Sundance 2005: Crisis In Park City

By Robert Koehler

“I get the feeling that Americans aren’t very interested in other cultures.”—Park Chan-wook, in Los Angeles, September 2004

2005 was the year that Sundance formally invited the world to its festival, granting competition slots in fiction and non-fiction sections to countries beyond the US borders. That didn’t mean, however, that Sundance invited The World, Jia Zhang-ke’s lovely, terrifying, and ironic consideration of China and Chinese youth in an urban universe of globalized emptiness, and the film that marks the new standard for how world cinema describes itself. The exclusion of one film—masterpiece though it may be—meant nothing in isolation, but it reflected Sundance’s ongoing confusion over its actual role, which was further confused by its other role (one that festival organizers, sounding like Democratic party officials, perennially complain about and do nothing to stop) as host to a tidal wave of corporate-sponsored glad-handing events, parties, and club dates that have nothing to do with films and turned the ski town of Park City into a gridlocked zone of SUVs and limos.

What did it really mean that the festival, indisputably (for better or worse) the annual American cinema event of record, was creating new sections for non-American cinema? Would it mean that there would be a full acknowledgement that it was time to finally give a full and loud platform to Argentina, South Korea, China, and Iran, where new syntaxes and possibilities for narrative and post-narrative cinema are being tested and created? Would it be, in Sundance director Geoffrey Gilmore’s words, “a place for discovery” of new filmmakers from various continents? Would it heighten the sense that even the most daring US cineastes were still caught in a Venus Flytrap of commercial and aesthetic cross-purposes, stuck between their desires to revive a mythical 70s nirvana that never really existed and a new American…movement, or whatever it is people would want to call it?

As far as the new sections were concerned, they marked a step forward from Sundance’s old, bad habit of sampling non-US films and then promptly losing them in the shuffle and ignoring them come awards time, but still proved to be far below the level of similar sections at other major American festivals (Chicago, Palm Springs, and Tribeca to name three). As for the four above-mentioned national epicentres, mixed signals filled the snowy Rocky Mountain air. It was awfully hard to square the fact that Gilmore had the foresight to bring Lee Yoon-ki’s superbly and sensitively observed debut, This Charming Girl (a winner at Pusan), while coming up with nothing more from Argentina’s endless riches than the fair but routine Norma Aleandro star vehicle, Live-in Maid, and the forgettable Palermo Hollywood, by all accounts (of those who stayed through its finish) as a sorry example—betrayed in its title—of an audition movie for the studios. Inexplicably, no Iranian filmmaker was invited. China was represented in a rather awkward and complex manner. Mainstream director Lu Chuan brought his extremely picturesque and physically harsh but formally conservative adventure, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, based on true accounts of self-styled patrolmen battling antelope poachers in the western provinces. Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works proved to be a poorly received documentary on Maoist-era opera by Yan Ting Yuen, Hong Kong born but for all intents and purposes Dutch, and therefore an outsider to contemporary China. Mardi Gras: Made in China emerged as by far the festival’s most interesting and revealing look at China, even though it was slotted in the American documentary competition because its maker, David Redmon, is from Texas.

Given Sundance’s credo of discovery, few of the world cinema entries could be considered examples of true Eureka moments. More often, in fact, foreign films shown in Park City weren’t having their world premieres at all, but their North American or US unveilings, which only further failed to explain why some exemplary films from, say, Toronto, weren’t there (L’intrus orCafé Lumiere, for instance) while other execrable ones were invited (Old Boy). Perhaps, some began to speculate, the lack of any serious survey of vital world cinema wasn’t neglect at all, but a foxy strategy to narrow the gap in perception between the quality of American narrative films (perilously declining, it seemed, with each reel of nearly every film) and their counterparts in all of those non-superpower countries. If so, this tacticfailed crucially, and from an unexpected place —from the US itself, and its cadre of non-fiction filmmakers who appear to recognize that there’s something bigger out there, beyond their living room walls.

Private lives, though, can suggest far bigger matters, as Lee’s This Charming Girl distinctly declares. His camera nestles so close to his main character, Jeong-hae (Kim Ji-soo) that it becomes her invisible friend, able to see everything: her humdrum job in a mail delivery store; her lonely single life accompanied only by a cat who hides for long stretches behind a sofa; her eyelashes periodically falling like leaves onto her cheek; her frustrations with a former fiancé; and her past traumas, which come in involuntary flashes of memory that suggest some reasons for, but never fully explain, her willed life of loneliness.

Lee is probably right to insist that he shares little in common with Hong Sang-soo and his world of men and women living in a paradoxical state of incommunicable communication, but he provides, like Hong’s and Park Ki-yong’s cinema, a way out of the culture of machismo that sometimes poisons Korean cinema, and toward a mature view of the uncertain realities of what separates women and men. Jeong-hae, we learn, has wisely retreated into herself while maintaining some tentative contact with the outside world, but Lee finally points to a possible shift in her life. His closing scene suggests the opening scene of a Hong film: we see a man trying to talk a woman into a date as his camera—Jeong-hae’s invisible friend—holds on her silent consideration of what to say next.

This same intensity of inward focus dominates Polish directorMalgosia Szumowska’s second feature, Stranger, one of the few foreign films actually premiering at Sundance, due, no doubt, to the fact that it was developed at the Sundance Institute. While that development process has come under attack for creating standardized narrative work that hardly veers afield from predicatable Hollywood structures, none of this is evident in Szumowska’s look at a young woman named Eva and how her existence is altered forever by a fetus growing in her belly, the eponymous alien who at first feels like an intruder and who then becomes a person. Notably, Szumowska doesn’t use this personhood as an opportunity for a modernized Catholic ideology, nor even as a literal theme refracted through feminism, but as an organic cinematic artifact in the form of sound. Eva’s father, immersed in his den with Bach recordings, tells her that the first sign of life is hearing, and this convinces Eva to verbally describe the world to her baby-to-be. There’s a freedom in Stranger that permits the viewer to enjoy Eva indulging in a Demy-style musical fantasy one moment, or, most spectacularly by the end, enter her apparent dream state in which the border between exterior and interior space is significantly dissolved.

It’s evidently a chore for American festivals to acknowledge Africa at all, so I was stunned to see that Zeze Gamboa’s The Hero, from Angola, was actually in competition. One of those few good imports from Toronto, Gamboa’s tale ponders life in Luanda after the smoke of the country’s civil war has settled, and is thus an instructive contrast to In My Country, John Boorman’s embarrassing attempt to consider South Africans after Apartheid. Africa, as that other failed “political” drama, Hotel Rwanda, reminds, is best left told by Africans, so rather than artificially insert Westerners and characters from colonialist countries to serve as objects of audience identification, Gamboa simply places us in contemporary Luanda, a city split between its African and Portuguese natures and full of maimed veterans (like Vitorio) and childless boys (like Manu, lured and abused by gangs). Gamboa’s documentary past adds muscle to what is strongest about The Hero: its rooted sense of place and of stark class differences, and its loose and unmannered mise en scène. His doc background also places in high relief where the film least convinces, in itsmelodramatic insertions (such as the homeless Vitorio’s drunk spells once he’s robbed of his prized prosthetic leg) and a strained belief that drifting lives like Vitorio’s and Manu’s can actually be brought together for a hopeful future. But as an African film by and for Africans, The Hero helps chart a programming direction that Sundance would be wise to follow.

The revelations, as always at Sundance, were in non-fiction work that indicated what happens when an artist’s capacity to mold and select merges with a journalist’s need to observe and synthesize what actually exists. This tendency was demonstrated in stunningly different ways by Simone Bitton’s Wall , well-travelled in the festival circuit, and Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight , a Sundance premiere—taken together, the two most important films on display.

Bitton’s ability to gaze at the far-from-impregnable wall that Israel continues to construct as a supposed line of security between it and the Palestinian Territories reminded me of how a birder must gaze at birds: with a deeply informed and fascinated distance, committed to taking in the whole thing as it is, and yet also appreciating a beauty beyond the factual image. Audubon-like, Bitton places her camera close enough to the wall to notice every bit of detail, no matter how odd, from political graffiti and little love notes (between an Israeli Romeo and a Palestinian Juliet?), to the wall as a canvas for street art. In standard journalism, the wall is used as a visual object to accompany echo-chamber debates involvingIsraeli vs. Palestinian in endless verbal wrestles; with Bitton, the wall becomes both a character and a medium that reveals the people who live near it and cross through it. Perhaps because she’s Moroccan-born, Arab Jew and a citizen of both Israel and France, Bitton can absorb and comprehend things in this tense environment that elude other filmmakers. She has the subversive habit of presenting a shot of the wall, and inserting recorded dialogue from offscreen voices whose identities are deliberately unclear; thus, Israeli and Palestinian voices blend and form an audio linkage, even as their bodies are physically separated by this concrete rupture of social space.

Jarecki’s subject is 100 percent American, but profoundly concerns the world. The “we” in Why We Fight connotes the American people, yet the word is in a collective voice directed beyond American borders, even as the title provocatively displaces the pathetic plaint, “Why do they hate us so much?” (It also cleverly refers to the title of Frank Capra’s series of patriotic WWII propaganda films.) The title’s “why” addresses the American military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about on the eve of his departure from the White House in 1960. With a musician’s sense of form, rhythm, and counterpoint, Jarecki shapes his examination of the sources of the marriage between the military, defense contractors, the think-tanks that support them, and the Congress that funds the infernal machine.

But this summary, like the film’s PBS-seeming surface, is deceptive: Why We Fight is a funereal tone-poem on a nation that has lost its way, a lyric on the distance between the ideal of human freedom that has always served as a rhetorical (and sometimes real) motivator of US foreign policy, and the deadly reality of a system of permanent arms manufacturing that generates its own inner logic of making wars where none exist. Some skeptics of Jarecki’s film complained that jumping from this thesis into Iraq hopelessly dates the film in the present tense, and saps it of any power to affect future viewers. I found myself arguing, in response, that such a jump is inevitable, particularly as the invasion of Iraq provides the purest lab test of Jarecki’s thesis since the Vietnam War and its fabricated trigger in the Gulf of Tonkin. No one else has better explained, in historicist terms, the method behind the madness of the latest war in Iraq: The beast, composed of the arms and legs of the Pentagon, corporations, militarist intellectuals, and easily-bribed politicians, must simply be fed.

For all of its brilliance, though, Why We Fight also underlined a nagging condition that seems constant in American filmmaking today: The cinema of ideas must be fact-based, the cinema of fancy must be fiction-based, and, like a good driver obeying the rules of the road, no one can cross the lines. The integration and interplay of fiction and non-fiction has been an ongoing project since at least Vertov, and yet it defies my understanding as a critic how it is that even the best-intentioned of American filmmakers continue to resist a phenomenon that has been receiving a new injection of life, through work ranging from Notre Musique to Los rubios (2003)—a phenomenon, I would argue, that stands as cinema’s most significant movement right now.

Perhaps it points to a literalism deep in the American character, a tendency that explains both the astoundingly non-nuanced readings of Biblical text that proliferate across the Republic and the confusion of reality TV for reality. It extends from the incisive wit and wisdom of poeticized but nevertheless doggedly fact-driven films such as Why We Fight and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (made by Jarecki’s partner on The Trials of Henry Kissinger [2002], Alex Gibney) to the unremitting naturalism that tended to characterize most of Sundance’s American narrative entries, and is perhaps best proven by the utter failure of such misbegotten auteurist noodlings as Hal Hartley’s The Girl from Monday, Craig Lucas’ The Dying Gaul, and Michael Hoffman’s and (gasp) Don DeLillo’s Game 6 . Only the appearance—out of nowhere, it seemed, but actually care of Steven Soderbergh’s big fat wallet—of William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 ½, offered an alternative: a film about a married couple confronting the reality of their divorce while walking through Central Park, and equally, a film about the making of the film we’re watching, and a film about the makers discussing the film they’re making.

This playfully slippery hybrid of drama and documentary was actually hatched in 1968, first as Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, featuring Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows as the feuding couple (plus Greaves and most of the crew when the cameras are directed towards them), and made during the full flush of Warholian consciousness of how the act of filming itself was a subject for consideration. It exists in the same arena as Rivette’s Out One films (1971 and 1972) and ranks, as Jim Hoberman has observed, with Jim McBride’s David Holtzman’s Diary (1967) as a key 60s experiment, and yet plummeted into obscurity until its revival in the early 90s (including 1992 Sundance screenings), and most recently, in Berlin last year.

Take 2 ½ takes up exactly where Take One leaves off, as actors Shannon Baker (assuming the role of the husband, accused of being a gay philanderer) and Audrey Henningham (as the accusing wife) give the scene their own reading, which is then revisited in 2003 in the same Central Park location with most of the same crew (though with the rather intrusive addition of Steve Buscemi) and a more extensive examination of what the characters are about. The new Take includes more (and, it seemed to me on one viewing, some of the same) footage of Greaves’ crew debating the project’s worth and pondering if the director is deliberately creating the conditions for a workers’ revolt on the set. It also includes an added layer: Greaves defending his experiment in a post-screening Q and A that directly leads into the 2003 footage. The two films haven’t been shown together, though why Sundance didn’t manage this easy task is a mystery. Greaves’ project is easily as important as Yvonne Rainer’s in allowing the “real” and the “staged” to touch and affect one another, and implicitly asks why, in 2005, American independents, as a group, have retreated from any real experimentation.

Without meaning to, Sundance 2005 thus pointed to an overt crisis in US filmmaking. When only two narrative films could be widely deemed of any consequence—artist Miranda July’s piquant debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know, and Noah Baumbach’s way-better-than-Wes-Anderson The Squid and the Whale—it was quickly obvious that, just as Hollywood has traded storytelling for variations on juvenile mythmaking, superhero reconstructions, or graphic novel adaptations, the indie world not already gobbled up by the studio’s pseudo-indie minions is also desperately out of ideas. The signals of a crisis went beyond the out-of-breath summaries one might pass to a colleague (“avoid the narratives and go for the docs’’) to a sense that, when entering a non-fiction screening, one would have a chance of connecting with human nature, social nature, or (with Luc Jacquet’s well-liked penguin film, The Emperor’s Journey, or Werner Herzog’s wildly praised Grizzly Man) nature. When entering an American narrative screening, one may as well have beenin a vacuum.

July is not in a vacuum. Her multimedia art has followed a trajectory from mere cleverness to a mature depth, and she brings this progression to her film. She’s concerned with a string of neighbours along a suburban street in a nameless city, all of whom dream of doing something other than what they’re doing or try to connect with others in impossible ways. What has to impress anyone who watches Me and You and Everyone We Know—and knows how inhuman most Hollywood comedy can be—is not its dogged obsession with trivia (shoes, email, kitchen utensils) or its nearly terminal desire to plunge into kookiness, but its proposal that humanism can drive comedy.

July plays an artist named Christine—somewhat close to herself as far as her work goes, but portrayed as a fully imagined character—who really struggles; an encounter in an elevator with a gallery owner may be the best, and funniest, take ever on what young artists actually go through to get seen. Christine seems to embrace the world—thus, the title—while the morose shoe salesman (played drolly by John Hawkes) she meets has his hands full with his job and raising two web-centric boys on his own. What sounds, yet again, like the stuff of naturalism is tilted and tossed in another direction—July’s camera captures her people in frozen moments in time, sometimes when they’re most vulnerable or absurd, and loves them rather than pities them. She doesn’t always maintain this sense of grace about her characters (satire seems beyond her, at least at this point), but she listens to them, and views them at human scale. There’s some hope here.

After the sinking feeling of Anderson’s airless and humourless The Life Aquatic (which Baumbach co-wrote), I had no desire to see the awfully aquatic-sounding The Squid and the Whale , the film that eventually won the Grand Jury Prize. But word trickled through that this was something worth seeing; sure enough, Baumbach exactly demonstrates what’s missing from Aquatic: namely, a genuine idea of what a family is really about. As hyper-concerned as most American literature is about family and home life, Squid takes that aspect of the literary and blows it up into a diorama of existence, shorn of Anderson’s worst tendency to pluck and poke and pin his characters precisely down on a board to observe them like insects.

Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical family, led by failing novelist Jeff Daniels as dad and rising novelist Laura Linney as mom, is a Brooklyn literati clan losing everything that glued it together. Mom cheated on Dad, Dad tries to “save” the marriage, Mom moves out, and the two boys (the revelatory Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) have to split their time between the two insufferable parents. As in the July film, the basic elements are there for a piece of hack formula—widescreen sitcom, perhaps, or a Woody Allen knockoff—but Baumbach pays attention to his best instincts, which seem to be wonderfully attuned toward sadness. His characters are written, but they appear to be making up their thoughts and actions on the spot with no clue where they’re headed next.

I couldn’t help but notice, as well, that none of these characters—either in the July or the Baumbach—ever talk politics, which has been almost impossible not to do in the past year of the Republic. By contrast, a film like Redmon’s Mardi Gras practices politics. Watching it, in fact, is a political act. Observing how colourful beads are made under gruelling factory conditions in Fuzhou, China, Redmon then juxtaposes this footage with images of the beads’ final destination—at the New Orleans Mardi Gras, where the beads are flung at women who expose their breasts. It may seem too facile to place side by side the life-sucking, regimented lives of the factory women (who live in barracks on factory property and get one day off a week) and the Rabelasian pleasures of Mardi Gras revellers, but Redmon then engages in a certain Greavesian experiment by showing the New Orleans crowd his Fuzhou footage and the Fuzhou workers his New Orleans footage, with neither knowing the other party existed, and then filming the effect that watching this footage has on each group. Capital’s alienation could not be starker.

It’s likely that globalization hasn’t received such a perfectly distilled going-over, at least in non-fiction cinema, as Mardi Gras, where the general point is made clear through the specific. This is a point also made by that missing film at Sundance, The World, in which China’s young are being thrust into a borderless, meaningless world of disposable products and “entertainment.” Only the women in Fuzhou, paid far less than for other manufacturing jobs, can’t even enjoy globalization’s fun ephemera—they’re too fatigued by the end of the week.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

Festival Highlights

Rotterdam
An Anorexic’s Case Against Uchida Tomo
By Quintín

Berlin
Berlin Blues
By Tony Rayns

Sundance
Crisis In Park City By Robert Koehler

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Dear Wendy
By Scott Foundas

Waking the Dead
By Jessica Winter

The Evolution of a Filipino Family
By Christoph Huber

Storm Clouds Over Berlin By Mark Peranson

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