Oak Street Films

The first films ever made were documentaries. Cinematic technology was, of course, the child of photography, and so the first filmmakers instinctively used their new toy much as they’d previously used their older silver-on-celluloid-based toys: they captured little bits of reality for posterity. There was little–if any–artistry to be found in these actualités, as reality-based films were then known. Workers filed out of factories, trains steamed frighteningly forward, elephants were electrocuted for the purpose of industrial agitprop, and parents ate meals with their babies. This wasn’t yet entertainment–it was a fascinating technological novelty. It was only a few years, however, until pioneers like Georges Méliès began to experiment with the cinema’s more fantastical possibilities, and almost immediately from (roughly) that point forward the cinema began to metamorphose into the primarily fictive, narrative medium with which we are all now familiar. Embedded within this transformation is the root from which the essential and inscrutable conundrums of the modern cinema have grown: if the filmmaker’s camera is capable only of recording that which is physically placed before its aperture in the real world, how are we to reconcile that fact with our common use of the technology for the creation of fictional works? What are the metaphysical and/or spiritual implications of a machine which is capable of turning objective reality into artifice? Can we really trust this camera’s “eye”? For that matter, can we truly trust our own? And perhaps most perplexingly of all, is it wise to accept a documentary as an objective representation of reality given the medium’s capacity to distort and to fantasticize actual events, even when clearly the camera is capable only of recording that which truly happens in its presence? Don’t the filmmakers’ aesthetic tastes, political predilections, and philosophical leanings get in the way of objectivity?

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As terrified as I am with the prospect of Sarah Palin having any chance whatsoever at holding a position of power on the national (and, de facto, global) level, I’m surprised that I didn’t make the connection earlier. Like many other Americans I have been utterly transfixed by the political goings-on of this historic presidential campaign cycle, and after watching Palin embarrass herself–and indeed, all of us–with her frankly idiotic responses to Katie Couric’s questions last week, I admit to tuning in to last Thursday’s Vice-Presidential debate with a certain impish feeling of schadenfreude. As I sat watching Palin’s mechanical detachment from the proceedings–including her open and unabashed refusal to respond to Gwen Ifill’s questions–a name popped into my head: Chauncey Gardener. On the strength of that impression I decided it was time to give Hal Ashby’s Being There another look. It’s a film which excoriates the televisual superficiality of our times like no other, and apart from its broad critique of our collective inability to see reality even as we stare straight at it, it’s also an eerily relevant film at this exact moment thanks to Peter Sellers’ brilliant portrayal of what amounts to a male version of John McCain’s running mate.

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The phenomenon of narrative features posing as documentaries has gotten way out of hand in recent years. While not in and of itself a loathsome cinematic device, it’s easy enough to loathe the kinds of films which make use of it. The Blair Witch Project and Incident At Loch Ness (why, Werner, why?) are execrable throwaways not only because they are children of the ludicrous notion that all manner of silliness instantly becomes believable if wrapped in a thin husk of formal “realism,” but also because they, in sum, convey nothing more than that the filmmakers are winking at us. While being able to quote from a one-page summary of Jacques Derrida’s writings on Deconstruction might seem mildly impressive on the campus of a Community College, it is hardly enough to constitute an earnest filmmaker’s complete Weltanshauung. These are gag films–unfunny cinematic one-liners. We seem to be headed toward a world in which, rather than making or watching actual films, we’ll instead be writing and reading pithy single-paragraph “conceptual synopses” in which filmmakers unveil their latest twists on the same old gags. In fact I’d not be surprised if I were to learn that a “dystopian pseudo-documentary” based on that very premise–and a remake of its sequel–were already in production. Peter Watkins‘ documentary-inflected films, Punishment Park being a prominent example thereof, manage to avoid seeming like a Freshman’s Media Studies term paper, both because they began to appear so far ahead of the cultural curve and because Watkins uses the form to provoke political discussion instead of merely to crack wise.

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The release of Psycho in 1960 without Production Code approval is often seen as marking the end of Hollywood’s long-honored program of self-censorship, and in a sense the release of that film serves as a rough point of departure for the deluge of sleazy exploitation films that would swamp the urban and drive-in markets for the next twenty years. There had been films of “questionable” moral character since the very beginnings of the cinematic form (take Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope photographs for example, which include some of the very earliest “skin flicks” among their number at a time before the celluloid cinema as we know it today had even been invented). With Psycho’s success, however, came a certain fading of the Puritanical silliness that had previously kept such films far from the open market, and suddenly all manner of previously taboo subjects (perversions, festishes, homosexuality,  etc.) became quite acceptable in films–so long as nothing was made too explicit, of course.

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When Alejandro Adams’ defiantly humanistic and formally rigorous first feature Around the Bay premiered to a packed house at this year’s Cinequest Film Festival, it was widely hailed by critics as a frank representation of the fractured modern American family, somehow engaging and undemanding of its audience in spite of its playful jumbling of conventional filmic syntax and its daringly suggestive sound design. It is described, in practically every response to the film I’ve seen, as a simple, unassuming character-driven drama. While this reading is more or less accurate, it is incomplete. Fundamentally, beneath its immediately observable patina of dramatic simplicity, Around the Bay is a radically poetic, associative collage on the subject of the dehumanized individual in the post-industrial, Capitalized world. The film is not about a deteriorating sense of the meaning of family so much as it is about barren interpersonal relations in general. It is not about the effects of inadequate parenting so much as it is about being inadequately human. Its characters are successfully presented as believably complex individuals, and yet within them lie broad archetypes. They each stand in for their respective generations, and therefore in a sense, their family is America writ small. The family drama, moving and affecting as it is, is really only the setting for a kind of grand lamentation of the automatic and empty life. The accessibility of the naturalistically rendered family story is one of the things that saves the film from becoming a heavy-handed allegory; however, critics who fail to see the deeper implications are, I think, missing the point.

Adams’ recently completed second feature, Canary–which I should point out has not yet been released or screened at a festival as of this writing–in many ways carries the themes of its predecessor a step further, this time within a somewhat dystopian science-fiction setting. Based (loosely) upon a 2004 short film by Sammy Samuelson, Canary revolves around characters connected in one way or another to the fictive Canary Industries, a corporation which provides internal organs to patients in need of transplants. The “catch” in these transactions (for CI functions as a profit-motivated enterprise rather than a Hippocratically medical venture–sound familiar?) is that the recipients must agree to a stringent set of dietary and lifestyle requirements, any breech of which is punishable by “repossession” of the organ(s). The playfully angry swipe at the current sorry and dehumanizing state of the United States’ healthcare industry is readily apparent here, but as in Around the Bay, the situation is meant also to resonate on a more general level: If Around the Bay was about human beings treating relationships like financial transactions, Canary is about social institutions treating human beings like objects to be owned and/or traded. It is, in short, a world not terribly unlike that depicted in Canary which produced Wyatt, the cold and detached father of Around the Bay–and millions of real people like him.

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There has recently been a fair amount of long-overdue critical attention directed at the work of Charles Burnett, mainly thanks to the recent restoration and subsequent DVD release of his lyrically naturalistic 1977 film Killer of Sheep. Formerly available only on low-quality VHS tape (which is unfortunately how I first experienced it), the film has gone, until recently, all but completely unnoticed by the general filmgoing public. It is wonderful to see that Burnett has finally been able to find a wider audience for his painstakingly honest depiction of blue-collar life in the Watts of the 1970’s–however, it is unfortunate that even less written criticism regarding his short films seems to have been undertaken, particularly in light of the fact that several of Burnett’s shorts have also been restored and released along with Killer of Sheep.

However unfortunate this critical oversight might be, it’s far from surprising. As a general rule, the short film as a form tends to be all but ignored by critics and audiences alike, perhaps at least in part due to its association with student films and an attendant knee-jerk assumption of amateurism. Burnett’s The Horse skillfully transcends such notions by virtue not only of its aesthetic and formal brilliance, but also of its dense subtlety of figurative suggestion. It is anything but the work of an amateur, and nothing if not a clear demonstration of the inherent power of the short-format film.

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I suppose it’s no coincidence that the term neo-noir only applies to films made after 1960 or so (the end of true film noir is often popularly seen as coinciding with Orson Welles’ stunning 1958 film Touch of Evil); the social and political climate which gave birth to the classic films noirs–the Great Depression and World War II being the most recognizable historical signposts of that era–had by that time begun to shift to one of revolution and anti-establishment protest. Noir had always been about the moral and existential quandaries born of a world seemingly poised to destroy itself.  By the time the 1960’s had headed back to the dressing room and the 1970’s had slouched onto the stage, a new kind of malaise had infected the popular consciousness, and it’s one from which we still suffer today: namely, cynicism and a general sense of collective self-disgust. The political, ethical, and psychological inclinations of a Polonsky or a Tourneur had in some fundamental way lost their social currency, and it is for this reason that film noir ceased to be a common cinematic type–not, as a more cursory examination of film history might lead one to believe, because of a sudden shift in film aesthetics. The “revolution” of the 1960’s had failed, and so irony (the handmaiden of cynicism) became a dominant artistic mode. It is within this unfortunate set of historical circumstances that Buzz Kulik’s Shamus is situated.

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