Lynn Forester de Rothschild (belonging as she does to that bizarre sect which formerly supported Hillary Clinton but which now inexplicably supports McCain) argues that:

The fundamental problem with Senator Obama’s stealth economics is that his dogma will not make America stronger or fairer. Today, the top 1% of earners contributes 40% of the nation’s $2.6 trillion tax intake and the bottom 50% pay 2.9% of our nation’s total needs. It has been shown that reductions in tax rates increase tax revenues because private enterprise strengthens the economy which in turn creates a larger tax base. For example, in 2003 the richest Americans paid $136 billion in taxes and after the Bush tax cut in 2006 they paid $274 billion.

I’d be laughing if I weren’t so unbelievably nauseous at the trotting-out of this tired old Richie Rich canard. How ridiculous is it to argue for a tax policy that benefits only 1% of this nation’s citizens? Seriously? How much more ridiculous does that same argument become when it’s posted on the internet as opposed to being communicated over champagne in some country club dining room?

Most ridiculous of all is the absurd notion that poor people’s votes can be won by arguing for policies which make them even poorer.

There are exactly two kinds of power in this world: that based on having money and that based on a mobilized populace. When Obama wins the presidency tomorrow we’ll finally be seeing that latter kind of power once again. As the pendulum swings in that direction, those who defend the idea of power-by-wealth would do well to keep their heads down.

So the campaigns may teach us something of interest about narratives: You can’t have a gripping narrative without some suspense. You can do without curiosity or surprise, but a story lacking suspense won’t keep us turning enough pages to be curious or surprised. [...] Maybe that’s why the McCain campaign never had a “compelling narrative.” It didn’t build up enough of a sense of how it would win or how, after the election, the future would be different.

It’s a fascinating piece, though probably more so for “educated elites” than for political junkies. Highly recommended reading.

More information on membership is available on the organization’s site; for more information about this event, download the invitation.

Images of people, people as images.

Méliès’ “coup,” thus, has had the net effect of marginalizing–if not quite fully delegitimizing–what might otherwise have turned out forever after to have been the cinema’s inexorably dominant raison d’être: the documentation of reality. Inasmuch as this subversion of the nature of cinema has most squarely affected the perceived philosophical viability of the documentary mode, it should come as no surprise that it is within its framework that, throughout the medium’s 113-year history, those who have most effectively mocked it have operated. But while some have asserted the cinema’s essential distance from reality, others have sought to reclaim the primacy of the cinema’s natural (if problematic) relation to the direct documentation of actuality. It might rightfully be argued that no film has worn this reclamational badge more visibly upon its sleeve than Rouch’s and Morin’s 1961 vérité treatise Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), in which Rouch, during its opening minutes, declares to Morin that ”[he does] not know if [they] will succeed in recording a conversation as ‘normal’ as it would be if there were no camera present” (note: my own translation).

This film is, however, decidedly not a dull, academic manifesto. It packed to the edges of each beautifully high-contrast frame with vibrant, unpretentious, unreserved humanity. Its subjects talk plainly about their lives–and often quite forthrightly, as can be seen in the sequence in which an auto mechanic openly admits that he must “fudge” a bit on his books in order to make a living. He explains that such chicanery is par for the course in the economic milieu of France in the 1960’s–or even of the much more recent France, an assertion to which I, an employee of the French government from the Fall of 2000 through the Spring of 2001, can personally attest (as a visiting ersatz functionary, I was somewhat fairly paid–however, the rather dire economic straits navigated by the resigned working class in the tiny medieval village where I lived was abundantly clear).

The empathy that Rouch and Morin evince toward their desperate, reaching subjects–who feel, across the board, dehumanized and objectified by an industrial and commoditized culture–is unlike anything I have ever seen in a film. The war in Algeria weighs heavily upon the conversation (particularly in the film’s second half) and the general sociopolitical atmosphere of the time and place is eerily prescient of the situation in present-day America: no one here feels “alive” in the face of monotonous and unrewarding working conditions, a bloody war is being waged overseas in defense of a crumbling empire, and literally everyone is arguing with literally everyone else about how these problems might be solved. In a particularly gut-wrenching sequence, the filmmakers, two white women, and two young black men discuss the then-current events in Africa. The white women are somewhat prejudiced in their thinking about black people, and we feel a great deal of real discomfort for the black men. Quite suddenly, the dynamics of the situation are turned upside down when one of the white women is revealed to have survived internment in a Nazi concentration camp. Just after an image of stunned silence on the part of one of the black men we jump to what must surely be one of the most beautiful–and unbearably sad–sequences in cinematic history: the camera tracks alongside the Holocaust survivor as she walks across the Place de la Concorde, and then through the streets of Paris, singing and offering half-audible “I wish you were heres” to someone who was less lucky than she was. The visceral pain she still feels is amplified twentyfold by the visual virtuosity with which we are shown all of this, and the only two people on Earth I can imagine not crying by the time Rouch cuts away are Dick Cheney and Sean Hannity.

But for all its seeming ideological and formal purity, there are here and there a few moments which can seem a bit too candid to be taken at face value. We see a young ouvrier awakened by his alarm clock, for example, and can only assume that access to this event was arranged in advance, meaning that in at least one sense, it was scripted. It seems a small bone to pick, but in a film which is conspicuously and outspokenly claiming–at least in its formal conceits–to represent a stoically unfiltered reality, a tiny misstep like this one can threaten to undermine the entire enterprise. Anyone who has ever attempted to produce an uncompromisingly vérité film knows that such concessions are nigh inevitable, and knows that they must be handled as delicately as broken glass. It is in these quietly disjunctive moments in which the idea of “pure” cinéma vérité can seem most definitively to repudiate its own ideological program, and so it is here where Rouch’s opening skepticism toward the cinema’s ability to reproduce reality adequately must be recalled. This kind of objection is easily recognized as being entirely beside the point once one realizes that a film like this one does not claim that the cinema is capable of representing reality objectively; rather, it repeatedly assaults us with subtle reminders of the fact that since the work of Méliès, the very language of the cinema has been molded to fit an economically desirable model, weighted to favor mindless entertainment (nevermind whatever artistic desirability certain implementations of artifice might carry with them–this film is not as artistic as it is polemical). This is not a movie; it’s life sculpted into a shape which demonstrates what movies–even fiction movies–ought to be.

Nearly 300 members of the Anglican Christ Church in Jacksonville, Florida gathered on Sunday, Oct. 19th 2008 for an unusual ceremony. As the congregation cheered, more than 100 reels of classic porn and sexploitation films were thrown into a pile, ritually torched, and then hosed down with water from a Jacksonville Fire and Rescue truck blessed by the priest.

“Obviously, we knew the right thing to do would be to destroy it, and not let it ever be out on the market”, pastor Mark Eldredge later told a reporter.

The church came into possession of the vintage film canisters when they purchased the 13-acre “Playtime Drive-In” for $1.4 million after the 60-year-old theater folded in 2007. The flock had found the historic stash above the concession stand, and some reels were even hidden in the walls. They did not watch any of the films, nor did they record the names of the movies they destroyed, some of which may have been the only remaining prints — and are now lost forever.

At first glance it would be easy enough to ignore a story like this one–it’s just a bunch of old porno, right? The problem with that line of thought is that we have no way of knowing if these films actually were porn or not since these upstanding guardians of your “morals” didn’t even bother to confirm their suspicions before they set what might have been a cache of lost cinematic documents ablaze. Even if these were “dirty” movies, there’s no excuse for this kind of wanton destruction. As I have written recently, these old “sexploitation” films are worthy of serious study, both because they show us how our society has changed in the intervening years and also because they tend to address social issues in a way which was impossible in the mainstream cinema of the past. Full of boobies (heaven forfend!) they may have been, but they might just as possibly have been irreplaceable snapshots of our cultural history.

Burning films (or books, or witches) is every bit as offensive to me as the female body is to these Anglican mind police.

Trailer: HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE from Jarrod Whaley on Vimeo.

• The availability of potential locations is entirely subject to the capricious whims of incommunicado sorority girls and/or of paranoid corporate legal teams (see below).
• Abandoned, isolated parking lots are apparently very dangerous places; film crews are 100% likely to wound themselves mortally (perhaps by stubbing a toe on a cracked bit of asphalt, one presumes) and then sue the owners of the lot, even if the producers and the cast have offered to sign a meticulously cautious liability waiver (see above).
• Just because pre-production was a hellish nightmare which made you want to boil your own face doesn’t mean that the production itself won’t be an absolutely stress-free pleasure.
• My cast is amazing; they are effortlessly turning my sketchy characters into believable human beings, and each of them is no less than a joy to work with.
• If you’re planning on shooting outdoors but it’s really windy out and you don’t have zepps or fuzzies for your mics: fuck it, go eat some barbecue with Richard and try again later.
• If “it” decides to rain on the day you’re scheduled to shoot the same scene that wind pre-empted earlier, do not say “fuck it” and go eat barbecue with Richard. Shoot the scene inside the car while the rain falls, be blown away by the result, and thank the atmosphere for having been so windy the previous week.
• Random drunken jackasses like to shout unintelligible gibberish at your cast in the middle of a take. Do not throw batteries at their heads. Instead, smile and wave, then write snarky things about them five days later on your blog.
• If you fart while tape is rolling on a very quiet scene, you can always edit the audio into a different take (i.e. one in which everyone in the room is not laughing) and thus shift the blame to an actor. Please note that this tactic works best if you’re shooting a comedy and if “windiness” fits your character; the only dramatic context in which I can imagine this working is at the precise moment when Christopher Walken pulls the trigger in the climactic Russian Roulette scene of The Deer Hunter.
• There is a cleaning product called “Whitey.”
• A good source of jokes for between-takes-on-the-set levity: Senator Whitey (R-AZ).

She'll find some and bring 'em to ya.

Chance likes to watch.

While it’s a true enough point to be made, when the black maid who raised Chance sees him on television and pointedly says, “all you’ve gotta be is white in America to get whatever you want,” it sounds suspiciously like a too-overt summation of what might be the film’s central thesis. But the film is not as much about the ease with which a white American can navigate the challenges of living in an otherwise Darwinian world as it is about our modern tendency not only completely to misapprehend the world we see around us but, ridiculously, also to fool ourselves into thinking it’s another kind of world entirely–even when bombarded by mountains of evidence to the contrary. With the black maid’s observation Ashby shows us that the people most left out in our society are the people most likely to observe with some degree of accuracy how the culture works–but even then only incompletely and in a way limited by the narrow avenues of injustice which most directly apply to their lives. This scene is a particularly brilliant and subtly handled presentation of the film’s nuanced and intellectually rigorous political insights.

By the film’s end, Chance has somehow managed to charm his way into a position of great power by dint of the fact that only one of the film’s characters has in any way realized that his mind is completely vacant. A whispering cabal of kingmaking power brokers–serving in the scene in question fittingly and wittily as pallbearers–decides to run him for president in the next election, and in the film’s much-discussed and (to many) bewilderingly abstract final image, Chance walks Christlike upon the surface of a lake. One wonders if we are meant to imagine that Sellers is actually making a slapstick splash even as we are “seeing” him seem to defy the laws of physics and common sense.

It’s not hard to imagine Palin taking a similar kind of maddeningly bone-headed “dive” (and taking us all with her, thereby severely dampening the humor) if we are as blind as this film’s characters are and vote her into office. If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to spend some of that massive war chest of his on an unconventional, yet wildly effective effort to win a few as-yet undecided votes, it might do well to mail out Being There DVD’s to a few thousand voters in the so-called “swing states.”

It’s hard–if not impossible–to produce a film with zero money, however; it’s nice to be able to reimburse the cast for their fuel expenses (especially with gas prices where they are right now), and it’s only fair to buy them some lunch every once in a while. Videotape obviously still costs a few dollars, even if the expense is nowhere near that of working with film.

As small as these kinds of expenses are when compared to the bloated budgets of most films made these days, they can still at times be hard to cover when one is a struggling independent producer who has enough trouble just trying to feed oneself. That being the case, even a near-zero-budget project can require at least a little fundraising.

I am looking for small donations for Hell Is Other People–$5, $10, $20…maybe you’d like to donate a a gas card…or maybe you own a restaurant and would like to donate a lunch for three or four people. These kinds of things–while seemingly financially insignificant on an individual level–are very helpful, and can help me keep my (unpaid) cast happy. All donors will receive credits as associate producers, and in many cases we may be able to work out a way to make your donations tax-deductible.

If you’d like to help: you can donate financially via PayPal, or contact me to discuss any kind of non-financial donation you might be willing to make.

I, and my cast, thank you in advance.