April 24, 2006
True/False West
Festival Fun in Bellingham, WA
It was only a matter of time before a film festival came to Bellingham, Washington; and not just a film series, but the whole thing, the reel deal. This past weekend, April 22nd through 23rd, brought us True/False West, a collection of around twenty-five documentary films, with filmmakers and experts in tow.
First, a word about Bellingham. As a place, Bellingham is essentially Anycollegetown, USA. It is home to Western Washington University and its transient student body, as well as an ever-increasing amount of retirees who come to the area for its environmental amenities — a beautiful bay, mountains, all that — and relative tranquility. For these reasons especialy, it is a bastion of left-of-center thinking.
Yet it also has the rest of the county to contend with. Whatcom County is easier to live in if you're a young ‘un with a student loan, or an old fogey with a pension, but for most folks the county is rough stuff. In terms of jobs, not much exists outside the service industry, as the timber and fishing industries that gave birth to Bellingham have hit the skids in the past few decades. As a result, poverty rates are higher here than most of Western Washington.
Bellingham's solution so far, with the 2008 Vancouver Winter Olympics looming on the Northern horizon, has been to play the Tourism card. In some ways, the city's boosters want big city culture without the big city problems. Which brings us to True/False West.
As the True/False West festival program observed, Bellingham, "in its ineffable hipness, is a documentary loving town." That is, like any college town, it likes to watch, to revel in its education, and to offer contrary opinions to whatever malfeasance the current political administration is up to. But when the shit hits the fan, I fear you're more likely to hear a complaint aired in a bar than in the form of an action.
Like more and more of Bellingham's residents, the True/False festival is a transplant from another part of the country. True/False proper, a festival of almost twice the size of its West counterpart, occurs annually in Columbia, Missouri.
Going into it, I had the same attitude towards the fest as I do towards a lot of Bellingham; I didn't have much faith in it. But like Bellingham, it surprised me throughout, even if it never fully won me over. The films of True/False West featured many stories of struggle. Fortunately, the majority of what I saw was so affecting, so well done, that I was able to forget my indignation over Bellingham, even if momentarily, and orient it towards topics more deserving of my attention.
Banking on Heaven. Of the seven films I saw, Banking on Heaven captured my indignation the strongest. My first thought at reading the film's description before screening it was that it could be a crude anti-Mormon screed. I couldn't have been more wrong, and the strong language of the film's description couldn't be more justified. An expose of the crude Mormon creed practiced by a polygamist sect, the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS), the film focuses primarily on the organization's isolated communities in Arizona and Utah, whose population numbers around 10,000.
The film's indictments are built from interviews with the men and women who have managed to escape these communities, bringing with them horrible stories of rape, domestic violence, and corruption. The FLDS's "prophet" Warren Jeffs is wanted for sexual misconduct with minors, but has managed to escape federal prosecution thanks to the wealth of his multimillion dollar church. He's currently on the run. Other efforts at prosecution of FLDS have been difficult because sympathetic Mormons comprise much of the area's law enforcement.
The nuts and bolts of Banking on Heaven are not perfect. Both the editing of the film and its pacing leave some of the material unclear. The film could have also explored more of the history behind FLDS, and the Mormon religion's roots in American society in general. But the weight of the subject matter and the strength of its arguments are more than enough to carry the film. It brings home an essential question: why does the United States government condemn religious fundamentalism abroad, when we have our very own Taliban in our own backyard? Here's hoping the film will be seen by more than just film festival audiences.
Sisters In Law. There couldn't have been a more uplifting follow-up to Banking on Heaven then what I saw next, Sisters In Law. Documenting several cases handled by women judges in Cameroon, the film finds women's' resistance where we are supposed to least expect it,in Third World Muslim communities.
The film's straightforward narrative follows the court cases involving spousal abuse, child abuse and rape. The narrative is so straightforward, in fact, that it inevitably leaves some important things out, such as the larger cultural context of Cameroon. We are left wondering many things, such as what the effects of imprisonment are on those convicted. Still, the film teaches us to appreciate what women can achieve when they are empowered with self-determination.
Lot 63 Grave C and The Last Supper. Next up was The Last Supper, preceded by Sam Green's short film Lot 63 Grave C.
Green's name was immediately recognizable to me as the co-director of the feature documentary, The Weather Underground. That film felt stuck in history: heavy on reminiscences, but light on exploring the historical legacies we live with today. In Lot 63 Grave C, Green foregrounds the question of what it means to be lost to history.
The title of the short refers to the unmarked grave of Meredith Hunter, an 18-year old man who was murdered by Hell's Angels at the infamous Altamont rock concert in California. The Altamont murder is considered a metaphor for the "end" of Sixties idealism, but Hunter himself is lost to history. All that is known about Hunter is confined to the slow-motion footage of his murder, and a few newspaper articles Green captures ingeniously on fast-motion microfilm. The short manages to achieve what the The Weather Underground did not, asking what is lost when we only think of history in grand schemes.
Following Lot 63 Grave C was The Last Supper, a film by Swedish installation artists Mats Bigert and Lars Bergstrom focusing on the last meals prepared for prisoners prior to their execution. In both its music and overall presentation, the film was by far the most stylistic documentary I saw at True/False West. Despite a few odd "The Art Speaks For Itself" moments - moments that betray the fact the film is by a pair of Swedish artists —the film's point is otherwise well put. The last meal in some way lubricates the judiciary machine of the State, and salves individuals' misgivings about the grave ritual of murder.
The film includes interviews from many people around the world, from cooks, former death row inmates, to prison wardens. In doing so, it often manages to detail individuals and their motivations for what they do, despite their being trapped within the structural imperatives of the State. In this way, it would make an interesting double-bill with Errol Morris's Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
While Lot 63 Grave C challenged the grand schemes of history, the worst moments of The Last Supper seemed to indulge in a certain ahistorical cruelty. We learn witches were thought to burn best at the stake if liquored up first, and that a man was once beheaded in Burma (I think) with a cigarette in his mouth. One wonders what burning witches and Burmese dictatorships have in common other then there being execution involved. But then one wonders what good execution serves at all, and its then I realize the filmmaker's intentions have been realized.
Full of warbling bass and screeching electronic frequencies, the soundtrack for The Last Supper is extraordinarily hypnotic, but also quite disempowering, and this seemed to be the issue with nearly every film I saw this weekend. If there was any trend I noticed in contemporary documentary filmmaking at True/False West, it's the incessant use of ambient droning in the soundtrack to denote drama. I generally like the music, but after my five or so films with moaning bass and iterative hums, it starts to lose its effect.
Iraq in Fragments. We made it to the final film of Saturday evening, Iraq in Fragments, rather early, but by show time the theater was packed. Bellingham has seen a lot of documentaries dealing with Iraq in the past few years, and working in a university office that programs around social justice issues, I've seen a lot of them myself. Control Room. Soldiers Pay. Gunner Palace. Dreams of Sparrows. Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories. Of all these, Iraq in Fragments is by the far the best, and I'd venture to say it is the most well-made documentary I have ever seen. It is definitely the finest shot documentary; there were moments I felt it rivaled even Days of Heaven. Here's hoping that this is not simply the afterglow of a fine first screening.
My least favorite documentary on the Iraq occupation has so far been Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories. It was shot by a random guy from Portland, OR who went to Iraq on more or less a whim. And it shows. The filmmaker appears on screen as very uncomfortable in his surroundings, and while the film had its moments, it was obviously done by someone with little empathy or understanding for the people appearing on screen. James Longley, the man responsible for Iraq in Fragments, went to Iraq on more than just a whim, and stayed for over two years; but he too hardly knows Arabic, and was raised in Washington State. Still, Longley has managed to create something the exact opposite of Inside Iraq.
Producer John Sinno explained after the film that Langley's strategy was to hang out so often in one place, to become such a common visitor, that his subjects would no longer mind his filming. While Longley remains firmly behind the camera, never asking so much as a question, his rapport with his subjects is clear, and his sympathy is shown in the care taken with each and every edit he makes. Beyond Longley's choices of where to cut and when not to, where to cue music and when to go with the silence, the film itself is very nondescript. It is political only in so far as a difficult, complex understanding of Iraq is almost impossible to find in America these days. As Sinno observed, the film takes you to Iraq and leaves you there. You are left to decide the rest.
The film is broken into three parts. In the first chapter, "Mohammed of Baghdad," Langley captures the life of a young boy of eight as he attends grade school and apprentices with a mechanic. "I'll keep working until I'm grown," Mohammed explains. Longley's camera lingers incessantly on Mohammed's eyes. The young boy he takes in the quarrels and debates of older men around him, and this is why, Mohammed represents a new generation in Iraq: he is born under new despotisms, new contradictions, and new struggles now that Saddam is gone.
The second segment of the film takes us within these despotisms, contradictions, and struggles. "Sadr's South" depicts the followers of Islamic cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as they debate politicians, hold rallies, and raid markets to violently apprehend men accused of selling alcohol. Sinno explained that the audio track of the film was carefully rendered in surround sound, and the attention to detail on the soundtrack, especially in this segment, is astounding.
The noise and sound of Baghdad is constant throughout the first two chapters, and breaks only when the last shots of the second segment take us out of Baghdad on a train. We then arrive in the Kurdish north for the third and final chapter, "Kurdish Spring." Here we find as many internal debates as in Baghdad, but with a culture and economy far removed from life of the Iraq's capitol.
"The future of Iraq is in three pieces," an old Kurdish man explains towards the film's end. But a child's voice ponders, "How can you cut up a country? With a saw?" This moment could be seen as a debate about the limitations of Longley's film as much as a debate about Iraq's political future, and its this amazing attention to metaphor and detail that makes Iraq in Fragments seem nearly unprecedented among documentaries. Perhaps among the best I have ever seen.
Tientsin Diaries. Where the screening of Iraq in Fragments was the closest True/False West came for me to a big festival moment, the next morning's showing of Tientsin Diaries was a pleasure for all the opposite reasons. It was a short, modest, and free presentation of the film by its director Serge Gregory, followed by a good discussion that teased out the reasons why the 30-minute short was very much worth seeing.
The film is a compilation of World War II footage, period music, and pictures — many remarkably beautiful — taken of the young lives of Gregory's Russian émigré parents while living in China. All this is woven together by three fictional narratives, two based off of Gregory's parents, and the third being that of a British military official interned in China during the war. When all of these elements are brought together, they raise a host of interesting questions about the role of historical events in one's personal life, past and present, and the impossibility of escaping the world, no matter how strongly one wills otherwise. The Russian émigrés try their best to live their lives despite history, but when a dam is broken by a Chinese militia in an attempt to frustrate the efforts of the Japanese occupiers, they are up to their necks in it.
This Is Nowhere.The next film I saw, This is Nowhere, documents a population of people that history and the world have not yet caught up to, the estimated 2.8 million "affluent homeless" who rove the country in Recreational Vehicles, known to the world as RVs.
If Bellingham is where peaceniks retire, it's seem like the RV circuit is where red-blooded Americans retire. The film provides a host of nameless seniors (nameless, at least, until the end of the film) pronouncing Arab "Ay-Rabb," sharing their fear of Mexicans, and spinning loads of Heartland wisdom like, "You do what you can do and trust the lord for the rest of it." Meanwhile, the filmmakers repeatedly show us where they stand on these matters by juxtaposing the senior's rather facile remarks with equally facile footage of environmental degradation and the WTO protests in Seattle. Meanwhile, the soundtrack brims with some odd musical choices, ranging from banging techno to bass heavy, gravel-voiced rock and roll.
The film itself is not quite as polemical as the above description might make it sound. While the intention of some of the imagery is all too clear, most of the film's commentary is more subtle, as when the lyrics of a song on the soundtrack intones, "Act invisible and act like you know what you're doing. That's the definition of the American dream."
Following the screening, co-director Doug Hawes-Davis explained to the audience that the film was shot almost exclusively in one place, a Walmart parking lot in Missoula, Montana. He also explained that their strategy was to address how RV life reflected issues of consumerism, homogenous culture and a changing American economy by allowing the RV crowd to speak for themselves. What is apparent in the film is that the RV crowd didn't always say what the filmmakers wanted, resulting in some of the heavy-handed editing choices described above.
The topic is a smart one, and This is Nowhere has glimpses of brilliance. But in some ways it is a little unfocused, and were it not for these few moments, it would essentially take the viewer nowhere itself. It especially leaves many of its own assumptions unchallenged. As the seniors in the film observe, everyone wants something clean and new, and no one enjoys the congestion of a big city — even liberals like the filmmakers.
Bellingham, for instance, is not a recreational vehicle, but it's got lots of retirees, and it certainly wants the good times of a big city, like a film festival, without the social problems that come with it. Also, it's interesting to ponder how the environmental degradation lamented in the film may be partially responsible for the cheap video technology that makes such a film possible in the first place.
It must be noted that none of these questions necessarily invalidate the concerns of This Is Nowhere. We only come upon new questions, questions of strategy. For instance, we may have to stop escaping to places like Bellingham — where development's tentacles have not yet fully reached — and realize that escape is futile, and that if we really care, we have to start fighting back.
Commune. If there is any lesson in the last film I saw at True/False West, it concerned the futility of escape. Commune is comprised of the reminiscences of the aging hippies who established Black Bear Ranch in Siskiyou County in 1968, out of $22,000 in donations from rock stars. The individual goals of the commune's founders sound eerily similar to the logic of the RV crowd in This is Nowhere, at least in terms of escaping and retiring from the hectic world around them. At the height of Sixties social unrest, a sizable group of white youth sought "to get away from America and do what you want," abandoning politics and adopting "culture" as the proper shibboleth.
Sexual promiscuity, the birth of children, incidents with cults, and all other sorts of mischief ensues, but the documentary never asks what Black Bear achieved, and what lessons we might learn from the experience. The film is essentially a collection of memories and reminiscences — a photo album, not an analysis. Like a photo album, it is interesting, even charming. But in the end, Commune is hardly inquisitive.
Some final thoughts...
Towards the end of Sisters In Law, someone remarks "We've all seen how important school is." Indeed, throughout True/West, the importance of education was very much on display. But I wonder what it takes for education to become applied.
The line-up of True/False West was incredibly strong, and each film was a pleasure to see. The festival organizers ought to be immensely proud, and here's hoping they make it an annual tradition. I really can not remember the last time I had so much fun throughout a weekend.
But fun isn't all I'm after, either. As a festival, True/False West was essentially Anyfestival, USA, in Anycollegetown, USA. So I wonder what it might take to make a festival truly exceptional. The potential I saw in so many of the films on display at True/False West has me pondering in what ways the festival could be tied to Bellingham, and not just in terms of big city "culture" (like the Black Bear commune dreamed of) and potential tourist dollars, but politics as well.
It is hardly a simple proposition — indeed, the best film of the festival that I saw, Iraq in Fragments, was also the most confusing and disorienting. But it's those tough questions we have to ask if we seek to land on the True side of the True/False divide.
Many thanks to Michael at True/False West for providing us with a press pass for the weekend, cutting our costs in half. Also, thanks to Alex, Greg, and Anna for all the stimulating discussion throughout the festival.
