta Compton, with black leading actors, only a white supporting actor and the white scriptwriters respectively received nominations. No leading actors of other races or ethnicities were nominated, nor were any films in which they played the leading roles.

While this might not have drawn much notice fifty years ago in 1966 (which in fact did have an all white roster of nominees) or, in 1936 (unsurprisingly), closer to the Oscars' establishment in 1929, it does stick out in 2016, at a time when the United States is growing increasingly more diverse in racial, ethnic, religious, and other ways, and when industry figures themselves note that 46% of Hollywood movie ticket buyers in 2013 alone were people of color (designated as black, Latinx and "other" in the marketing study linked above), and Latinxs in particular are the most enthusiastic moviegoers. And the Academy has a black woman, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, as its president.

2013 in fact was supposed to be "turning-point year" for black filmmakers. In his The Dissolve article "New study puts numbers to the lack of minority representation in film," Vadim Rizov quotes producer Harvey Weinstein uttering a quintessentially post-racial (and deeply deluded) paean to America's changing political and thus social terrain, noting that the micro-burst of black directed and starred films "signals, with President Obama, a renaissance. He’s erasing racial lines. It is the Obama effect." How wrong he was and is. Hollywood cinematic representations lag behind those on TV, which has certainly improved since the heyday of the 1970s, and those "racial lines" Weinstein spoke of are as present today as they were in 2013 or before.

As it turns out, 2013 was more of a mirage than anything else. The USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism study that Rizov cites makes clear, diverse racial and ethnic representation in Hollywood cinema is still a problem:

Examining 500 top-grossing films released in the U.S. from 2007 to 2012, the study considers some 20,000 characters and finds diversity is sorely lacking. “Across 100 top-grossing films of 2012, only 10.8 percent of speaking characters are Black, 4.2 percent are Hispanic, 5 percent are Asian, and 3.6 percent are from other (or mixed race) ethnicities,” the paper notes at the outset. “Just over three-quarters of all speaking characters are White (76.3 percent). These trends are relatively stable, as little deviation is observed across the five-year sample.”

I observe this not only when I catch previews during my increasingly rare visits to see movies in theatrical release but on TV, where film after film appears to reflect a very narrow, usually white, upper-middle-class, coastal perspective. Innumerable stories not just from the present but the past remain offscreen, at least those screens commandeered by Hollywood studios. Non-traditional casting has improved somewhat, but people of color are still relegated to secondary or subsidiary, and often stereotypical roles, and even though blackface performance thankfully is rare to nonexistent in Hollywood these days, whitewashing source characters happens regularly, and yellowface characterizations crop up. Far more frequent, though, are stereotypes.  Quoting Rizov again:

Among the other conclusions reached: “Hispanic females are more likely to be depicted in sexy attire and partially naked than Black or White females. Asian females are far less likely to be sexualized.” While women got assigned the same kind of domestic status regardless of their race or ethnicity, “Hispanic males are more likely to be depicted as fathers and relational partners than males in all other racial/ethnic groups. Black males, on the other hand, are the least likely to be depicted in these roles.”

Some actors of color, like Kevin Hart--who has become the current go-to black sidekick-enabler in comedies--continue to make careers out of this situation. What exacerbates the problem is the lack of diversity behind the camera, with the ratio of white directors dwarfing directors from any other racial background. Thinking intersectionally, given the sexist and ageist challenges women in Hollywood still face (articulated without intersectionality last year by Patricia Arquette and again this year by media darling Jennifer Lawrence), things are even worse for women of color.

Meanwhile certain plotlines, including "white men battling adversity"; an older white man paired with a younger white woman; younger upper-middle-class white people facing relationships hurdles; and all or mostly white historical scenarios characterize a great many of the plots of Hollywood films. Yes, pace Vladimir Propp, there are a limited number of plots out there, but still a far greater array of narrative configurations, inflected by cultural difference, which is to say stories and experiences, in the US and across the globe, that rarely if ever make it through Hollywood's system.

Sylvester Stallone and Michael B. Jordan
in Creed (moviepilot.com)

This imaginative narrowness, which I would only partially chalk up to racism, only magnifies the inequities the Academy members' racial and gender makeup (94% white and 77% male) and voting patterns produce. Fewer and less culturally and narratively diverse film opportunities mean fewer roles in which actors of color appear on screen, whatever their acting skill level. I should also note that most of the black actors who have won Oscars in recent years have usually been honored for performances involving strong elements of abjection and spectacle, which also points to Academy voting biases.

Ultimately it comes back to gatekeepers at all levels of the movie industry who fail to approve and advance scripts and films that might offer a richer portrait of the society, or who tend to view issue of race and ethnicity, religious difference, and so on, through a narrow lens, are one major source of the problem. The revelations emerging from the Sony hack made this very clear. Moviegoers who support the status quo are another, but while it is conceivable that Americans could boycott Hollywood standard offerings (and excuses), films are a global business, circulating from Canada to Argentina, the UK to South Africa, Russia to New Zealand--and China is the largest single market of all. Hollywood's representations are not just a domestic problem.

Actress Jada Pinkett Smith, supported by her husband actor and musician Will Smith, who starred in the film Concussion (which I did not see) and did not garner a nomination this year, has called for a boycott of the Oscars ceremony, as has director Spike Lee. Actor and comedian Chris Rock, the event MC, may be considering boycotting the proceedings as well, though it appears he will show up and, I hope, skewer the debacle. Other actors, including 2013 Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong'o and actor Idris Elba have called out the movie and TV industry's failings, and in the Briton Elba's case, the UK's parallel problems with cinematic and TV racial representations.

April Reign, creator of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, has challenged one of the default excuses behind the film industry's ongoing whiteout, male domination and this and the previous year's nominations: "Don't tell me that people of color, women can't fill seats." But Hollywood, which pays attention to the bottom line, apparently isn't as concerned about who fills those seats as it is with endlessly replicating its tiny store of self-regarding visual narratives. It's not about the money, but rather systemic and structural problems that need to be dismantled completely. Perhaps beginning with a boycott of the Oscars this year, and from now on all movies with retrograde casting approaches and stories.

As important, filmmakers, actors and movie audiences must proactively devise ways to build systems to enable domestic filmmakers of color to create, distribute and screen not just more, but better films, and perhaps if people desire an awards system, as in the case in the literary world and other artistic areas, create that as well. The technology is increasingly there, as are the rival film bases Bollywood and Nollywood (whose films I increasingly watch). Given that Hollywood's earnings have taken a dip in recent years, the studios will change--or they'll realize too late that they could have but did not.

Street Stories with Gbenga Akinnagbe @ Rutgers-Newark

Gbenga Akinnagbe

Two wonderful colleagues of mine, my English department chair Professor Frances Bartkowski, and Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Associate Professor of Sociology Sherri-Ann Butterfield, decided last year to co-teach an undergraduate course revolving around the former HBO series The Wire. The five-season series was one of my favorite TV shows of the last decade and one I blogged about a few times in the past. But nothing I have written about the series could compare to the fastidious, thoroughly engaging interdisciplinary approach Fran and Sherri-Ann are taking in introducing this richly provocative program to Rutgers undergraduates.

As part of their class, they invited to campus actor, activist and entrepreneur Gbenga Akinnagbe, who played one of The Wire's profound villains, Chris Partlow, to speak not just to their class, but to the larger Rutgers and Newark communities.  Rutgers-Newark's College of Arts and Science Departments of English and Sociology and the Paul Robeson Campus Center: Office of Service Learning and Student Development sponsored the Washington, DC-native's visit.

Akinnagbe spoke about his upbringing as a Nigerian American, some of the struggles he had encountered over the years and how wrestling helped him in multiple ways, including gaining a scholarship to Bucknell University, his career as an activist, and how he has gone on to participate in civil and social activism, both in the USA, where he has been active in opposing the New York Police Department's racist "stop and frisk" policy, and overseas, including with Occupy Nigeria. He also talked a bit about current projects, including his recent work as a producer of multiple films in 2013, among them the documentary Children of the Wind, and the feature film Newlyweeds (2013), has received a lot of industry buzz.

Akinnagbe patiently answered questions, many of them about his preparation for and the effects of playing Chris Partlow, whom he deemed a "sociopath," as well as his roles in programs like Graceland, for over an hour, never flagging and frequently and smoothly shifting from seriousness to humor, all while providing a richer picture of who he is and many of the things he's been up to. I asked him about balancing acting and activism, and he responded that he was still trying to figure out how to do so, but he is not giving up on lending his voice, time and platform to causes he believes in. Afterwards I expressed my wish that he and some of the other members of The Wire reconvene on another project that would allow them--like Seth Rogen's film repertory--to display their talents on screen, and he said that some of the actors do appear in Newlyweeds, but that he would love to do more projects bringing them all together. I hope it happens soon! Many thanks to Fran, Sherri-Ann, Mr. Akinnagbe, and everyone else who made his visit possible.

Fran Bartkowski and Sherri-Ann Butterfield

Sherri-Ann with Gbenga Akinnagbe

Gbenga Akinnagbe

One of the Rutgers-Newark
students with Akinnagbe
after his talk

Black Diaspora in Hollywood 2.0

Watching Sunday night's Homeland finale, which brutally and ironically dispatched one of my favorite characters from the show, CIA Counterintelligence Chief David Estes, superbly embodied by British actor David Harewood (see below), I recalled that during Black History Month in 2006 I wrote a blog post pointing out the sizable number of black actors from across the African Diaspora now in Hollywood, and featured stars including Idris Elba, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Adewale Akinnoye-Agbaje, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Edjiofor, Garcelle Beauvais, and Boris Kodjoe. I noted then that I hadn't seen any discussion at all of this reality in the mainstream media, though the black film and TV communities in the US appeared to be acknowledging the diversity of their talent pool, and, like the larger black communities across the country, reflected the truth that the US black population has always comprised people from all over the world. As far as cinema and TV go, you need only cite iconic non-US-born black actors from the past such as Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Juano Hernández, Frank Silvera, Austin Stoker, Percy Rodriguez, and Zakes Mokae to bear this out.

As of 2012, the trend continues; just as with white actors in Hollywood, a number of high-profile black stars of film and TV shows are originally from overseas, but have found roles and homes (even if temporarily) here. The list below suggests that black actors from several different parts of the globe are making their names and careers in the US. Some, like Mel B, play themselves; some, like Dania Ramirez, are able to get roles crossing ethnicities; others like, Harewood and Oyelowo, quite effortlessly slip into African American/unspecified black roles without much problem. The British actors have gained considerable attention, and it remains the case that in the UK, roles for talented black actors are scarce.  In Hollywood, there are many more roles, but few leading ones, outside biopics, for actors of the caliber of many of these folks or their African American colleagues. As the country darkens, though, one can hope.... Here are a few of the most notable contemporary black diaspora actors gracing US TV screens:

David Harewood (UK)
Homeland, Blood Diamond

Ashley Madekwe (UK)
Revenge, Drop Dead Gorgeous

David Oyelowo (UK)
Red Tails, Last King of Scotland, Lincoln, The Help

Naomie Harris (UK)
Skyfall, Miami Vice, 28 Days Later

Benjamin Charles Watson (Jamaica/Canada)
L. A. Complex

Gloria Reuben (Canada)
ER, Feast of All Saints, Lincoln 

Dayo Ade (Nigeria/Canada)
L. A. Complex, Lost, Let Go, Degrassi High

Dania Ramírez (Dominican Republic)

Entourage, Heroes, Fat Albert, She Hate Me

Dayo Akeniyi (Nigeria)
The Hunger Games

Mel B (Melanie Brown/Scary Spice) (UK)

X Factor, Mel B: It's a Scary World

Dwain Murphy (Canada)
Saving Hope, The Mentalist, How She Move 

Enuka Okuma (Canada)
Rookie Blue, 24, Andromeda 

Lyriq Bent (Canada)
Rookie Blue, Saw III, Saw IV, Four Brothers

Marsha Thomason (UK) 

2 Broke Girls, General Hospital, Lost

Peter Mensah (Ghana/Canada)
Avatar, True Blood, Spartacus

Lorraine Toussaint (Trinidad & Tobago)
Scandal, Friday Night Lights, Saving Grace, Ugly Betty

Rocsi (Díaz) (Honduras)

106 & Park, Brothers, Soul Ties

Aml Ameen (UK)
Harry's Law, Red Tails, CSI Miami

Harriet Lenabe (South Africa) [shown with Don Cheadle)
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Hotel Rwanda

Nonso Anozie (UK)
Game of Thrones, The Grey

Kandyse McClure (South Africa)
Battlestar Galactica, Persons Unknown

Christian Marclay's "The Clock"

A scene from the film (my surreptitious photo)

Knowing that tomorrow would be the final day to see Christian Marclay's acclaimed film The Clock, which would also probably ensure a line all the way to Midtown, I hightailed it up to Lincoln Center to catch a snippet--that was my goal, to see only a small portion to savor the experience--and find out what all the hullabaloo was about. Zadie Smith wrote what I think is the definitive meditation of the ones I've read on the film, entitled "Killing Orson Welles at Midnight," which she published in the New York Review of Books back in April of this year, so I won't attempt to match her perceptiveness or depth of reading. Instead, I'll point out that this is as strange, seductive, experimental, and methodical a film as I've ever seen, and it compels your viewing even as it lulls you. I found myself attempting two things constantly: trying to guess when the clock would appear--for Marclay ensures, I believe, that it either appears or is mentioned every minute of the 24-hour clock--and trying to figure out from which films came the swatches of cinema he has ingeniously stitched together. Yet as I was actively doing this, I also found myself become transfixed by the stream of imagery and sound, the whole cloth of the film, such that although I'd set for myself a fixed time of no more than 30 minutes--I wanted to allow others to catch the film and to gauge my experience of only a tiny bit of it--I kept pushing back my moment of departure. My eyes remained agape; my indifference to the dutiful ushers who were, like mechanical soldiers, guiding people in and out of every available seat (the Lawrence Rubinstein Atrium at Lincoln Center cinema space holds only 96 or so), never slid into annoyance; my wonder and awe at what Marclay had pulled off steadily rose, though I could not bring myself to.

The serpentine line in front of the cinema space

When I realized, via the clock on screen, which matched up exactly with the real time outside the darkened narrow room, that I'd gone over, I had to force myself to get up and head out. A smile parted my lips. I'd waited in line for about 2 1/2 hours, and it was if I had not even waited 10 seconds; my entire sense of time, so forcefully grounded by Marclay's artistry had, ironically, floated off into nothingness. The balmy air, more autumnal than August need promise, was like an added gift. If there weren't likely to be a long line and I didn't have to start preparing for classes and so on, I'd go back tomorrow,  and sit for a slightly longer time. I completely grasp how people have managed to pass an entire morning, or evening, or day in front of Marclay's film. It beguiles that completely. At least it did to me. I wonder what it would have been like to see in the Paula Cooper Gallery, as Smith did, last winter. To go at any time of the day or night and just watch. There is tomorrow, of course, for those nearby. It is worth it.

One of the docents, who was helpfully keeping people from jumping in the line and, as calmly as possible, telling people that they might have to wait for 4 hours or more like everyone else, did say, I think I heard correctly, that a print of the film will remain in New York, and may show again at some point in the fall. If it does, especially for the 24-hour period, I intend to be there to see it again. It ought to be released for public and private viewing parties too. It's a perfect way to while away an hour, or several, and give the mind a workout even as it is simultaneously rocked to something akin to, but not exactly, sleep.

Ever grand Lincoln Center, on a late-summer night

From Zadie Smith's essay:

The things you notice on a second visit are quite small but feel necessary for orientation, like drawing an x and y axis before attempting to plot a great mass of information on a graph. In my notebook I tried to state the obvious, to get it clear in my own mind. The Clock is a twenty-four-hour movie that tells the time. This is achieved by editing together clips of movies in which clocks appear. But The Clock is so monumental in intention and design that even the simplest things you can say about it need qualification. There isn’t, for example, a clock visible in every scene. Sometimes people will only mention the time, or even just speak of time as a general concept. Mary Poppins does less than that; she glances at her wristwatch, the face of which we cannot see, then opens her umbrella and flies, to be replaced, a moment later, by a man, also flying with an umbrella, who soon floats past a clock tower, thus revealing the time. There are many moments like this, and when you first notice them their synchronicity and beauty are a little unnerving. They reveal a creative constraint even larger and more demanding than the one you had assumed. If The Clock cares to match a flying umbrella with a flying umbrella, it must have aesthetic currents passing beneath its main flow, moving in a variety of directions, not simply clockwise.