Govindini Murty

Voices Raised in Resistance: Powerful Defiant Requiem Premieres on PBS Sunday, April 7

2013-04-06T15:11:49-04:00

If a hallmark of great art is its ability to transcend the limited circumstances of its creation, then there is no more heartbreaking realization of this than the 1944 performance of Giuseppe Verdi's Catholic Requiem by Jewish prisoners at the Nazi concentration camp Terezín. The story of Terezín and of the Requiem is told eloquently in director Doug Shultz's powerful new documentary Defiant Requiem, which premieres this Sunday, April 7, on PBS at 10 p.m. ET/PT (check listings for additional screenings on local PBS stations).

It was at Terezín in 1944 that imprisoned Czech conductor Rafael Schächter led a chorus of his fellow Jewish prisoners -- most of them doomed to the gas chambers at Auschwitz -- in brazenly performing Verdi's Requiem before the very Nazis who had condemned them to death. One of the most complex and demanding of chorale works, Verdi's 1874 Requiem was originally intended as a musical rendition of the Catholic funeral mass. Rafael Schächter took Verdi's music and transformed it into a universal statement, one proclaiming the prisoners' unbroken spirit and warning of God's coming wrath against their Nazi captors.

Defiant Requiem tells two parallel stories: the first takes place during World War II, when Jews throughout Europe were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to Terezín as part of an elaborate deception to convince the world that Germany treated its prisoners humanely. Among those arrested and dragged to Terezín in 1941 was the young Rafael Schächter, a courageous and steadfast Czech opera-choral conductor.

Distinguished American conductor Murry Sidlin, who discovered the history of Schächter and the Terezín performers in the '90s, and who went on to found and conduct the Defiant Requiem concerts, notes in the film that "Schächter would have emerged as a great conductor" had his life not been cut short by the Nazis.

Within the confines of Terezín, Schächter lifted the spirits of his fellow inmates by creating a musical program for them to perform -- a program that inspired an astonishing outburst of cultural activity, which would eventually include almost a thousand different performances of chamber music and operas, oratorios and jazz music, theatrical plays, and some 2,300 different lectures and literary readings. Included in this were 16 performances of Verdi's emotional and musically challenging Requiem. As Terezín survivor Zdenka Fantlova explains in the film: "Doing a performance was not entertainment. It was a fight for life." She later adds, "If people are robbed of freedom, they want to be creative."

This flurry of activity within the walls of the prison camp -- achieved under the most trying possible circumstances of starvation, disease, and abject cruelty -- would culminate in a performance on June 23, 1944, of the Requiem in front of the camp's Nazi brass, visiting high-ranking SS officers from Berlin, and gullible Red Cross inspectors brought in to verify that the prisoners were being well treated.

It was at this point that Verdi's Requiem, with its dark, apocalyptic Dies Irae ("Day of Wrath") choral passage -- evoking the Last Judgement -- and equally harrowing Libera me ("Deliver me") passage took on connotations that Verdi could hardly have imagined. Serving as both a spiritual catharsis for the prisoners, and as a prophecy of the Nazis' ultimate fate, the Requiem was immediately transformed by Schächter and his fellow prisoners into an anthem of divine supplication and retribution. Indeed, shortly after this final performance, both Schächter (see photo below) and most of his choir would be sent to Auschwitz.

Defiant Requiem's second, parallel story takes place in 2006, as Murry Sidlin brings a full orchestra and the Catholic University of America's chorale ensemble -- along with surviving members of Schächter's chorus -- back to Terezin to perform the Requiem once more, this time in tribute. (Sidlin continues to conduct such tribute performances of the Requiem, with concerts scheduled for The Lincoln Center on April 29 and Prague's St. Vitus Cathedral on June 6.)

The journey to Terezín is clearly a spiritual quest for Sidlin (who has since founded The Defiant Requiem Foundation), who views the modern performance of the Requiem at Terezín as the completion of something begun seventy years before. As Sidlin says at one point in the film: "I brought the Verdi here because I want to assure these people [Schächter and the deceased prisoners] that we've heard them." Sidlin's staging of the Requiem in the now unassuming confines of Terezín is powerful and gripping -- and serves, one senses, as the perfect tribute to Schächter and his fellow performers.

Highlighting the role that individuals can play in keeping important cultural history alive, it was Sidlin's discovery of the book Music at Terezín in the late '90s, and his subsequent championing of the concert series, that has brought the otherwise forgotten history of Rafael Schächter and the Terezín Requiem performances back to life. It is a culmination both of Sidlin's passion for music and of his own personal history; Sidlin's grandmother and many of her closest relatives were murdered outside Riga, Latvia by Nazi SS assassination squads during World War II.

This June, Sidlin (see photo below) will be awarded the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Medal of Valor for his efforts to commemorate Rafael Schächter and the Terezín prisoners.

When we spoke with Sidlin recently, he recounted to us the special nature of Rafael Schächter's connection to Verdi's music. Sidlin noted that the young conductor had taken the score of the Requiem with him as one of his few prized possession to Terezín.

"I'm convinced that if he could have cut himself open and taped that score to his heart, and then bound himself up, he would have done so. It was that important to him," Sidlin explains. "It [the Requiem] is the kind of work that you read late at night and it gives you assurance -- of strength, of courage, of hope and dignity and renewal and memories."

As survivors recount, the performance of Verdi's music fed the souls of the Terezín prisoners, giving them something to look forward to in the midst of 12-hour days of slave labor, disease, cold, starvation, and executions that would eventually kill 33,400 of them -- along with deportations to Auschwitz that would kill another 88,000 prisoners from the camp.

Survivor Edgar Krasa says of the Requiem, "It was a prayer that overcame hunger ... you were there [singing] in that cellar and you were a different person." Another survivor who sang in the chorus, Marianka May, agrees: "My stomach stopped growling when I was singing. I think when you are more a soul than a person, I don't think the soul has to be nourished by anything but heavenly music."

Art was not a theoretical matter to them, nor was it mere entertainment. As Sidlin notes, "Vera Schiff -- who is in the film -- said to me once: 'The Nazis knew that if you kill the soul, the body will follow.'" Sidlin exhorts, "So keep that soul ignited."

Sidlin further explains that after years of not being allowed to perform, teach, or study the arts in Nazi-occupied Europe, for the Jewish prisoners of Terezín,

"Doing the Verdi Requiem -- this was a pinnacle for them ... Schächter chose this work not only because it was a crowning achievement artistically, but also because it was raising the fist, it was defiance and resistance, it was saying all those things to the Nazis about the Day of Wrath [that they couldn't say otherwise]."

Participating in the 2006 Requiem concert at Terezín was an emotional experience for the contemporary performers. Actor/singer/dancer Lisa Ferris was an undergraduate in music at the Catholic University of America when she participated in the first Defiant Requiem concert at Terezín (two more concerts have been performed there subsequently). As Ferris recalls, "It very quickly became about something more than just getting all the notes right. It was about creating a memorial to this group of people."

Ferris befriended Terezín survivor Edgar Krasa (featured in the documentary), Rafael Schächter's roommate and assistant on the original Requiem performances. Krasa's sons, Rafael (named after Schächter) and Daniel would sing in the Defiant Requiem chorus with Ferris. (See photo below of Lisa Ferris with Edgar Krasa and Rafael Krasa at Terezín, courtesy of Ferris.) Ferris says of Edgar Krasa:

"He is so full of life in a way I'd never seen before - his wife [Hana Krasa, also a Terezín survivor], as well. He has such joy. He is a human manifestation of how you can't destroy the human spirit. And the musical performance was a microcosm of that."

When asked about the emotional impact of performing at Terezín, Ferris admitted, "It wasn't easy. Those kinds of experiences are haunting." Ferris grew emotional as she described the moment when Sidlin took the performers down to the cellar where the original Terezín chorus had rehearsed:

"We were down there for ten or fifteen minutes, and the air down there was suffocating. It was dark and moldy and hard to breathe. To hear how this group of people, with one score and a broken piano, rehearsed in this place where you couldn't even breathe - and [yet] they created this epic piece of music."

Sidlin confirms this experience:

"I think we were doing OK until we went down into the cellar, and that was a transformative moment. We realized that after twelve hour days, they [Schächter's chorus] had to drag themselves, walking over dead bodies, by choice coming down here, where it was freezing - no light, no air - standing next to people who are sick, and standing next to everyone who is hungry, and to do this night after night."

Schächter's original Terezín chorus had to learn the entire Requiem score by heart, due to only having one score to share among the 150 of them. And as Sidlin explains, Schächter was demanding.

"Edgar Krasa says he was merciless, and it wasn't because he was a tough conductor. It was because he would not let their minds wander. He would not let their minds go inside themselves and think about the things he wanted them to overcome, which included things like: Where are my children? Where is my wife? Where is my husband? These are incredibly difficult things to imagine."

Lisa Ferris concludes of the experience: "If you are a performer, you are lucky enough to have a handful of experiences that change you, that you carry with you for years to come. ... Every person with a heart feels connected to this group of people in 1944."

Defiant Requiem also presents recreations of cultural life at the Terezín camp - along with animations adapted from surviving Terezín drawings - and features poignant reminiscences from the camp's survivors. The survivors themselves are uniformly remarkable for their eloquence and equanimity.

As a horrifying counterpoint to the Terezín survivors' memories, and reinforcing the depth of the Nazis' sadism, Defiant Requiem also presents surviving Nazi propaganda footage of Terezín as it was perversely stage-managed during a Red Cross inspection visit to appear like an attractive Jewish commune, a Potemkin village of Third Reich magnanimity. Children play in the grass and eat butter off slabs of black bread, adults compete vigorously in soccer, a pleasant outdoor café bustles with life and activity. As Defiant Requiem's narrator Bebe Neuwirth informs us, many of the people shown in the footage would within weeks be shipped to Auschwitz in cattle cars for extermination -- including some 15,000 children, some as young as three years old.

In telling the largely forgotten story of the Terezín camp (see photo above), Defiant Requiem adds meaningfully to the body of knowledge about the Holocaust -- but it also adds a new twist to debates over the political and rhetorical uses to which music is put. Given the Nazis' adoption of Richard Wagner's operas as a soundtrack for their program of national mythic renewal (with which Schächter as an opera conductor would have been familiar), it may be said that Schächter's adoption of Verdi's Requiem hoisted the Germans on their musical petards. Schächter would later be joined in this endeavor by such artistic luminaries as Thomas Mann, whose famous 1947 novel Doctor Faustus associated music of the German Romantic tradition with the diabolism of the Nazi era.

When we asked Sidlin what Verdi's Requiem means to him as a work of music, Sidlin responded:

"It used to mean singing in tune, playing precisely. It used to mean following Verdi's dynamics and his metronome markings, all those things that don't matter ... Now it means this: an opportunity to give Rafael Schächter something of the career he never had - as a real hero, as an artistic hero. That's number one."

"And number two is that Verdi's Requiem is way beyond beautiful, powerful, dramatic music. The internal meaning of the Verdi is now: 'What is our spiritual obligation as humans?' It reminds us of people in a concentration camp with no food, no medical attention, freezing, sick, terrified, who stepped forward and taught us what the Verdi Requiem means."

When asked how this experience has changed him, Sidlin told us:

"It's not only changed me personally, it's changed my whole focus. My whole professional life now is dedicated and devoted to illuminating the legacy of Terezín and what a major role the arts and humanities play in that mission. It's an exercise in seeking a connection with history - and therefore being able to well serve the future."

For the viewer, what ultimately remains after watching Defiant Requiem is the intense reality of what singing Verdi's music meant to the prisoners of Terezín who had been condemned to death. As Terezín survivor and original chorus member Marianka May explains it: "Verdi's Requiem put all of us into another world. This was not a world with the Nazis. This was our world. [...] We just tried to reach something that's bigger than we are ... and let's hope that we are singing to God, and God can't help but hear us."

Highly recommended, especially for those interested in the cultural history of the Holocaust or in classical music, Defiant Requiem premieres this Sunday, April 7th on PBS at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT (see local listings).

Courage & Individual Conscience: The Top 10 Pro-Freedom Films of 2012

2012-12-31T07:51:40-05:00

Freedom must thrive for the arts to flourish. It's therefore an encouraging sign that so many of 2012's most acclaimed films -- such as Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln, Les Misérables, or Skyfall -- should explore the centrality of freedom to our civilization. As we celebrate 2012 in film, it's fitting that we honor movies that affirm the very liberty that makes our art, our traditions of free speech, and our democratic form of government possible.

Whether depicting historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, or pop-culture icons like James Bond and Katniss Everdeen, or contemporary dissidents like China's Ai Weiwei and Russia's Masha Drokova, the movies below illustrate how freedom only survives when brave individuals are willing to risk their lives fighting for it. These films also depict the virtues that accompany such bravery: a strong individual conscience and empathetic feelings of responsibility toward one's fellow human beings.

Many of this year's best pro-freedom films also portray the bravery of women. In a refreshing development, movies like Zero Dark Thirty, Barbara, The Hunger Games, and Putin's Kiss all feature complex, independent women as their leads -- while Skyfall, in the character of "M" (Judi Dench), features a strong woman in a pivotal leadership role. This is another way in which these movies powerfully affirm the democratic spirit.

Here then are our ten best pro-freedom films of 2012:

1) Zero Dark Thirty

A taut and intense account of the almost ten year hunt for Osama bin Laden, director Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty captures the emotional and ethical complexity of the War on Terror -- while unfolding a vast, investigative mystery that takes audiences from secret CIA bases in Afghanistan, to the corridors of power in Washington D.C., to the urban mazes of Pakistan. Leading this historic manhunt is an indomitable young CIA analyst named Maya, played with steely resolve by Jessica Chastain, who for nearly a decade tracks down bin Laden's courier on the way to locating the terrorist mastermind. Scrupulously non-partisan, Zero Dark Thirty gives primary credit for bin Laden's demise not to any politician -- but to sober career intelligence professionals as well as military personnel, a tragic number of whom gave their lives in pursuit of Al Qaeda's leader. Telling their story with a refreshingly understated realism, Zero Dark Thirty honors these largely anonymous men and women who protect our freedom in an increasingly dangerous and chaotic world.

2) Barbara

Germany's official Oscar entry and winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director (Christian Petzold) at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, Barbara is the most compelling depiction since The Lives of Others of day-to-day life in a modern surveillance state -- in this case the communist East Germany of the early 1980s. Nina Hoss gives a complex, Oscar-worthy performance as a pediatric surgeon whose desire to leave East Germany puts her under the watchful eye of the Stasi (the secret police), and of a conflicted, would-be lover played by Ronald Zehrfeld. Austere and suspenseful, Barbara is one Germany's best dramas since the 1970s, and an indictment of any society in which allegiance to a political system overwhelms common humanity.

3) Lincoln

Director Steven Spielberg's Lincoln brings the story of The Great Emancipator to life in a way that is both respectful of our 16th President's achievements and alive to his humanity. In perhaps the richest depiction of Abraham Lincoln since Henry Fonda's in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Daniel Day-Lewis brings warmth, interiority and conviction to a man charged with the weightiest responsibilities in American history -- as both slavery and the fate of the Union hang in the balance. Lincoln also highlights the value of eloquence in free societies; in recounting the sometimes baroque political backstory behind passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, Spielberg suggests that it was Lincoln's poetic oratory as much as any other factor that ended slavery in America for good.

4) The Other Dream Team

One of the best sports documentaries in recent years, and a highlight of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, director Marius A. Markevičius' The Other Dream Team tells the emotional story of the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic basketball team -- a symbol of freedom and Lithuanian national pride after decades of Soviet rule. The film tells the improbable tale of how Lithuanian basketball talents like future NBA stars Arvydas Sabonis and Šarūnas Marčiulionis came to dominate Soviet basketball in the 1980s (even defeating Team USA in the 1988 Olympics) -- only to face off against Russia in the '92 Barcelona Games, wearing tie dyed uniforms provided by The Grateful Dead (!), after Lithuania had just won its hard-fought independence. A moving and uplifting piece of Cold War history, The Other Dream Team is as much a tribute to the courage of the Lithuanian people in the face of communist tyranny as it is to the inspirational power of sports.

5) Skyfall

One of the best James Bond thrillers since the 1970s, director Sam Mendes' Skyfall reinvents 007 as a hero for the War on Terror era -- and thoughtfully affirms the value of our intelligence agencies in the post-9/11 world. In Skyfall, information pertaining to NATO penetration of worldwide Islamic terror cells has been stolen in Istanbul, and Bond must retrieve the data before Western agents are exposed and killed -- the opening act of an elaborate revenge plot orchestrated by the sociopathic Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem). In a film rife with references to Winston Churchill and his legacy, Bond and his colleagues are depicted as reflexively selfless in the cause of freedom -- and Dame Judi Dench's quotation of Tennyson's poem "Ulysses," as both she and Britain come under attack, packs an unusually stirring punch for a Bond film.

6) Caesar Must Die

Italy's official Oscar entry and winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's documentary-drama depicts a group of prison inmates -- including several with life sentences -- rehearsing and performing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar within their high-security Roman prison. Shot largely in black-and-white, the film features vivid performances from its non-professional cast, who bring a raw passion and fury to Shakespeare's timeless parable of tyranny and betrayal; plus, uncanny parallels between the prisoners' lives and Shakespeare's characters add a poignant, humanistic quality to the drama. Like a pieta-in-motion, Caesar Must Die gives testimony to how art can awaken an inner freedom of the spirit, even in lives broken and brutalized by crime -- and it's a heartfelt evocation of basic human dignity.

7) Les Misérables

The beloved musical by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg (and by extension, the original novel by Victor Hugo) finally gets the epic treatment it deserves in director Tom Hooper's heart-on-the-sleeve, verité-style interpretation. The emotional, tortuous journey of escaped convict Jean Valjean toward freedom, respectability, and redemption plays out against the huge canvas of Paris' June Rebellion of 1832 -- an uprising in which a rag-tag band of student freedom-fighters strike a blow on behalf of the poor. Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway utterly inhabit their respective roles as the soulful Jean Valjean and the tragic Fantine, and Russell Crowe makes for a formidable Inspector Javert -- tormentor of Jean Valjean and pitiless embodiment of the law, devoid of human compassion. Les Misérables plays out like a sentimental, populist ode to liberty -- albeit a liberty grounded in social justice and Christian forgiveness -- as Jean Valjean earns the freedom he illegitimately gained by sacrificing himself on behalf of others.

8) Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Currently on the Oscar short-list for Best Documentary and the recipient of a special jury prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, director Alison Klayman's Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry depicts the pro-democracy activism of the witty, pugnacious Ai Weiwei, China's most famous contemporary artist. Outraged by the political repression he sees around him, Never Sorry shows the earthy, voluble artist risking his flourishing career (as one of the designers of 'The Birds Nest,' Beijing's Olympic stadium) to speak out on behalf of democratic reform in China -- a risky endeavor that likely has its origins in the persecution of Ai Weiwei's father during the Cultural Revolution. Using social media tools -- mainly Twitter, blogs, and digital cameras -- Ai Weiwei becomes a one-man army of free speech and transparency, particularly when exposing the Chinese government's shoddy "tofu construction" that led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of school children during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. For this and other human rights efforts, Ai Weiwei is brutally beaten by the police (suffering a cerebral hemorrhage), imprisoned on trumped up charges, and forbidden from speaking to the media. Unfolding a story that is still in progress, Klayman's film becomes an indispensable account of how one defiant, creative individual can challenge an authoritarian system and become a symbol of hope around the world.

9) The Hunger Games

The spectacular box office success of The Hunger Games affirms that science-fiction remains a vital genre for communicating the value of freedom, in this case to the young women so often marginalized in our popular culture. Directed by Gary Ross, The Hunger Games tells the story of teen heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), who fights for her freedom by way of brutal gladiatorial combat in the future dystopian state of Panem. Drawing on the Greek myth of Theseus, modern reality TV, and imagery of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, Ross and Hunger Games creator Suzanne Collins craft an electrifying depiction of an individual's fight to free herself from authoritarian state control and media-induced mass conformity. Katniss asserts her integrity and sense of personal responsibility -- crucial prerequisites to democratic freedom -- by volunteering to take the place of her under-aged sister in Panem's barbaric 'Hunger Games.' Katniss overcomes lethal competitors and manipulation of the Games to become a symbol of hope to an otherwise despairing public, who see in her example that they too can fight for liberty and prevail.

10) Putin's Kiss

Putin's Kiss documents the real-life heroism of Masha Drokova, a charismatic leader in the Russian nationalist youth group Nashi who makes the courageous decision to leave the group after she witnesses anti-democratic tactics directed against journalists and human rights activists. As depicted in the film, Masha owes everything to her involvement in Nashi: a coveted job on TV, a nice apartment, a university education, and a medal given to her by Vladimir Putin himself. Yet Masha gives all of this up in protest over the brutal beating of an opposition journalist and friend, Oleg Kashin. At a time when political dissidents face official harassment and jail terms (or worse) for challenging Russia's leaders, Masha makes waves in activist circles -- and puts her future at risk -- by standing up for her own personal integrity against pressures emanating from Russia's authoritarian political class. Directed by Lise Birk Pedersen and winner of the World Cinema Cinematography Award in Documentary at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, Putin's Kiss is a timely account of how even those trapped within a corrupt political system can stand up for individual conscience and freedom.

Honorable Mentions: High Tech, Low Life, Stephen Maing's superb documentary about Chinese dissident bloggers; The Ambassador, Mads Brügger's darkly comic exposé of corruption in The Central African Republic; Words of Witness, Mai Iskander's insightful documentary about Egyptian journalist Heba Afify; and The Sheik and I, filmmaker-provocateur Caveh Zahedi's outrageously subversive mockumentary.

Special Note: we honored Jafar Panahi's This Is Not a Film and Luc Besson's The Lady in our list of "The Top Ten Pro-Freedom Films of 2011," since those films had their initial screenings in 2011 and then went on to wider release in 2012. These fine films are certainly also worthy of your support this year.

We would also like to thank our colleague Joe Bendel for the many excellent reviews he has done of pro-freedom films for Libertas Film Magazine.

This Holiday Season, What Happens When All of Our Cultural Memories Go Digital?

2012-12-24T10:16:36-05:00

As we celebrate the holidays, many of us are taking digital photos and videos of our loved ones, thinking that these digital files will be saved forever. The same thinking applies to our movies, books, songs, and stories - we save all of our creative works to the digital cloud, assuming they will be safely stored there. But between continual tech upgrades that make our digital files obsolete, and UN agencies that now seek to censor the internet, the question must be asked: are any of our cultural memories really safe in the digital age?

Recent developments are making it clear that control of digital information, and in particular of online artistic content, is the new front in the twenty-first century war of ideas. The UN's International Telecommunications Union recently voted to allow individual nations to censor the free flow of the internet. This move was welcomed by authoritarian governments like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Russia - and condemned by democracies like the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia.

Combine this alarming development with the fact that many people now store their photos, videos, writing, and other creative works in online clouds, without ever creating hard copies or backing up their data - and the result is the potentially explosive ability of authoritarian forces to erase vast areas of our cultural memory at the push of a button. Without physical copies, no longer does a dictator have to go to the trouble of staging public burnings of art and books, as in 1930s Nazi Germany or 15th century Florence under Savonarola.

The freedom of the individual artist to speak out is more important now than ever, as today's authoritarian nations seek to silence artists at every opportunity. Russia's jailing of the women's punk rock group Pussy Riot, China's jailing of dissident artist Ai Weiwei, and Iran's jailing of filmmaker Jafar Panahi are all examples of modern autocracies crushing citizens' rights to creative expression. Apparently nothing is more threatening to today's political fanatics than a free, creative individual.

And now the UN is going to give these authoritarian nations official sanction to censor the online work of artists, filmmakers, writers, and creative thinkers. This is a worldwide cultural catastrophe in the making.

Yet this isn't the only danger that faces the preservation of our cultural memories; a new form of techno-utopianism poses a serious challenge to the preservation of our creative works. The problem in technologically advanced cultures like America is that we sometimes value technology for its own sake more than we do content. We equate advanced technology with greater value, so we rush to upgrade software, devices and formats without making any corresponding effort to ensure that prior digital files and formats can still be used.

Obviously it's important that we progress technologically. As a filmmaker I embrace digital filmmaking tools for their ability to democratize the movies, and as a writer I wouldn't even be writing this post if it weren't for the freedom of speech enabled by the internet. But as the digital revolution matures, we must give thought to how we manage and protect the enormous new quantity of digitally-created works.

This holiday season we're celebrating blockbuster movies like Les Misérables and The Hobbit, but the irony is that these films are based on classic novels by Victor Hugo and J.R.R. Tolkien that were written in the pre-digital age - and are still around today because they've been widely distributed in paper hard copies. But what about fresh artistic and literary works created today? Where will they be fifty or a hundred years from now if they only exist in digital form? Even if they are classics, who will have the chance to adapt them into tomorrow's movies or other, future forms of storytelling if they are erased within a few years by government censors - or are unreadable because tech companies have upgraded tablets/e-readers to the point that they can't read prior digital books?

Our iPhones and iPads are obsolete within two or three years, files saved on external drives often can't even be read five years later, hard drives crash, memory cards fail, and continual software upgrades make computers even just a few years old practically inoperable. So why do we assume that matters will be any different with our movies, photos, and songs - in short, all of our cultural memories?

Keanu Reeves' fascinating documentary Side by Side (2012), directed by Chris Kenneally and produced by Justin Szlasa, is one of the best examinations I've seen of the digital revolution's impact on the art of the movies. (As a positive outcome of digital technology, you can see the film on Amazon VOD.) What I appreciate about Side by Side is that it turns to our leading filmmakers to ask them what the digital revolution means for storytelling. The film interviews over seventy notable film directors, editors, and cinematographers - from Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, James Cameron, and David Fincher to Walter Murch, Anne Coates, Vittorio Storaro, and Michael Ballhaus.

Side by Side speculates as to whether our digital moviemaking output will potentially be unreadable in the near future due to the escalating pace of technological change. As Michael Goi, recent President of the American Society of Cinematographers, points out in the film, there have been more than eighty video formats to date - and many of them cannot even be read today. By contrast, archivist Ed Stratmann of George Eastman House notes that he can still take out a film reel from 1895 and play it on a film projector today.

The same is true for paper books. One can hold up any book from a decade ago or a century ago and still be able to read it. Isn't there a virtue to this kind of simplicity? Shouldn't good technology consist in allowing people to focus on ideas and content - rather than on the expensive, soon-to-be-obsolete devices that deliver the content? And what will happen when all of our books are digitized and the original paper copies are discarded - as is already happening in libraries worldwide?

George Lucas deserves much credit for promoting the digital filmmaking revolution, and he expresses optimism in Side by Side that there will be a solution to archiving and readability issues:

"All of everything in the whole world is stored digitally. Yeah, so there's problems with it - but they're going to solve those problems. I'll guarantee that. There's too much digital information out there not to figure out a fool proof way to store it forever."

I hope Lucas is right, because the move to digital seems irrevocable, but I've yet to see viable solutions offered to filmmakers and other creative people to allow them to save their work and migrate their data to new software and new formats every couple of years.

The digitizing of cultural output and its storage online is giving governments, U.N. agencies, and tech companies unprecedented ease of censorship. There is a potential for intellectual and creative repression on a worldwide scale that George Orwell or Ray Bradbury could only have dreamed of when they envisioned the dystopian societies of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.

As Martin Scorsese says in Side by Side of the potential erasure of our digital creative works:

"That's a danger, I think, in the continuation of our culture. What do you go back to when you need to go back to the well? Where do you get the nourishment culturally, artistically, intellectually? Where do you get it?"

The irony seems to be that the more we remember, and as the quantity of digital technology grows, the more we are in danger of forgetting.

So as you celebrate this holiday season, be sure to save your digital memories by printing them out or backing them up. And beyond that, do everything you can to speak out for internet freedom. It's the best safeguard today for the rights of filmmakers, artists, dissidents, and storytellers to create and share the cultural memories that we live by.

A Conversation With Fashion Icon Ozwald Boateng on Style, Africa, and His New Film A Man's Story

2012-11-03T08:49:35-04:00

During his meteoric career, Ozwald Boateng's been called the coolest man on Earth, and the fashion world's best-kept secret. Yet the candid new documentary A Man's Story, opening this weekend in New York and Los Angeles, makes certain that the British fashion designer and style icon no longer remains a secret.

In a career already spanning two decades, the 45 year-old Boateng has outfitted celebrities from Will Smith to Russell Crowe, from Jamie Foxx to Mick Jagger. At age 28, he became the youngest tailor - and the first of African descent - to open a store on London's legendary Savile Row. Boateng's also designed menswear for Givenchy and bespoke costumes for films like The Matrix and Ocean's Thirteen, and he's even been the subject of his own Sundance Channel TV series, House of Boateng. He's also the recipient of an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for his contributions to the clothing industry.

Throughout all this, however, Boateng's private side - such as his quiet struggles in the rarified world of British fashion, or his efforts to foster entrepreneurial investment in Africa - have taken a back seat in public to his style innovations.

Director Varon Bonicos' new documentary, A Man's Story - for which Bonicos filmed Boateng from 1998 through 2010 - reveals much about Boateng's personal life: from the challenges of growing up as a young man of African descent in London of the '70s and '80s, to the abiding influence of his father on his life and career. The result is a warm and often poignant film that humanizes Boateng, while doing full justice to the glamorous place he occupies in the world of men's fashion.

We spoke with Ozwald Boateng and Varon Bonicos in Los Angeles, where they are promoting A Man's Story. The interview has been edited for length.

GM: What is your passion for film - and in particular, how are you inspired by the intersection of film and fashion?

OB: Film has always been a really good tool for me to communicate emotion about why I create a collection. I'm probably one of the first designers to make short films. The first time I did it was back in 1994. The invite for my first fashion show was a VHS cassette. And it kind of became part of the language of my designing collections - I was always putting together short films.

Apart from that, I think fashion designers are directors anyway. We spend a year designing a collection for a fashion show that lasts maybe fifteen minutes. We have to design the look of the catwalk, cast the model for each look, work up the sound, the lighting - it's a lot of work that goes into that fifteen minutes.

JA: Film has been so important in terms of influencing men's style, men's self-perceptions. I was curious whether there were film icons, movie stars who have influenced your sense of style?

OB: Sean Connery, of course, since I was a kid - you know, James Bond. Or The Thomas Crown Affair - you can't beat those three piece suits. The Italian Job with Michael Caine - again the suits. If you're a designer, there's got to be some films that you've seen that have inspired you creatively. There's no escaping that. Film is such a very good tool for communicating emotions, and all designers and creative people look to inspire an emotional response.

JA: You mention Connery and Bond, and he was so crucial in selling the Savile Row style here in the States.

OB: Absolutely.

JA: You yourself have become an icon on behalf of that style. Was that something you planned from the outset as a designer - to be so out front selling the look yourself?

OB: No, actually, I tried to stay out of it. In the early years, it was because I was a very young guy working in a very old discipline - so really, that's tough to begin with. And then I was trying to do it in a very modern way - so again, that's tough. Add me, visually, into the mix of all that, and that just complicates things. So for the first few years, I didn't let anyone take any pictures of me. Basically, a lot of people had no idea what I looked like. And because my name did not necessarily sound African, a lot of people ... just thought I was some kind of middle aged white guy [laughs]. So no-one actually knew what I looked like, and that was the best thing - because it allowed everyone to focus on the work.

JA: You were hidden, basically.

OB: Yeah, but it was all very deliberate. Because I'm good at what I do, and I just wanted to focus on the work. Let people talk about my cut, the influence of the cut, the detail, and that's all it was about - for years.

And then there was this famous magazine in London called The Face - this was in the late '80s, early '90s - and that's the first time I kind of revealed myself. And the reason was that the journalist was so adamant that she take a picture, and I was fighting it and fighting it, and anyway, I did it. And then the moment I had the picture taken, the dynamics completely changed. I got a lot more interest, but the interest always came back to that they wanted to take a picture of me - and that's when I got into Italian Vogue, and all those magazines at that time.

GM: One of the most powerful parts of your story is that you are of Ghanaian descent, you were born in London - and you broke into a place as tradition-bound as Savile Row. How was your background as an African an asset to you - in your fashion, in your creative work - and at the same time, what challenges did it pose that you had to overcome?

OB: As I say very early on in the film, at the time I was growing up, it was tricky. You had two options: allow it to become a headache, or just get on with your life [laughs]. So I chose to just get on with my life and not let it bother me. So even when I was experiencing real issues, I just didn't see it. So, I think that when someone's got an issue about where you're from, and they're going at you - and you ignore it ... it makes them powerless.

So that's been my way of dealing. When I went to school, there were two black kids in the whole school. I think the first time I saw only black people was when I went to Ghana - I must have been 21, or 22, at that time. To have that visual experience - I remember going, "oh, wow - I've not seen that before."

GM: You're very proud of your culture and of the artistry that comes with it. And you have collections inspired by African style, but also by Japanese samurai style, Native American culture, Russian style. You show all this interest in different cultures - and I think in part that's because you yourself come from a culture different from that of the UK.

OB: Exactly. And that's why Savile Row was so relevant, because Savile Row is an important street in British history. So my opening a shop there had much greater meaning than just opening a store. And I think, subconsciously, I was aware of that. Because I'm always about change for a greater meaning. But the way to do it is without putting any badges on it. Because the more you put a badge on something, the more it becomes something else.

GM: I'd like to ask you about your commitment to helping Africa through development. You've said in your interviews that you believe private investment and entrepreneurship are more effective in helping Africa than government aid.

OB: Yes, absolutely.

GM: I'd love to hear more about your philosophy and how you think you can accomplish your goals through your Made in Africa Foundation and also through this film.

OB: Designers are creating for the future ... [we're] basically visionaries ... so when you visualize something, you don't visualize it to be worse than it is, you visualize it to be better [laughs]. That's how designers think. So when I go to Africa, I don't visualize it being worse, I visualize that if we did everything right, what would that look like, and suddenly it's an amazing vision.

Africa controls 50% of the world's natural resources, in some cases 70% - so the concept of poverty [in Africa] makes no sense. And in the world, resources are key. So when you understand those points, the only thing left is: 'why?' And the 'why' is the infrastructure. So infrastructure development is the key. And you balance that out with how much aid has been invested, which is billions, and of the aid money that's been put in, if 20% actually hit the ground and got deployed, I'd be shocked. So that's why I set up the foundation.

In terms of what we're dealing with: we've written a paper for the British government on policy for Africa, we've campaigned the World Bank, the African Development Bank - and the African Development Bank is doing a $22 billion dollar infrastructure bond. So now there's more interest in investment in Africa than there's ever been since I can remember. The main thing we've done in Africa is to change views, which is the key.

JA: For both of you, what is the big takeaway that you want people to have on this film? And Varon, you put twelve years into this - all that footage going back to the late '90s. We see documentaries all the time, and no-one is rolling cameras over that length of time.

VB: The film is 96 minutes out of five hundred and something hours. It was really hard to craft. It's like little tiny dots of newsprint - and then you pull out, and you get the picture. The editor Tom Hemmings had to sit in a darkened room for two months just watching footage. But you know, I met Ozwald and I'd never met anyone like him before. I was only supposed to film for a few weeks ... [but it wound up being twelve years]. The central message of the film really is about belief, the core structure of belief. It's got a man's story - and fashion, it's a great backdrop. The film also highlights one of the most important relations in life, which is a relationship between a parent and a child. But the central message is about belief. I'm proud of the film. It's great to be sitting here with you to be able to talk about it.

OB: I think each person's going to take a very personalized viewpoint about what the film's doing for them. I make bespoke suits that are made to fit men as individuals - and that's somehow worked through the film, [with] the film fitting the individual. That seems to be the poetry of life.

JA: In the final shot of the film, you're walking off stage with your father. That was very touching. He inspired you - and look what it created. I just thought that was wonderful.

OB: That's interesting. Many people see the film, but no-one's mentioned that. So let me tell you about that. I decided I was going to do this fashion show based around this movie, and I called it, "A Man's Story." I wanted to figure out: at what point do you become a man? Is it 18, is it 21, is it when you get married, when you have kids? So I'm sitting at dinner with five mates of mine, and the guys say, "actually, you only become a man when you lose your father. It's when you have a problem, and you can't call him - because he's not there." And I said, "wow." So at that point I realized I'd done all this stuff, and I'd never celebrated my dad. So my whole focus moved from what I was doing to making it all about him. Which is why, at the end of the show, I'm applauding him. [...] So that's really what A Man's Story is about. It's really about your moments, and remembering them. And also, enjoying them as they happen.

VB: I agree. Enjoy every moment as it happens.

A Man's Story opens in New York and Los Angeles on November 2nd, and is also available in Apple's iTunes store.

Supermodels and True Beauty: A Conversation With Timothy Greenfield-Sanders of HBO's 'About Face'

2012-08-31T09:55:43-04:00

They're among the most iconic faces of the second half of the twentieth century. Isabella Rossellini, Beverly Johnson, Paulina Porizkova and their supermodel sorority helped to shape public perceptions of beauty and womanhood at a time of rapid expansion in the mass media. Their faces graced thousands of magazine covers and they were role models to millions of young women.

But was the rise of the supermodel a sign of female empowerment or female objectification?

About Face: Supermodels Then and Now, an insightful new documentary by director and photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders available on HBO on-demand through September 3 and HBO Go through 2013, interviews sixteen of these supermodels about the true nature of beauty in an age of consumerism and mass media.

As alluded to in About Face, the irony that underlies the modeling profession is that it should lead to both the empowerment and objectification of women. On the one hand, the mass distribution of images of female models through fashion magazines, ads, and other media in the past century has led to women becoming quite literally more visible in today's world -- with that visibility being an affirmation of their femininity and right to exist as women in the public sphere. In contrast to this, from the Puritans to the Taliban, misogynistic societies through history have restricted sensual or beautiful images of women as a prelude to denying their basic right to participate in public life, citing women's beauty as a "corrupting" influence on social morality. The predominance of beautiful images of women in Western culture has thus affirmed the broader right of women to exist in public as feminine and not as neutered beings.

On the other hand, modeling has also had the effect of objectifying women by focusing on external surfaces, and at times unnatural standards of beauty. In About Face, Isabella Rossellini asks of the pressure for women to undergo plastic surgery: "Is this the new foot-binding? It's misogyny to say that older women are unattractive." Objectification can also lead to racism by dehumanizing people and imposing narrow standards of 'beauty' or 'normalcy.' Model and agent Bethann Hardison describes in About Face trying to book African-American models for runway shows in the '70s and '80s, only to be told by the casting agents that such models weren't their "aesthetic." As Hardison explains "'Aesthetic' is borderline for racist."

I spoke with director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders about some of these issues at the LA Film Festival's screening of About Face. The interview has been edited for length.

GM: What drew you to these ladies? I know you met them initially at a party in New York, but what did you find so magical about them?

TGS: I think when I met them at that party ... I immediately got a sense of how smart they were. You know, the cliché is that you either have brains or beauty, but you don't have both. Well, they seemed to have both. It really makes it an interesting film. And I thought that people weren't aware of that. I have two young daughters who knew who they were. But many young people today who are so interested in fashion, they don't know the history of it and of these iconic women.

GM: What has changed about modeling? You mentioned in the screening that these models were so unique, whereas today the models and their careers seem more transient. Why is there this disparity today versus back then?

TGS: I think that it was a smaller world then. I think there was a warmer relationship between the models and the designers and even the businesspeople involved. It was not so cut-throat and not so corporate. And I think today it's just big business and big money, and I don't think the human relationship is there as much. I think it's very changed.

GM: Do you think a big part of that is the issue of covers -- that the actresses are taking over magazine covers?

TGS: Yes.

GM: It's such a striking change. What has that done to the morale of the models? Does it make a big difference behind the scenes?

TGS: I'm not sure I can answer that because it's not my world, exactly. But I know certainly it was huge in those days to have covers, because covers were the definition of success. And the cover of Vogue was the ultimate success. So when Beverly Johnson got on the cover of Vogue -- the first black woman to do so [in August, 1974], that was a big deal. And today -- that doesn't happen for models.

GM: I thought it was very interesting what Dayle Haddon said that it wasn't just that she thought she was the prettiest -- in fact she didn't quite fit into the physical type that was popular at the time, but that she brought something else to the picture.

TGS: She brought something else. And Dayle Haddon had to struggle because she wasn't the look of the moment. She was a very smart woman and she figured out a way to add something more to the picture.

GM: Do you think the reason that those models from that era were so powerful - we're talking the '70s and '80s, was because they were often muses for the designers they were working with?

TGS: Yes, exactly.

GM: I think of Yves Saint Laurent and models like Khadija Adams, or even Catherine Deneuve in the '60s who was dressed by St. Laurent for Belle de Jour. I think of Calvin Klein and Brooke Shields, they were so intimately tied together.

TGS: They were very connected to the designers. As Karen Bjornson said, Halston cut the clothes on her. So it was very much an intimate experience where they got to know these women, they hung out with them, they were very much part of their lives. One of the interesting questions I heard in the screening was about how [the models] sacrificed family and I think that to some extent that happens. You can't go out every night and be with the designers and hang out in their world [and still have a family life]. It's not a world about children and family. It's a world about -- something else.

GM: Beauty, decadence, glamor --

TGS: Yes, exactly.

GM: Art.

TGS: And you can't have both of them sometimes. It's very hard.

GM: Do you think it's tied in to the fact that there are more women fashion designers today? Miuccia Prada is incredible, and you think of the women designer of the Missoni family -- are they perhaps more the icons then, rather than the women that they're dressing?

TGS: I think Chad [his producer] would have a better answer than I. But I think that what surprised me making the film was how extraordinary these women were. And I shouldn't have been surprised because I don't think you can become what they became without being more than just a pretty face and a great body -- you had to have something else. And Calvin says it at the beginning of the film: they had something special. You know they did. They had something special, and I'm amazed by them.

GM: Are we going to see greater diversity in the modeling industry? It's nice to see Indian models [like Lakshmi Menon] in Vogue.

TGS: And there's Liya Kebede [who's Ethiopian]. Yeah, I think it has to change. It's going to change -- much more, as in the next dozen years the diversity of America changes. So it'll change. It just takes a longer time than you'd think.

GM: And there may be more Chinese models because of expansion into China. As those international markets become more important they have to have models that look like their customers.

TGS: A lot of those markets want American-looking models.

GM: That's rather ironic. I was also fascinated by your story about going to the AFI and studying to be a filmmaker -- and then taking photos of Bette Davis and Alfred Hitchcock, with them then telling you how to take pictures -- and then also getting to know [legendary Hollywood portrait photographer] Hurrell. Those are such extraordinary experiences. How did that inspire you? What fed into your creativity?

TGS: I left film because I felt that photography was my art. It was something I could do on my own, whereas film was so collaborative. I thought as a photographer I could make something that was artistic and that was mine, and I liked that. And it wasn't until I got back into film and I have very small crews and I could do very tiny filmmaking that wasn't 100 people that I still felt that I was making something artistic as a filmmaker. So, you know, I'm an artist, and whether it's photography or film, I want my voice to be there and I think my voice is very strong in this film.

GM: It is, and these women really opened up to you. I thought it was fascinating what Isabella Rossellini said about beauty, and about not wanting to get plastic surgery because "was that a form of foot binding?" -- another form of misogyny.

TGS: Right, right.

GM: That was very telling. What do you think of that?

TGS: I think people need to watch this film several times. It's very dense and there's so much information in it and there are so many extraordinary statements. They come and go so quickly that you go "Oh my God," and you're thinking about that and then you're on to the next one. So I think it's a film that deserves multiple viewings because it's a very intelligent film and with very intelligent people. There's a lot of density to it.

GM: These women have a lot of wisdom -- and I think as women get more power in the media and in society I think you'll see less pressure for there to be 15-year-old models only. I would rather see a women in her 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, selling something.

TGS: I love what Isabella said about how they're selling to young people because they're more malleable. That's what she was saying. It's not so much that older people want to look young, but they target young people because they can sell to them more easily.

GM: I'd rather buy from a more mature woman --

TGS: Yeah, but you're special. [We both laugh.]

TGS: You know, it's funny because I think marketers in the end at Lancome realized they made a mistake. [Lancome let go Isabella Rossellini in 1996, after she had been the iconic face of the brand for fourteen years. Lancome's explanation was that Rossellini was too old, but many felt that she was still at the height of her beauty.]

GM: They did, they did.

TGS: They did, and they know it.

By the end of About Face, what becomes clear is that these supermodels didn't succeed just because of their looks, but also because they conveyed an inner quality of soul in their photographs. As Calvin Klein says in the film: "They had something inside that came through ... they had character, they had personality. Those qualities never age." Supermodel Dayle Haddon explains: "Through a picture I felt I could communicate ... beauty is bringing more to the photo than just the outside." And Cheryl Tiegs adds: "I always thought education was the key to beauty."

Perhaps this is the larger message of why models, actresses, singers and other women whose images are glamorized in the media play such an important role in the visual imagination of our culture: as paradoxical as it may seem, their photos lead to a consideration of something deeper within ourselves. As Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media, "The photograph really transcends the pictorial by capturing the inner gestures and postures of both body and mind." Thus, by dwelling on women's faces, we're also dwelling on women's souls, their psychology, and their inner mystery.

Basketball Diplomacy: An American Point Guard Becomes a Symbol of Freedom in The Iran Job

2012-07-17T15:39:52-04:00

NBA fans know that two-time MVP point guard Steve Nash recently joined the Los Angeles Lakers. Fans are buzzing, because the addition of Nash could soon result in a return to championship glory for the league's most glamorous franchise. As big as Nash's impact on the Lakers might be, however, it can't possibly match the impact that flashy point guard Kevin Sheppard -- the former Jacksonville University star and Virgin Islands native -- had in 2008 on A.S. Shiraz, a professional basketball team in Iran's Super League.

The reasons for this go beyond sports, however, because over the course of one gripping and emotional season -- a season documented by director Till Schauder and producer Sara Nodjoumi in their extraordinary new documentary, The Iran Job -- Sheppard becomes one of Iran's most popular athletes, and brings a ray of hope into an increasingly repressive and isolated society.

The Iran Job screened last week in Washington, D.C., and had its world premiere recently at the Los Angeles Film Festival, where we had the chance to talk to the film's creators.

As depicted in the film, Kevin Sheppard's Iranian odyssey begins in the fall of 2008, when he's offered a spot on A.S. Shiraz's roster. Having already played professional basketball in South America, Europe, China and Israel, the voluble Sheppard is unfazed by the prospect of playing overseas -- but is understandably nervous as an American traveling to Iran. Coming in the midst of a 2008 election in which Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain all had sharp words for Iran and its nuclear program, Sheppard nonetheless decides to take the plunge out of a spirit of professionalism.

It was a decision that would change his life, as well as the lives of everyday Iranians -- and in particular, those of three young Iranian women.

One of the most compelling aspects of The Iran Job is the way it captures the casual details of life in today's Iran -- a closed society that clearly harbors some unusual stereotypes about the outside world. So for example, the moment Sheppard arrives in Iran and meets up with his Serbian roommate (the team's 7-foot center, and the only other non-Iranian allowed on the squad), Sheppard learns that his cable TV has been custom-provided with hundreds of pornographic channels -- the assumption being that because he is an American, he must be sex-obsessed. The irony that such programming is even available in a "strict" Islamic society, of course, is not lost on Sheppard -- who can't help but laugh at Iranian officialdom's awkward notions of diplomatic courtesy.

Such ticklish moments aside, however, Sheppard immediately begins bonding with average Iranians. A natural show-off with a wicked sense of humor, Sheppard dazzles everyone around him -- even when they barely speak English, and are only able to respond to his warm smile and playfulness. The camera follows him early on as he goes out to grab dinner, and we see regular Iranians high-fiving him and snapping pictures with him before he's even picked up a basketball. His enthusiasm and dynamic personality ignite smiles everywhere.

We asked Sheppard about the rock-star treatment he received from average Iranians:

"The funny thing about it is, once I got over there -- people really love America. The government would say, 'Down with America.' They have all kinds of signs -- 'America is the Devil,' 'Down with the U.S.A.' -- but once you get to the people, they love American culture, they know everything about America, they love all the American sports. So it was a little bit ironic and crazy for me at first. I was like, how can you have all these signs around? But yet, when you speak to the people it's totally different. So I know it [hostility toward America] was not coming from the mass of the people in general. This was all pushed upon them by the government."

As The Iran Job proceeds, however, Sheppard's innate enthusiasm is challenged by his lackluster basketball team, A.S. Shiraz a new and untested squad in Iran's Super League, and a team sorely lacking in the kind of talent or winning attitude to which Sheppard is accustomed. Viewers basically get the sense that Sheppard has just joined The Bad News Bears of Iranian basketball, and his first task will be to shake up the underwhelming squad.

It's worth noting here that The Iran Job follows the usual parameters of sports documentaries in depicting how one inspirational player can turn the fortunes of a franchise around by getting his teammates to believe they can win. That's precisely what Sheppard does, due in part to his on-court heroics (we watch him win several games with buzzer-beating shots), but mostly due to his cocky swagger and high standards. The intense, demanding point guard simply hates to lose -- and refuses to let his teammates ever be comfortable accepting defeat.

More important things are happening off the court, however. As Kevin plays his first few games -- lighting up the scoreboard and exciting fans with his brash, aggressive style (he plays like a toned-down version of the Clippers' Chris Paul) -- we watch as three young Iranian women named Elaheh, Laleh and Hilda become his biggest fans. All of the women are educated professionals and avid basketball enthusiasts, and they become a kind of chaste, chatty cadre of groupies -- spending their evenings hanging out unsupervised (and therefore at no small risk from Iran's morality police) at Kevin's apartment, mostly discussing politics and their professional aspirations. The three friends clearly feel comfortable around Kevin, and pour out to him their frustrations with Iranian society -- especially in terms of its restrictions against women.

This is where The Iran Job becomes considerably more than a sports documentary, giving viewers a sense of the agonizing difficulties currently facing women under strict Islamic rule. Elaheh, Laleh and Hilda show remarkable candor and courage speaking in front of the camera about their grievances with Iran's regime, and viewers can't help but wonder why women of such warmth, intelligence and accomplishment (Elaheh is a savvy event planner, Laleh is getting her master's degree, and Hilda is a physiotherapist) should have any limitations put on their aspirations at all.

The stylish Elaheh, incidentally, is quite the looker -- she bears a striking resemblance to Kim Kardashian -- and develops a full-on crush for Sheppard. Adding poignancy to the situation is that Sheppard already has a girlfriend back home in the Virgin Islands, and that Elaheh's own parents are eager to marry her off to an Iranian of their choosing -- a fate she resists. With so many complications, Elaheh contents herself with inviting Sheppard to her family's home for dinner, and otherwise with taking him for impromptu tours of her city. Her emotional need for him, however, is written all over her face, and probably the most touching aspect of The Iran Job is Elaheh's unrequited passion -- a passion that every aspect of Iranian society seems to frustrate. Indeed, we learn that women in Iran can't even sit near men at basketball games, and at one point during the film women are even banned from attending games, altogether.

[SPOILER ALERT: Two of the three women -- Elaheh and Laleh -- eventually make major decisions affecting their fates, with Elaheh rejecting her arranged marriage and moving out of her family home, and Laleh becoming actively involved in the Iranian revolution, leading to her being arrested several times; and one has the sense that these decisions were motivated at least in part by their friendship with Sheppard.]

We asked Sheppard about his unusual relationship with Elaheh, Laleh and Hilda, his biggest fans in Iran:

"The young ladies -- I stay in touch with them a lot, because they were making the biggest push in the revolution. Women, in general, have it so hard in Iran. And ironically, they are probably the smartest people over there. They were so educated. I mean, I had 15 guys on my team, and only two guys spoke English. Yet all the women I talked to knew English, French and Farsi. [...] They were really highly educated. But because of their [Iran's] system and the government, they were really restrained in terms of reaching their full potential. So that was really heartbreaking for me."

The Iran Job builds to its suspenseful climax as two things happen simultaneously: Sheppard unexpectedly leads his team into the Super League playoffs and a showdown with the heavily-favored team from Tehran, and Iran itself moves toward the fateful 2009 election and the attempted Green Revolution. While trying to lead his overmatched team through the playoffs, Sheppard winds up literally having a front-row seat for the mass protests accompanying the election (Sheppard's Tehran hotel room gave him a dramatic view of the protests, with the front lines between the protesters and the regime's armed militias literally at his front door) -- and it's at this point that his balancing act as an unofficial American sports ambassador becomes most complicated. The bonds that Sheppard has formed by this point with his teammates and with average Iranians make it impossible for him to view the revolution dispassionately; at the same time, his official job in Iran is simply to play basketball.

And so as Sheppard's popularity grows -- creating awkwardness for the Iranian regime -- he becomes something of a silent icon for Iranians, a quiet witness to the possibility of freedom.

As Sheppard explained to us, the experience was life-changing:

"I could not help but get emotionally involved with the people, seeing what they're going through ... they just draw me in, and it made me a much more rounded and humble person, once I got there and saw what was really happening. Because the people over there really want change. The government has their view, but the people have their view, also."

"A couple of the guys [on his team] came to me and said, 'you don't just make us play, you kind of give us hope.' So you really get emotional."

As a film, The Iran Job has two major assets going for it: a fantastic musical score made up of contemporary Iranian hip-hop music, and the charismatic personality of Kevin Sheppard himself. Sheppard exhibits major star power, investing vitality, insight and humor into otherwise tense situations. Director Till Schauder and editor David Teague wisely keep Sheppard at the center of events, rarely straying away from him to make general political points about the situation in Iran -- and the film is more effective for doing so. Although nominally a sports documentary, The Iran Job is really a penetrating look at how life is currently lived by average Iranians torn between their aspirations for freedom and a repressive, moralistic regime.

The film's German director, Till Schauder, who was blacklisted from entering Iran after making the film, is hopeful that Iranian society is on the cusp of change:

It reminds me a little bit of Germany, just before The Wall came down. The measures [associated with holding power] became more and more absurd, so I think it's a matter of time. My biggest hope, as much as it's possible in a country like Iran, is that there's a peaceful transition. [...] It's inevitable at some point that there will be change. Hopefully they will figure this out in a halfway civilized and non-violent way."

A film not to be missed by either sports fans or those interested in the current situation in Iran, The Iran Job screens at The Noor Iranian Film Festival in Beverly Hills on August 5, and is eyeing a late September/early October release.

As for Kevin Sheppard, he recently retired from professional basketball after finishing his third season in Iran's Super League. He now runs a not-for-profit youth league, Choices Basketball Associations, which provides a positive environment for kids of the U.S. Virgin Islands through after-school programs and basketball.

Sheppard is reflective about his experience in Iran as a sports ambassador: "Sports transcends politics. That's why I think sports have a very powerful role in bringing people together."

New Film 'Words of Witness' Testifies to Egypt's Hopes for Democracy

2012-06-26T11:01:40-04:00

Egypt's government announced on Sunday that an Islamist has won Egypt's first competitive presidential election. The superb new documentary Words of Witness, screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York through June 26th, sheds much needed light on how Egyptians got to this point. Directed by Mai Iskander, the film depicts the complex reality of an Egypt in which long-suffering citizens genuinely desire democracy, but must deal with the less than ideal reality of having to vote either for the Muslim Brotherhood or for remnants of the former Mubarak regime -- with the military looming over any choice they might make.

Against this backdrop, Words of Witness makes the smart decision to focus its story on a young Egyptian woman, journalist Heba Afify. The documentary follows 22-year-old Afify, a reporter for the English-language newspaper Egypt Independent, as she covers Egypt's transition to democracy -- from the heady days of the revolution in early 2011, through Egypt's chaotic year and a half under military rule, to the recent months of buildup to Egypt's first free presidential election. Completed in just the last few weeks, Words of Witness has a remarkable timeliness and immediacy in depicting the contending forces that are challenging Egypt's journey to democracy.

Like her fellow citizens, Heba Afify finds herself torn between tradition and progress. Her traditional Muslim family worries about her career and her safety, while Afify's chief concern is reporting the truth of the Egyptian revolution so that she may contribute to her nation's democratic future.

As Afify poignantly says: I can't abide by the rules of being an Egyptian girl if I want to be a good reporter." And if she can't be a good reporter, the implication is that she can't help her country, as a free press and democratic liberty go hand in hand. Afify adds, "It's hard to live under a dictatorship -- if you say the wrong thing, they will knock on your door and take you away forever.

The film documents the remarkable degree to which Afify and other young Egyptians like her are willing to buck authority in order to bring about freedom and progress. It is her faith in these ideals that leads Afify to volunteer to cover the most dangerous demonstrations, despite the fears of her family. Afify's conviction and her willingness to put her ideals on the line are what ultimately make her such a compelling protagonist.

In one extraordinary scene, Afify hears that there is a protest taking place outside the State Security headquarters. This is the home of the hated secret police who have been arresting (and reportedly torturing) thousands of pro-democracy activists. Even though it is nighttime, and reports indicate that the situation is dangerous, Afify doesn't hesitate to join the demonstration. What follows is shocking footage, shot by Afify herself, in which the demure young woman dives right into the crowd of protesters in the dark -- joining them as they break into the building. They're hoping to free political prisoners, but as they turn on the lights in the building, they discover something even more surprising: boxes of surveillance files kept by the secret police on government employees, media, public figures and countless ordinary Egyptians. A colleague hands Afify boxes of files, saying, "This happens only once in history, Heba." Afify shakes her head at the magnitude of the surveillance, commenting, "The number of files is unbelievable."

As Afify later examines the files in her office, she finds a transcript of an actress' phone call; Afify wonders why the state police felt the need to write down every word of this woman's personal phone conversation. As the film suggests, such an abuse of authority engenders a moral corrosion that is an important reason why authoritarian societies have such trouble adapting to freedom. It can take generations to overcome the cynicism, paranoia, and bad faith created by a system in which the government spends more time repressing its own people than in serving them.

Another important point made in the film is the need for religious tolerance. Afify shows concern when the unity between Muslims and Christians -- that had largely prevailed in the early days of the revolution -- breaks down in the wake of attacks on Christians. When a church is burned down in the village of Atfeeh, leading to riots in Cairo, Afify goes to the village herself to find out what has happened. When she gets to the village, she finds a curious scene -- the kind of scene that often doesn't make it into the Western media. A local Muslim leader addresses a large group of villagers, telling them that they should show support for their Christian brothers and work to have the church rebuilt. However, a large army presence watches the scene, and Afify is prevented from visiting the site of the church. Indeed, no-one is allowed to go near the church site, and the rumor ripples through the crowd that it is the State Security apparatus itself that burned the church down in order to inflame religious tensions in Egypt and justify the old regime hanging on to power.

Afify notes that there have been no religious riots in the village -- all the riots over the church burning have occurred in Cairo -- indicating that it may not have been local Muslims who burned the church, but other, perhaps governmental forces. I was told much the same thing by the co-directors of 1/2 Revolution, a documentary about the Egyptian revolution that I covered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. When I raised the problem of rising anti-Christian violence to the filmmakers, they said it was being carried out not by Islamists, but by the State Security forces who were attempting to sabotage the revolution. I was skeptical of this -- until I saw much the same thing corroborated in Words of Witness. As Heba Afify says about the church attack in the film, "Every time we are united they [the old regime] do something to divide us."

In another dramatic scene, Afify interviews pro-democracy protesters camped out in Tahrir Square. They tell her that they will stay there until they win their objective, which is the creation of a constitution and the release of political prisoners. They recount that just recently the State Security forces had swept through the square and arrested 1500 people. The men complain: "Mubarak fell -- but not his regime." When angry pro-Mubarak demonstrators show up to confront them, Afify calmly tells the men not to yell, stating that all opinions will be heard if they allow each other to speak without interrupting.

Unfortunately, things deteriorate in Tahrir Square. The army lays rolls of barbed wire around the square and news reports show hired thugs attacking the protesters with knives. A woman says the army is behind the attacks, and others cry that the army has turned on the people of Egypt. Still others tell horrifying stories of the army torturing citizens in the Egyptian Museum -- stories that were also recounted at Sundance by the directors of 1/2 Revolution. If true, this is a tragic desecration of what is otherwise a proud monument to Egyptian art and history.

Afify collects video testimonials of Egyptians describing arbitrary detention and abuse at the hands of the army. Afify's friends worry that she is risking her life by posting the videos online. Afify, however, feels that the videos represent the only way for people to realize "that the army is not a saint." Her mother says to her: "The army was our father." Afify responds: "We must learn how to be without a father."

As Egypt heads toward a referendum on democracy, Afify explains that in the past, voting was a danger because people were beaten up in polling places. She says that "this time people are very excited that their voices are going to count. ... This is a new experience for them." In one of the most moving sequences of the film, the camera shows long lines of citizens, women and men of all ages, lined up to vote. The camera lingers on their jubilant faces. For many, it is the first time they have voted in their lives. A man says to Afify "before, the outcome was predetermined," but now "we don't want to postpone democracy." Afify takes a picture of an elderly woman who proudly holds up her ink-stained thumb to show that she has voted.

Words of Witness is redolent with such images, showing that the democratic spirit is alive in a people who have otherwise been assumed not to want freedom. Even after they become disillusioned with the military and with the Muslim Brotherhood (who commit a series of blunders after being elected to parliament), Egyptians are still hopeful as they approach the 2012 presidential elections. One woman says to Afify, this is "the first time I've been free to vote without coercion." And though many seem less than thrilled with the alternatives of voting for either the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi or the prior regime's Ahmed Shafiq, Afify notes, "We're taking some stumbling steps, but the feeling of unity and solidarity won't go away."

Director Mai Iskander, herself of Egyptian Christian and Czech heritage, brings a strong eye for such humanistic detail to Words of Witness. When I chatted with Iskander at the film's screening at the LA Film Festival (coincidentally held on June 17th, the day of Egypt's presidential election) she explained that she was influenced by her background in narrative film, having worked on such productions as Men in Black and One True Thing. When I remarked on her powerful use of close-ups, Iskander explained that she focused on the faces of average Egyptians in the film because she "wanted to show them as human beings and not just a news story."

I was also impressed that Iskander directed, shot, and recorded the sound for the documentary by herself, with fellow filmmakers and the AP contributing some footage of the revolution. Iskander was literally a one-woman crew as she followed Afify through the revolution and its aftermath. The danger that Iskander and Afify put themselves in to shoot Words of Witness cannot be overstated. They are both young women, and yet they repeatedly moved through large crowds of angry men or into remote rural locations to capture the movie's dramatic footage. Given the brutal assaults and rapes carried out against women journalists in Egypt this past year, their courage is all the more remarkable.

When I asked Iskander how she had handled such dangerous situations with Afify, she responded:

"Well, Heba doesn't seem to get scared about anything, so I just followed her lead -- and then when I came home and I was editing, I realized I was being very naive to follow her lead! [Laughs.] No, she's very courageous, and I guess you just can't think about that, you know ... I was scared at some times."

As for her hopes for Egypt's future, Iskander related:

"What I hope is that people don't forget that something was born out of the revolution ... the sense that people could have this power, this taste for democracy ... I hope that doesn't get extinguished too easily."

Words of Witness is currently playing at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival through June 26th and recently screened at the LA Film Festival. Iskander hopes to show the documentary at fifty college campuses this fall through a campaign that she is currently fundraising for through Kickstarter.

As Egypt heads into an uncertain future with a new president, it seems appropriate to end with the words of Heba Afify: "People are saying that Egyptians aren't ready for democracy - but the only way we'll get ready is by practicing."

"We've All Been Brainwashed": China's Dissident Bloggers Speak Out in High Tech, Low Life

2012-06-08T10:08:10-04:00

Even as Chinese dissidents like Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and artist Ai Weiwei suffer physical imprisonment, hundreds of millions of their fellow Chinese citizens are suffering a form of mental imprisonment thanks to their nation's system of internet censorship. For example, the Chinese government recently blocked online searches for words relating to the 23rd anniversary of the June 4th, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre, censoring the terms "Tiananmen square," "June 4th," the number twenty-three, the words "never forget" and even images of candles. The award-winning documentary High Tech, Low Life, currently screening at film festivals in the U.S., UK and Australia, profiles two dissident Chinese bloggers who are working to challenge this Orwellian system.

Directed by Stephen Maing, High Tech, Low Life was in part funded by a Kickstarter campaign publicized on The Huffington Post and was an official selection of the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. High Tech, Low Life documents the work of 57-year-old blogger Zhang Shihe (known as "Tiger Temple") and 27-year-old Zhou Shuguang (known as "Zola"), two of China's best-known "citizen reporters." Even as the Chinese government uses internet technology to stifle dissent, these brave bloggers find creative ways to circumvent "The Great Firewall of China" and publish the truth about human rights abuses to the world. Along the way, Tiger and Zola suffer official harassment, familial disapproval, eviction and arrest.

Blogger Zola describes in the film the vast apparatus of internet censorship that exists in China:

"There are 440 million netizens in China, 40,000 internal police monitor them and 500,000 websites are blocked in China." [Despite this,] "if an incident happens anywhere, netizens and citizen journalists will flock to the scene from all over the country. The censors might stop some of us, but they can't stop all of us."

Tiger Temple expands on the morally corrosive effect of the government's censorship: "We've all been brainwashed. We've been listening to lies for too many years." Although material prosperity may have improved in China, Tiger argues that life today is as bad as it was under Mao's dictatorship. As Tiger puts it, the Chinese people are "complacent because they feel powerless."

Tiger Temple and Zola could not be more different in style. The older, more experienced Tiger is a writer and former publisher living in Beijing who becomes closely involved in his subjects' lives, bringing them food, money and legal help. Tiger's father was a high official in the Communist Party, but the family was persecuted by Mao during the Cultural Revolution in the '60s. Tiger recalls how he and his family were beaten, evicted from their home, and exiled to the countryside. It was then, as a 13-year-old, that Tiger says he started "roaming the country."

Tiger's entrée into blogging was almost accidental. Returning home one day from viewing an exhibition of Monet paintings in Beijing, he saw a woman being stabbed to death on the street by a man as bystanders watched. Horrified but unable to prevent the murder, Tiger grabbed his camera and documented its aftermath instead. He notes that when the police showed up, they were angrier at him for taking the photos than at the murderer himself, because such scenes would normally be censored from the press. Tiger went on to publish the photos online and caused a sensation, becoming known as China's first "citizen journalist." Tiger adds that he calls himself a "citizen" and not a "citizen journalist" because that way the government can't ban him.

Years later, Tiger makes lengthy journeys on bike through the countryside to report on the lives of the rural poor who have suffered in the rush to urbanization. He is even on occasion tailed by agents of the government. In one trip documented in the film, Tiger bicycles 4000 miles to Er Loa, a village devastated by the illegal flooding of toxic waste by the local government. The floods of waste have caused the farmers' homes to collapse and have made farming impossible. Villagers tell Tiger that local officials have warned them that if they complain too much they will be arrested. Not only does Tiger take photos and video of the environmental devastation, he also brings the villagers flour and noodles to feed them and tells them he has forwarded their information to a university in Beijing where law students are working to file a legal complaint with the authorities. Tiger interests an NGO in their case, and the farmers are ultimately brought to Beijing to speak at the Civil Society Watch's Environmental Protection Conference.

As for the younger Zola, his rise from rural vegetable vendor to famous blogger is even more striking. As he puts it: "I used to be a nobody. Until I discovered the internet." Zola's first significant story comes about when he hears of the alleged rape and murder of a young girl at the hands of the son of a local government official in the county of Weng'an. The Chinese media isn't covering it, so Zola goes to the village himself to see what is happening. He finds no reporters there -- but plenty of police to keep an eye on the angry and grieving villagers. Zola attends the news conference where the local officials give an improbable reason for the girl's death: they claim that she decided to jump off a bridge and commit suicide after watching a friend do three push-ups on the bridge. Zola goes to the bridge, does three push-ups and sarcastically looks around to see if anyone feels an impulse to suicide. Zola's reporting on the scandal causes the number of readers on his site to jump from about 200 a day to 200,000.

Zola typifies the new generation of young, brash Chinese bloggers. He is criticized at times by his readers for being too flamboyant and westernized, but by Western standards his youthful hijinks seem pretty tame. Zola declares "I just record what I witness," unlike Tiger who gets actively involved in his subject's lives. However, Zola's bravery as a blogger goes well beyond mere observation. He repeatedly risks arrest by reporting on politically-sensitive subjects. In one scene, Zola interviews a man in Beijing whose house is about to be bulldozed to "beautify" a street in advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As the man cries to Zola over the loss of his home, the bulldozers and the local police are poised just a few feet away. In another striking scene, Zola shows a small house sitting on a lonely island of earth in the midst of an enormous construction crater. The family inside has refused to vacate their home and the government is about to go in by force.

Zola's parents don't understand any of this. They disapprove of his career, considering his pro-democracy efforts destabilizing to the "large family" of China. They want him to settle down and do something that they consider more useful to the state, like farming and getting married.

In the course of their blogging, Tiger Temple and Zola suffer official harassment and intimidation. Tiger is arrested in the middle of the night and driven by ten police to the city of Xi'an to keep him out of Beijing during a Communist Party conference. Later, the police put pressure on his landlord and Tiger is evicted from his apartment. Disheartened, Tiger puts his modest belongings in storage and decides he will live on the road, riding his bike around China to document local abuses. As for Zola, he is threatened by intruders who assault his home in the middle of the night and is warned that the state security services intend to arrest him. When Zola is invited to speak at a blogger conference in Germany, his ticket is confiscated at the airport and he is prevented from leaving China. He finds out that the Public Security Agency has blacklisted him "as a threat to national security." And although they've both found ways to host their blogs on foreign servers, both Tiger and Zola are still continually under threat of having their websites shut down or posts erased by the government.

When Tiger Temple and Zola eventually meet, there is a fascinating moment where Zola states: "I think the most important thing is to be conscious of the boundary between you and them." This is the nub of the issue: how to keep one's mental integrity even in the midst of corruption.

And when Zola worries that he's too irreverent, Tiger responds "There are many kinds of warriors ... you're a playful warrior." Zola is touched by this, and the interaction between the two men reminds me of that between Toshiro Mifune's feisty farmer-warrior and Takashi Shimura's older, experienced samurai in Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai.

Through an accumulation of closely-observed detail, High Tech, Low Life creates a devastating portrait of life in an authoritarian society. What makes the documentary all the more moving is how it reveals that no matter how powerful the Chinese government may seem to be, there are always Chinese citizens willing to risk their lives to speak out for freedom.

Tiger Temple and Zola's solitary courage manifests true humanism: the idea that one feels a sense of obligation toward one's fellow citizens without needing a coercive authority to make one act humanely. Indeed, these bloggers act justly despite the threats and intimidation of the Chinese state.

That the Chinese government, for all its apparent power, still feels threatened by such activists is made clear by the strenuous efforts it makes to deny their impact. There are some particularly telling TV clips in which news anchors on Chinese state TV ridicule democracy activists, claiming that "this kind of agitation is an act of vanity" that undermines "peace and social stability." The anchors add: "Anyone looking for parallels to the Arab Spring will be sorely disappointed." However, the Chinese are so frightened by the role that social media and the internet played in the Arab Spring that they create a new State Internet Information agency "to prevent disruptions to social stability."

Tiger Temple questions the Chinese government's concern for "social stability," since this stability apparently involves the wholesale abridgment of its' citizens human rights. As Tiger comments, it's "as if bureaucratic order is more important than the law itself."

The Most Provocative Filmmaker in the World: A Conversation With Mads Brügger on The Ambassador

2012-02-10T09:33:34-05:00

His documentaries have been among the most provocative films featured in the Sundance Film Festival over the past several years. Bolder even than Sacha Baron Cohen, he's punk'd both the North Korean communist government and now, in his new film The Ambassador, the Central African Republic and the corrupt diplomatic culture that supports it.

He's one of Europe's funniest and most controversial filmmakers, although most Americans haven't heard of him -- yet.

The name of this lanky, cerebral enfant terrible is Mads Brügger.

In Brügger's previous film The Red Chapel (read the Libertas Film Magazine review of the film here), winner of Sundance's 2010 World Cinema jury prize for documentaries, the filmmaker pulled off one of the most dangerous and politically provocative stunts in cinema history by infiltrating North Korea as part of a fake socialist comedy group. Operating under the watchful (and vaguely confused) gaze of the North Korean government, Brügger's cameras proceeded to document the bizarre, Orwellian nether-world of today's Pyongyang and its frightening cult of the 'Dear Leader.'

In his new film The Ambassador (read the Libertas Film Magazine review of the film here), which recently screened at Sundance, Brügger now attempts an even more complex and daring stunt by purchasing a Liberian diplomatic title and infiltrating one of the most dangerous places on Earth -- the Central African Republic (CAR) -- as an ersatz Ambassador. His purpose? To expose the illegal blood diamond trade -- and the corrupt world of CAR officials, bogus businessmen and shady European and Asian diplomats that it benefits.

Like a tragicomic version of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, The Ambassador takes viewers into a rarely-seen world of European influence-peddlers who exploit the African continent -- and the amoral retinue of African officials, petty businessmen and hangers-on who are complicit in the exploitation.

Along the way Brügger and his hidden cameras have close encounters with everything from an obese ex-French Legionnaire heading the CAR's state security (who is assassinated shortly after talking to Brügger), to armed militias in the middle of Africa's 'Triangle of Death,' to a diamond smuggler with a secret child bride and potential terrorist ties, to a tribe of inebriated pygmies organized by Brügger to staff a match factory.

It all makes for a potent, carnivalesque and politically incorrect experience -- and one that exposes the mutual racism (of Europeans toward Africans, and Africans toward Europeans) that makes central Africa such a hotbed of corruption and violence.

In the midst of all this is Brügger himself -- a tall, soft-spoken Danish journalist (and son of two Danish newspaper editors) with an ironic sense of humor and an uncanny ability to transform himself into the kind of diffident European grandee that African officials are accustomed to exploiting -- and being exploited by -- well into the 21st century.

Along with my Libertas Film Magazine co-editor Govindini Murty, I sat down with Brügger at the Sundance Film Festival to talk about his funny, horrifying and highly controversial new film. With a shaved head, and wearing a skull ring from DC Comics' The Phantom, Brügger arrived looking very much the part of an experimental European director.

Apuzzo: What got you interested in [corruption in the Central African Republic] as subject matter for a film?

Brügger: I like doing films that divert from their own genre. I wanted to do an Africa documentary without all the usual semiotics and codes of the generic Africa documentary. You know -- NGO people, child soldiers, HIV patients, and so on. But also I wanted a film where you would meet all the people you usually don't get to see - you know, the kingpins, the players, the ministers who live a very secure and comfortable life away from the scrutiny of the media. So I thought that if I could purchase a diplomatic title, I could gain access to this very closed realm of African state affairs and politics. It's pretty much a 'let's-see-what-happens' project. Once we set off to do this, who will we meet? What kind of people will I run into?

Apuzzo: How did you prepare to become a corrupt European diplomat?

Brügger: [Laughs.] I prepared for almost three years, because I wanted to really go into detail with my persona. I would go to receptions, embassies in Copenhagen, especially the Belgian embassy because they have a lot of African diplomats coming there. I noticed all the telltale signs, the do's and don'ts of how diplomats behave and carry themselves. For instance, when they're having cocktails they like to fold their napkin into a triangle and then wrap it around the glass. I think it's because they don't want to leave fingerprints, but I don't know for sure. [Laughs.]

The most popular cigarette amongst African diplomats are red Dunhills. The most popular liquor is Johnny Walker Black Label. You know, things of that order. At the same time, I also wanted my 'character' to be packed with various archetypes, and characters from comic books: Dr. Müller in Tintin, Bernard Prince (a Belgian comic book hero), even the Man with The Yellow Hat from Curious George.

Apuzzo: I thought that one of the key things that sold the character, so to speak, was his personal narcissism - in terms of the clothing, the demeanor, the portrait that you had of yourself in the diplomatic suite. Was that narcissism a key component of how you interacted with people there?

Murty: In other words, was that narcissism a way of interacting or seeming believable to people of the tyrannical mindset -- since narcissism is a key element of tyranny?

Brügger: Exactly. There's narcissism in it, but also: you know the theory about 'mirror neurons'? That when you're meeting somebody you start emulating them, on an unconscious level.

I think it played out well -- that by looking like something from a Graham Greene novel from the '60s or '70s I would attract people who are on to the same fantasies that I display, which is what I think happened. I was the ultimate fantasy of a white businessman-diplomat, because Africans themselves also have fantasies about white people. Usually they deal with these scruffy-looking NGO guys in sweaty T-shirts. I thought that if I would look very rich, very well-off, very eccentric, I would make African ministers think: if he looks like that he has to be very rich, very powerful, probably also very naive and idiotic. But that's OK. You know, 'we will not kill him - we can use him.' So there's also a survival strategy in it.

Apuzzo: Two really key figures out of the whole film were 'Dr. Eastman,' who is this sort of secretive, shadowy European figure pulling the strings and selling the diplomatic titles - and also Emperor Bokassa [former dictator of the Central African Republic], whom you mentioned you had a personal fascination with.

Brügger: Yes, very much so.

Apuzzo: Emperor Bokassa representing the worst of 1970s-era African despotism ...

Brügger: ... and madness.

Apuzzo: And with 'Dr. Eastman' almost representing the European side of that madness, almost like an Ernst Blofeld or a Bond-villain.

Brügger: Exactly.

Apuzzo: It seemed that what allowed you to get away with what you did was that you were fulfilling stereotypes and fantasies that a lot of Africans themselves had about white European businessmen.

Brügger: Yes, it has a lot to do with 'magical thinking,' which is something very important in Africa. Bokassa, as you know, he was the ultimate expression of this particular kind of madness. He was this carnivalesque figure trying to emulate Emperor Napoleon. He had this Napoleonic coronation, costing the national GNP times one hundred.

Murty: You had some footage of it in the film.

Brügger: Yes, it really is unbelievable. That, of course, also has a lot to do with this very painful relationship of the 'colonial master' with its subject.

What's so interesting is that there is this Werner Herzog film called Echoes from a Somber Empire, and he went in the early '90s to the Central African Republic together with a journalist named Michael Goldsmith, who was almost beaten to death by Bokassa, personally. And they go back to re-track the history of Bokassa - and at the end of the film, we learn that Michael Goldsmith is now dead because he had gone to Liberia to cover the civil war where he gets killed. So there are some very interesting intertextualities between [Herzog's] film and my film.

Murty: You briefly alluded to Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the film. You said that if the Congo is the 'heart of darkness,' then -- and you put a humorous twist on it -- then the Central African Republic is its 'appendix.'

Brügger: Yes, exactly.

Murty: So much of what Conrad depicted seems to still be existing in Africa today, over a century later. Were you consciously thinking of Conrad and what he depicted as you set out on your own journey?

Brügger: Look at the Head of State Security [the obese ex-French Legionnaire shown in the film]. He's like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. He is in 'the horror,' you know. [...]

It's a total dog-eat-dog world, and the new boss on the block is definitely going to be the Chinese. They are all very worried about the Chinese. They were personally telling me, you know, 'be careful about the Chinese.' And I would ask, 'but where are they?' 'Are they here at all?' And they would say, 'yes, they are here -- but they are very sneaky. We never see them, but they are here.'

Apuzzo: I wanted to ask you about that, because there was a statement you made in the middle of the film about a 'new Cold War' between the U.S. and China. You're obviously very concerned, having done The Red Chapel, with communist tyrannies, and so forth. Do you actually think there's a coming Cold War between the U.S. and China?

Brügger: I think that could very well be. Just look at what China's doing now in the Pacific ... and the scale of what they're doing in China is mind-blowing -- how much money they're bringing in, how many natural resources they're bringing in. They're bankrolling, for instance, Mugabe -- who is like an African Hitler, basically. He is the devil incarnate. By buying his diamonds, they keep his regime going -- which is criminal, I think.

For me, the defining moment with Sino-African politics is China inviting [Sudanese President] Omar al-Bashir to Beijing. He is a wanted criminal, wanted for crimes against humanity [the Darfur genocide], and yet they take him to Beijing and treat him with a state banquet, which is really depraved. And for sure there are tensions in Africa between the West and China, and they will become worse, I believe.

Apuzzo: Changing subjects, there's this idea we have in the West nowadays that it is the West that is exclusively victimizing Africa. And you depict quite a bit of that in your film, obviously. But it seems that the breakthrough of your film is in showing how through these despotic tyrannies Africans also victimize themselves.

Brügger: About 8 million people were killed during the time of Belgian rule, but what is going on today has a lot to do with what Africans are doing to themselves. Also, you know, they have this 'zero-sum' thinking. So if it's going well for you, an African would tend to believe 'something is going wrong for me.' It's not possible for you to do good, without somebody else doing bad. So they will start to envy you, and hate you. And that kind of thinking, you know, really destroys a society.

Murty: One of the other things that was heartbreaking was that scene where M. Gilbert is being confronted by his wife at the diamond mine. There's some sort of a fracas, and he says: "don't shame me in front of the white men." That was a very interesting moment, that there's still this sense of inferiority vis-a-vis 'white' culture, and a feeling of subservience, and how that mindset is hard to break.

Brügger: It has to do with how complex a thing racism is in Africa - because there's white vs. black racism, but there's also black-on-black, black-on-Chinese, blacks being racist toward white people ...

Apuzzo: Tribal rivalries ...

Brügger: ... tribal rivalries, which are also tearing countries apart. So it [racism] is really a very sinister thing in Africa.

Apuzzo: I want to ask you about your relationship with the pygmies. [Brügger employs members of a pygmy tribe to work in a match factory that will serve as the cover for his attempted diamond smuggling in the film.] What was that actually like behind the scenes?

Brügger: Pretty much as it was in the scenes. Actually, I think they were severely damaged from binge drinking. They do drink a lot, the pygmy people, at least in the vicinity of Bangui. But we were, of course, worlds apart. There wasn't much that connects me with a pygmy. What is there to talk about, you know?

Apuzzo: Let me tell you something that I found interesting about their [the pygmies] presence in the film -- that reminded me of something in The Red Chapel. In The Red Chapel you went over to North Korea with the handicapped comedian, Jacob Nossell -- and the thing that occurred to me watching The Ambassador was that you were actually depicting in both films how handicapped people, or the weak, the infirm -- how they end up being treated in these despotic societies. The way that the pygmies were outcasts from society, just the way your friend Jacob was treated in North Korea.

Brügger: That's true. When North Korean people met Jacob, in that regard he was like the black swan. They would ask him if he was drunk, or if he was sick, because they'd never seen a person with his kind of handicap before. As with Albert and Bernard [the pygmies in The Ambassador] and with pygmies in general, they are outcasts, they are abused, they are looked down upon, there's a lot of racism regarding pygmies. And there are these horrible occurrences in the Congo where rebels have killed and eaten pygmies - it's atavistic, to get part of their 'magical powers' inside them. So, you know, the ones paying the highest price for dysfunctional African states are the pygmies.

Murty: It's interesting how so often in societies that live according to mythological thinking the outcast figure -- the sacrificial figure, as it were -- is also considered the figure who can bring magic, and who must be controlled or exploited in some manner. I guess the pygmies were those figures in that community. I just feel very sad for the pygmies, themselves. [...]

You also bring up the fact that it's next to impossible to do business there. For people who are well-meaning, Western people who want to do development in Africa and help -- the whole idea of development being that you don't give people hand-outs, but you build things so they can run them themselves ...

Brügger: That doesn't work there.

Murty: Is there any hope? How will things improve there?

Brügger: I think it's a situation of utter despair. Some of the diplomats in Bangui told me they believed that within the vicinity of 15 or 20 years the country will no longer exist, because they can barely uphold their own sovereignty. They only have two thousand soldiers to protect an area the size of Texas. They have the Lord's Resistance Army there - this crazy, border-crossing, rebel group headed by a transvestite wizard called Joseph Kony. You have two or three different rebel groups. You have highway robbers from Chad.

Apuzzo: On that point I wanted to ask you something that was touched on in the film - the possibility of M. Gilbert's terrorist ties or connections ...

Murty: ... to an organization that was one of the funders of Hamas.

Apuzzo: What did you make of that?

Brügger: Hassan el Bakas? Well, I discovered for sure that Hassan el Bakas exists, and he's a real figure, so that checked out -- what the State Security guy was saying. And that he is a very shady and sinister guy. [...]

Apuzzo: Who are your favorite filmmakers?

Brügger: Werner Herzog, of course. A Swedish director called Roy Andersson, he's not very well known outside of Scandinavia. Lars von Trier, he's really a master. Todd Solondz. I like his sense of humor; I really like the film Palindromes -- I think it's his best film ever.

Murty: What about classic Danish filmmakers? For example, Benjamin Christensen in the '20s made Haxan/An Account of Witchcraft and Magic through the Ages, and then also Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc ...

Brügger: Of course Dreyer is on my list, you know, he was probably the biggest Danish filmmaker ever.

Apuzzo: This is the second film in a row you've done, the purpose of which is to expose corruption. Is that how you conceive your mission as a filmmaker and as a journalist?

Brügger: Of course, journalism and humanism go hand in hand. And I think of them as very humanistic films- - almost to a spiritual level.

Murty: In your films, underneath all of your satire, and your exposure of the horror of what you're seeing -- you have a deeply humanistic vision, a sense of outraged morality at your core. Of course, coming from northern Europe, there's a humanistic tradition that goes back to Erasmus ... I see your films and I also think of paintings by Brueghel or by Hieronymus Bosch in terms of the grotesque human behavior you expose. Do you see yourself as part of that tradition?

Brügger: Well you know [looking abashed], I don't think of myself in terms of Brueghel and the classic painters, but Denmark is in many ways the ultimate expression of humanism -- which you can also feel in the way Danish people trust the state. Danish people believe that people of authority are like The Smurfs. Benevolent people. [Laughs.] But that is because there is so much trust among citizens in Denmark, among citizens and the authorities. It's one of the least corrupt societies in the world, you know.

At the same time, it's also a very matriarchal society. Most of the schooling system, the universities, are defined by and led by women. And this creates a situation in which a lot of men of my generation have problems with authority. I sure do. That also in many ways defines the kind of journalism that I do.

Murty: Were there other things in your upbringing that shaped your particular vision as a filmmaker - in terms of either you family, or your education?

Brügger: Well of course my mother and father being journalists ... My father was the editor-in-chief of Denmark's biggest business daily, the Financial Times of Denmark, while my mother worked for twenty years at Denmark's biggest tabloid, exposing scandals about politicians. In some ways I am a synthesis of this - the tabloid/yellow press thinking, and the more traditional business journalism. In a way, it is a strange mix of Borat and The Economist.

Murty: You mentioned the humanistic vision of your films - but also about the spiritual element, as well. What is your own spiritual inspiration as you tackle these very difficult subjects?

Apuzzo: In other words, what sustains you as you descend into hell?

Brügger: [Laughs.] In Danish we have an expression, "to do the white cut." That is a Danish expression for a lobotomy. It is also a metaphor, to "give yourself the white cut." ... It's an act of letting everything else go. Just doing it.

Murty: Almost like a Zen-type moment. Entering the void. Losing your mindfulness.

Brügger: Yes, going 'all-in.' Without any considerations of what will happen to you, what will happen to other people, just doing it. So when I'm in it, I'm 'all-in.'

As Egypt Fights for Democracy, New Documentary 1/2 Revolution Goes to the Front Lines

2012-02-07T13:10:27-05:00

As the Egyptian military government prepares to put 19 American employees of pro-democracy NGOs on trial, and thousands of Egyptians continue to demonstrate over the stalling of democratic reforms, the new documentary 1/2 Revolution offers a striking look back at the Egyptian revolution of one year ago.

Premiering recently at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, 1/2 Revolution depicts the revolution through the eyes of a group of Egyptian activists directly involved in it. Using cell phone cameras and hand-held camcorders, the filmmaker-activists capture dramatic footage of clashes between average Egyptians calling for freedom and the repressive government forces attempting to stop them.

As co-director Karim El Hakim said after the film's recent Sundance screening, "You can't get any more cinema verité than this."

Danish-Palestinian director Omar Shargawi and Egyptian-American director Karim El Hakim live with their families just a few blocks from Tahrir Square in Cairo. When hundreds of thousands of Egyptians take to the streets on Jan. 25th, 2011 to demand the ouster of dictator Hosni Mubarak, Omar and Karim head down from their apartments to record the events. Viewers are immediately thrown into the visceral experience of the revolution. Crowds of protesters run through the streets shouting "Egypt! Egypt! "Join us! Join us!" "Freedom! Freedom!" When gangs of government-paid thugs and police start beating and shooting the protesters, the protesters shout "No violence! No violence!" This call to non-violence is one of the early strong points of the documentary. To emphasize the theme, Shargawi points out a crowd of demonstrators who surround a group of police yet refrain from assaulting them.

Over time, though, these commendable calls to non-violence are drowned out by the tide of chaos and bloodshed that overtakes the demonstrations when the government attacks. Police fire into the roiling crowds of protesters with live ammunition, loud booms announce the launching of tear gas canisters through the air, and demonstrators and counter-demonstrators fight back and forth with truncheons, rocks and knives. Demanding to see their passports, secret police harass Karim and Omar as they attempt to film the events, and Omar pulls a scarf around his face to disguise his identity.

Later, Karim is gassed in the face and stumbles home partially blinded, while Omar is severally beaten in a dark alley, barely emerging alive. Government snipers start shooting people through the windows of their apartments in the blocks around Tahrir Square -- making viewers fear for the safety of the filmmakers in their own homes, particularly as one of them has a baby who keeps wandering close to the windows. Late in the film, government thugs even take over the street below the apartment building and start harassing the residents, which is what finally forces the filmmakers to question staying in the country.

In capturing the tumult of the Cairo protests, 1/2 Revolution depicts more violence than most Hollywood action movies -- but tragically, the mayhem here is all too real.

The seemingly intractable rage captured in the film -- both from democratic protesters righteously angry over the suppression of their human rights, and from entrenched government elites determined to hold on to power at any cost -- highlights the central challenge facing the Egyptian people today. How will they overcome this bitterness and anger -- these scars from decades of violence, repression, and authoritarian rule -- in order to build a peaceful democracy?

In his seminal 1947 study of German film, From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer pointed out that the details of life captured in a film often reveal a country's unconscious predilections. The details captured in 1/2 Revolution are ominous: activists repeatedly declare their willingness to die and become martyrs, the camera dwells on shattered heads and limbs, bodies on stretchers being rushed away, a man lifting up his shirt to show a bullet wound in his back, a pool of blood on the pavement with the word "Egypt" traced in Arabic. Even more ominous are the anti-American and anti-Jewish symbols scrawled onto anti-Mubarak protest signs. One particularly ugly sign depicts Mubarak as the devil with pointy ears and a Star of David stamped on his forehead.

Sadly, the filmmakers and their friends engage in implicitly anti-Israeli rhetoric themselves. Co-director Omar Shargawi, whose father is Palestinian, says with pride of the demonstrations, "It was like being part of the intifada or something." One of his friends, a woman also of Palestinian origin, expresses fears that "the Israeli army is massing at the border" and worries that the U.S. might invade. Given that Israel's population of only 7.8 million is vastly outnumbered by Egypt's population of 81 million, and given that the American government was generally supportive of the Egyptian revolution, these kind of fears come across as over the top. But this is the dark side of the revolution: the urge to look for blame in outside bogey-men -- in this case, America and Israel -- rather than look internally to ask why so many Arab states have failed to achieve lasting democracy.

This urge to scapegoat outsiders is having serious consequences. The AP reported on Sunday that the Egyptian military government, after raiding a number of American, German, and Egyptian pro-democracy NGOs in December of 2011, is now planning to put 43 employees of these NGOs, including nineteen Americans, on criminal trial. One of these 19 Americans is Sam LaHood, the son of U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have made appeals to the Egyptian government, to no avail. As the AP reports:

The generals who took power after Mr. Mubarak's fall have accused 'foreign hands' of being behind protests against their rule and frequently depict the protesters as receiving funds from abroad in a plot to destabilize the country. Those allegations have cost the youth activists that spearheaded Mr. Mubarak's ouster support among a wider public that is sensitive to allegations of foreign meddling and sees a conspiracy to destabilize Egypt in nearly every move by a foreign nation.

The Egyptians who fall for such xenophobic rhetoric simply play into the hands of the military and government elites who wish to deflect blame away from their own failure to achieve prosperity and freedom for Egypt. Rather than blame America, Israel, or foreign NGOs for their troubles, Egyptians might ask themselves why a third of their public is still illiterate (according to the UNDP, Egypt ranks #156 worldwide in literacy, below even Angola and the Congo). Or they might ask themselves why over 90% of Egyptians lack basic property rights - keeping their economy in a condition that economist Hernando de Soto describes as "Egypt's economic apartheid." Egyptians might also ask themselves why they rank low in women's rights, with the World Health Organization reporting that 91.1 percent of Egyptian women are subjected to the brutal practice of genital mutilation. These are some of the true social and economic injustices that hold back Egypt -- despite its long and proud history -- from joining the first ranks of democratic nations.

1/2 Revolution offers the rudiments of such a critique, with the documentary showing how the revolutionaries were let down by Egypt's military even in the early days of the protests. When the police fire on the protesters in the film, the filmmakers and their friends naively hope that the army will save them. They say to each other: "The people love the army. They're waiting for them to come." Army tanks are shown rolling in and the filmmakers go down to talk to the soldiers and ask if they will help the revolution -- only to be rebuffed. They're even more bitterly disappointed when a line of army tanks drives into a crowd and rolls over five demonstrators, killing them.

A year later, of course, with the military now leading Egypt's government after the resignation of Mubarak, the protesters view the army as Egypt's new villains. Democracy activists are justly angry at the military for subjecting thousands of civilian protesters to military trials, and many Egyptians blame the military for the deadly soccer riots last week that killed 74 Egyptians and led to thousands of Egyptians taking to the streets in protest.

Interestingly, the filmmakers express the same lack of concern about Islamic radicalism today that they did about the military a year ago. One hopes that they will not be similarly disappointed. At the recent Sundance screening of 1/2 Revolution, I asked co-directors Karim El Hakim and Omar Shargawi if they were concerned that the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties had won approximately 75 percent of the seats in Egypt's new parliament while secular liberals had won only about 20 percent, and that attacks on women and religious minorities (in particular Coptic Christians) were on the rise. El Hakim answered: "Those elements were all there before in Egypt, but they were united in opposing Mubarak, now with Mubarak gone they're divided. This is going to be a long struggle to achieve democracy in Egypt." As for the rise in attacks on women and religious minorities, El Hakim urged me not to believe the media, saying "Those attacks were not carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood, but by secret police paid by pro-Mubarak elements in the government trying to create dissension amongst the public."

To their credit, the filmmakers also rejected the idea that Egypt should turn to socialism for answers. In one of the more amusing exchanges of the Sundance screening, an impassioned audience member informed the filmmakers that she too was trying to incite a revolution in America. Co-director Karim El Hakim asked her "What kind of revolution?" -- to which she answered, "a communist revolution." There was an awkward silence, followed by a few guffaws and no cheers. El Hakim responded: "The Egyptian state was based in socialism for decades [from the '50s through the early '70s]; it was allied with the Soviet Union and received major funding from the KGB. This laid the basis for many of Egypt's modern problems. Socialism is outmoded and Egypt does not need to go back to it."

While raising a host of questions that are as yet difficult to answer, 1/2 Revolution nonetheless offers a visceral, first-hand look at the Egyptian revolution, showing how chaotic and complex the situation on the ground really is. As the filmmakers make clear, the documentary depicts one slice of the revolution, and does not attempt to offer a complete picture of the events. Nonetheless, the raw immediacy of the footage shows once again the powerful role that digital video and new media are playing in allowing democracy activists to circumvent authoritarian governments in the Middle East and advance freedom.

While one may not agree with every view held by these activists, we can all hope that they overcome the many divisions in their society to achieve a truly peaceful and democratic Egypt. Egypt has an ancient and noble heritage that is one of the foundations of the Western tradition. Egyptian history is our history, and Egypt's people should be able to live in the same freedom we in the West do.

As Karim El Hakim said at the screening, "We Egyptians take pride in being the oldest nation in the world, but we lived in stasis for many years. Now we can finally feel a change happening... Egypt's spirit is high, even if the country is low."

The Cinema of Liberty: The Top 10 Pro-Freedom Films of 2011

2011-12-31T08:22:12-05:00

Freedom is one of the most important prerequisites of artistic excellence. 2011 was distinctive for producing a number of critically acclaimed films that celebrated the history of the arts and of the cinema itself - from Martin Scorsese's Hugo and Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist, to Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. Yet filmmaking never takes place in a vacuum, and these superb, literate films - which value knowledge, humanity, and civilization - are nonetheless the outgrowth of a free society, and would have had difficulty being made under circumstances of political tyranny.

It's therefore worthwhile to celebrate the notable movies of 2011 that took the risk of advocating for democratic freedom, the political principle that makes so much film artistry possible. Some of these are foreign films created under the most difficult circumstances, while others are mainstream Hollywood productions made within the freedom of democratic society. Whether spectacular or intimate, tragic or comic, these films dramatized to audiences around the world the importance of liberty. With the revolutions of the Arab Spring, citizen protests in China, and the recent democracy demonstrations in Russia, 2011 was a remarkable year for democratic action and this year's pro-freedom films often reflected this.

Given that many of these are foreign or independent films with multi-year releases, we thought it fair to include films that had their first theatrical or DVD release in the U.S. in 2011, or that screened in a U.S. film festival in 2011. Also, this is merely a list - not a ranking - so please consider each film on this list to have its own unique value.

1) This is Not a Film - Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran

This is Not a Film depicts in heartbreaking detail the house arrest of acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was accused in 2010 of making a film critical of the Iranian government. Panahi vehemently denies the charges, yet he currently faces six years in jail and a twenty-year ban on filmmaking. Nonetheless, in This is Not a Film Panahi not only documents his own house arrest, revealing how the banal details of daily confinement can crush the human spirit; he also reveals how the creative impulse can survive even the most repressive circumstances, and inspire hope.

2) The Way Back - Peter Weir, U.S.

Starring Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess, and Saoirse Ronan and directed by Peter Weir, this epic and moving film based on real events tells the story of a group of Polish, American, and Russian political prisoners who escaped from a brutal Soviet gulag in 1941 and walked 4000 miles from Siberia to India and freedom. An extraordinary paean to liberty, The Way Back's courageous protagonists repeatedly affirm their willingness to die in freedom rather than live out their lives in the slavery of Soviet communism. The film's concluding montage depicting the events of the Cold War is a long overdue acknowledgment from Hollywood of how the fall of European communism freed millions of Poles, Czechs, Russians, and Eastern Europeans.

3) The Help - Tate Taylor, U.S.

The civil rights drama The Help reveals how the struggle for freedom is equally urgent when it comes to racial equality in America. With gripping performances from Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and a powerful ensemble cast, The Help portrays the plight of African-American women who labored as house maids in the American South of the 1960s. The Help depicts the daily humiliations and injustices that grind down the human spirit and that form an 'internal prison' of despair that can be as destructive as any war, or act of violence. Taking place within recognizable domestic circumstances, The Help shows that our respect for civil rights in America is as important as our fight for human rights around the world.

4) Petition - Zhao Liang, China

A member of the 'Digital Generation' of independent Chinese documentarians, Zhao Liang depicts in Petition the Kafkaesque struggle of the Chinese people for justice from their own government. Petition follows real citizens, often poor and powerless, who travel from all across China to Beijing to petition the government for redress against local injustices. Zhao Liang goes into the petitioners' shanty towns to hear their tragic tales of official malfeasance: unlawful imprisonment, confiscations of property, torture and death at the hands of local authorities. The petitioners wait months and sometimes years for their cases to be heard, and in the meantime eke out miserable existences in cardboard hovels on the sidewalks of Beijing. Following on Zhao Liang's powerful Crime and Punishment, Petition is essential viewing for anyone who wishes to understand the abysmal state of human rights in communist China.

5) The Red Chapel - Mads Brügger, Denmark

In one of the bravest films in recent memory, director Mads Brügger and Danish-Korean comedians Simon Jul Jørgensen and Jacob Nossell risk their lives traveling to North Korea to tweak/punk that nation's tyrannical communist regime. Ostensibly visiting North Korea for the purpose of putting on a Danish socialist comedy show as an 'inter-cultural exchange,' the filmmakers' true purpose is to document the censorship and inhumanity of the North Korean government. Referring to the communist dictatorship as "the most heartless and brutal totalitarian state ever created," Brügger and his comedians repeatedly make fools of the authorities in this blackly satirical, poignant and insightful documentary. All the more relevant after the demise of Kim Jong Il, The Red Chapel follows on the heels of North Korea-themed films like Kimjongilia, Yodok Stories, and The Juche Idea in illustrating how the cinema can advocate for freedom by exposing tyranny.

6) Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Michael Bay, U.S.

Big summer popcorn movies are still some of the most effective (and entertaining) ways to convey the importance of fighting for freedom, as Michael Bay's epic Transformers films have proven time and again. With a plot spanning the Cold War and America's space race with Russia, this third film in the Transformers series features Decepticon robots scheming to enslave Earth - before Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), his loyal Autobot friends, and the U.S. military come to the rescue. Much like Bay's previous films, Dark of the Moon mixes spectacular action (here in breathtaking 3D) and cheeky humor with a celebration of America's independent streak, fighting spirit, and passion for freedom. As Autobot leader Optimus Prime puts it, while defending his human allies from alien invasion: "The day will never come that we forsake freedom."

7) The Devil's Double - Lee Tamahori, Belgium/Netherlands

Starring Dominic Cooper in a career-making dual performance, The Devil's Double tells the true story of Saddam Hussein's villainous son Uday and his reluctant body double, Latif Yahia. Stylishly filmed by former James Bond director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day), The Devil's Double depicts the full tyranny of the Hussein family's mafia-like reign in the '80s and '90s, dramatizing the plight of average Iraqis under their cruel and arbitrary rule. While taking not taking an overt position on the Iraq War, the film nonetheless depicts a brutal and ultimately doomed dictatorship that was a menace to the region - and to the human rights of the Iraqi people.

8) The Lady - Luc Besson, United Kingdom/France

Burmese democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has lived an extraordinary life, seemingly tailor-made for the big screen. The Lady tells the story of Aung San Suu Kyi's (Michelle Yeoh) multi-decade struggle for democracy in Burma, now renamed Myanmar by its ruling military junta. The film depicts the poignancy of Suu Kyi's struggle: leaving her happy marriage and family in England, she returns to her homeland of Burma to lead the struggle for democracy, with the party she founded (the National League for Democracy) ultimately winning the 1990 elections. The election results are invalidated, however, and Suu Kyi is placed under house arrest for much of the next twenty years. Besson depicts the tremendous sacrifices made by Aung San Suu Kyi as a wife and mother for the cause of Burmese freedom.

9) 5 Days of War - Renny Harlin, U.S.

Director Renny Harlin's 5 Days of War is two things simultaneously: a crisp, high-octane action-war drama, and a heart-rending depiction of the brutal Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. While largely side-stepping the initial cause of the invasion, 5 Days lingers on the human toll of the Russian assault, and on the courageous war reporters who struggled to get the story of war crimes out to the world. Featuring American stars like Val Kilmer, Andy Garcia, Dean Cain and Heather Graham, the film is as much an indictment of international indifference to human suffering as it is of the actual invasion. A stirring, emotional film that celebrates Georgia's desire for freedom, 5 Days concludes with a moving postscript featuring real-life victims of the invasion describing atrocities committed against their families.

10) Battle: Los Angeles - Jonathan Liebesman, U.S.

American science fiction has always taken a keen interest in the struggle for freedom. An intense, stirring and patriotic ode to America's fighting men and women, Battle: Los Angeles depicts a team of Marines - led by Aaron Eckhart as a rugged Marine staff sergeant - tasked with defending Los Angeles from a massive alien assault. Like an old-school World War II film, Battle: Los Angeles revels in the honor of military service, the basic code of fidelity to the mission and one's fellow soldier - especially in the face of overwhelming odds. Against a backdrop of intense urban warfare, often resembling street fighting in Iraq, director Jonathan Liebesman captures the steadiness and quiet resolve of America's soldiers as they defend civilians in an apocalyptic battle for human liberty.

We'd like to thank our colleague Joe Bendel for helping us compile this list and for his work reviewing many of these films for Libertas Film Magazine. Other timely films from 2011 on the subject of freedom include: Khodorkovsky, the chilling account of the Russian mogul's imprisonment by Putin; Cairo 6, 7, 8 and Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story, both portraying the struggle for women's rights in modern Egypt; along with The Black Tulip and The Miscreants of Taliwood, about the efforts of average Afghans to resist Taliban rule.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Twilight, and the Return of Women's Blockbuster Films

2011-12-20T09:05:58-05:00

When The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hits movie theaters on December 21st, it will be the second major female-led franchise movie released in just over a month. The first, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part I, has already earned over $640 million dollars worldwide since its November 18th release and has become the third-highest grossing movie of 2011 (after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and Transformers: Dark of the Moon -- and on a lower budget than those films). The remarkable success of the Twilight film series, with over $2 billion in worldwide ticket sales to date, proves that audiences will show up to see tentpole movies built around women. Now with the upcoming release of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the spring/summer 2012 openings of Mirror Mirror, The Hunger Games, and Snow White and the Huntsman, audiences are being offered a run of female-oriented big-budget films unlike anything they've seen in recent years. After decades of lavishing resources on male-led action and comic book movies, Hollywood is finally making an effort to give women and their stories the blockbuster treatment.

In doing so, the film industry is hearkening back to what was once a strength of classic Hollywood: the blockbuster women's film. Such films were high-quality productions that elevated the unique psychology, heroism and romance of women's lives to the level of epic entertainment. The great era of this kind of women's film was in the '30s and '40s when movies like Greta Garbo's Queen Christina, Vivien Leigh's Gone with the Wind, Marlene Dietrich's The Scarlet Empress, Joan Crawford's Mildred Pierce, Greer Garson's Mrs. Miniver, and Bette Davis' Jezebel enthralled audiences. Whether they told historical or contemporary stories, such films offered a 'blockbuster' vision of women's lives -- both in terms of the resources the studios devoted to them (A-list directors and casts, big budgets) as well as in the importance they placed in their heroine's emotional journeys. Such films were a mainstay of classic Hollywood, filling box office coffers and building the careers of talented actresses. Further, these films inspired both women and men, for they successfully transformed the unique emotions and experiences of women into works of art with universal significance.

The success of classic women-led films is reflected in their status as some of the highest grossing films of all time. According to Box Office Mojo's list of the all time highest grossing films (all figures are domestic, adjusted for inflation), Gone with the Wind (1939) is still number one with an astonishing U.S. theatrical total of $1.6 billion dollars. The Sound of Music ($1.13 billion), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ($867 million), and Titanic ($1.02 billion) also figure in the top ten list -- and one could argue that Dr. Zhivago ($988 million) and The Exorcist ($880 million) owe much of their success to their strong female characters, as well. The success of these films shows that women and their stories have been a compelling draw in many of the biggest movies ever made.

Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, however, the action movie rose in prominence -- and a genre that naturally favors men over women took over Hollywood. The success of the male-oriented action film was used to justify spending less money on women's films, and women were increasingly relegated to lower budget romantic comedies and dramas. This led to a vicious cycle in which the modest budgets given to women's films led to modest box office returns that were then used as an excuse to spend even less on women's films -- completely contradicting the evidence of the successful women's films of the classic Hollywood era. While some fine movies were made in this period -- Norma Rae, Julia, An Unmarried Woman -- much of the heroism, glamor, and romance that had characterized the great women's films of the '30s and '40s was lost.

There was a brief resurgence of the blockbuster women's film in the '80s with Out of Africa, Terms of Endearment, and comedies like Romancing the Stone, but this promising trend petered out in the early '90s. By the late '90s, the film industry's downgrading of women's importance in the movies was such that when Titanic became a massive hit in 1997 -- a film very much built around Kate Winslet and her emotional journey -- the film's success was instead credited to Leonardo DiCaprio and to the film's special effects.

This mindset has led to another trend in contemporary Hollywood: the rise of the comic book movie. With the comic book movie, the film industry has became preoccupied with producing a never-ending stream of films based around male adolescence and coming of age. That's fine for men, but there's little there to relate to for women. On the rare occasion when a woman plays the lead in a big-budget comic book or video game movie -- say Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider films, or Milla Jovovich in the Resident Evil films -- her role is little different from that of a man. This is a shame because women are capable of a lot more on the big screen than simply wielding violence.

Women's life experiences are different from those of men. We wish to be leaders and to achieve success in the world, but in our entertainment we also want romance, adventure, and emotional catharsis. When the Twilight movies came along, they answered this need beautifully. Twilight's highly traditional storyline of a young woman falling in love with and taming a dangerous man has appealed to women for generations and dates back to the 19th century Gothic novel and beyond (as I describe in my analysis of the literary and mythological themes in the Twilight series). One sees this storyline in everything from the fable of Beauty and the Beast to novels like Jane Eyre and Gone with the Wind. Ultimately, this storyline serves as a metaphor for a woman's heroic quest to overcome the forces of evil and find love and fulfillment in the world.

Thus, the entire focus of Twilight is on the emotional journey of Bella Swan and not the physical action (although there is action in the film). Though I find it hard to identify with Bella's lack of career ambition, the single-mindedness of her determination to romance Edward Cullen in the face of widespread disapproval (and despite the fact that he is a vampire) demonstrates a feisty and independent spirit. This is the real 'action' of the film -- not the external violence, but the internal drama -- and this is what has proven so immensely appealing to millions of women. After all, how much action is there really in Breaking Dawn - Part I? The first half hour of the film is spent lingering on Bella's wedding, while the second half of the film features Bella lying pregnant on a couch -- with a brief honeymoon in Brazil in between, and a few scenes involving werewolves. And yet the movie has so far made over $640 million worldwide.

While the success of Twilight may be surprising to some, women's lives and their emotional journeys have been the stuff of successful storytelling for millennia. For example, the rivalry of the goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite plays a central role in the events of The Iliad, while the touching portrayal of Penelope's honor and fortitude forms the emotional backbone of The Odyssey. The extraordinary depiction of Medea's emotional journey in Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica inspired the passionate figure of Queen Dido in Virgil's Aeneid, which in turn influenced generations of storytellers. Fast-forwarding over a millennia, women's lives and their complex characters figured in the birth of the modern novel, from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Even in Asia, the Japanese literary tradition was born in the work of female writers of the 10th - 11th centuries AD who explored women's lives in poignant masterpieces like Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji and Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Hunger Games trilogies are being turned into major movie franchises because they too offer something more than simply action or violence in their portrayals of women. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo gives us a central character, Lisbeth Salander, who is fascinating both for her psychological complexity and her intelligence. The Hunger Games is compelling because its heroine, Katniss Everdeen, has to learn how to negotiate complex rivalries in order to stay alive in the games. In the upcoming Snow White adaptations Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman, the heroines are forced to confront the deadly jealousy and vanity of a wicked queen. Although there is action in all these films, it is the emotional journeys of the women involved that will likely be the main draw.

This is what forms the core similarity between the contemporary women's blockbuster films of today and the great women's films of the classic Hollywood era. Whether it be The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or Mildred Pierce, these movies depict their female leads dealing with the central issues of love, friendship, betrayal, and ambition that women everywhere have to deal with in their own lives.

By lavishing big budgets on these women's movies, Hollywood is acknowledging that women's stories are worthy of being told on the grand scale. Epic roles in epic films give women the chance to exhibit crucial qualities -- our potential for leadership, our capacity for honor, love, intelligence, and nobility. Such films also give men the opportunity to relate to women's stories as if they were their own. It's the least the movies can do to reflect the dramatic and consequential lives women are living today and have lived throughout history.

A Conversation With Werner Herzog, Part II: Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Avatar, & the Hostility of Nature

2011-12-02T09:15:39-05:00

In Part I of my interview with Werner Herzog, we discussed his new movie Into the Abyss and its searing exploration of evil in human society. Now in Part II we turn to the world of nature, which Herzog sees as even more dangerous. In Les Blanks' documentary Burden of Dreams, Herzog famously spoke out on the "obscenity" of the jungle, its "harmony of overwhelming and collective murder." In Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the World, he expressed skepticism toward "tree huggers and whale huggers," while in Grizzly Man, he documented the fate of a man literally killed by his unhealthy obsession with wild nature. Herzog has even criticized the romanticizing of nature in Avatar, calling the film "an abomination because of its New Age schlock and bullshit."

Obviously Werner Herzog has strong feelings about the proper relationship between humanity and nature. One sees this, for example, in Herzog's stunning documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, released this week on DVD. Cave of Forgotten Dreams offers an extraordinary look at the 30,000 - 32,000 year-old Paleolithic cave paintings inside the Chauvet Cave in southern France - currently considered to be the oldest cave paintings in the world. As Herzog told me in Part I of our discussion on the concept of "the abyss," "I've always tried to look deep inside of what we are - deep into the recesses of our existence, of our prehistory - like in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. So it is some sort of a theme that runs through quite a few of my films."

In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog speaks eloquently of the Paleolithic cave paintings of Chauvet and their relationship to the surrounding landscape:

"These images are memories of long-forgotten dreams. Is this their heartbeat, or ours? Will we ever be able to understand the vision of the artists across such an abyss of time? [Camera shows a massive natural stone arch in the landscape.] There is an aura of melodrama in this landscape. It could be straight out of a Wagner opera or a painting of German Romanticists. Could this be our connection to them? This staging of a landscape as an operatic event does not belong to the Romanticists alone. Stone Age man might have had a similar sense of inner landscapes ..."

And yet despite these poetic sentiments, Herzog vehemently denies being a Romantic; rather, he defines his approach to nature as being similar to that of the artists of the late Middle Ages.

Ultimately, if one were to search for a theme that unites Werner Herzog's diverse body of work, it would be that respect for human life and its limits is what holds us back from the brutality of amoral nature - the abyss into which humanity's natural instincts might otherwise plunge. As Herzog told me, he is concerned above all with civilizational breakdown - with how humanity can abandon its own heights to descend into unfathomable depths of madness and annihilation. Equally importantly though, Herzog's love of art, of literature, of joyful exploration of the world and its peoples points to a hopeful way out of the abyss and into the light of day.

Thus, in Part II of this interview, we tackle such colorful subjects as Herzog's anti-romantic views on nature, why he can't help ranting about Avatar, his excitement over his Rogue Film School (in which he teaches such crucial skills as "lock picking" and "neutralizing bureaucracy"), and his belief that Wrestlemania and reality TV offer vital clues to understanding civilization. The interview has been edited for length.

GM: There is this sense in all of your films, whether they're historical dramas or contemporary documentaries, that you wish to explore the extremes. You go from examining the molecular world in scenes from Encounters at the End of the World to these broad vistas of Antarctica or the desert or the Himalayas in your other documentaries. Do you feel that you're part of what could be termed the German Romantic tradition in terms of having this approach to nature - seeing it both as a place of danger and a place of inspiration?

WH: I think that's a common misconception [that] I had an affinity to romantic culture - no I don't. I do not feel much affinity with it. I don't feel at home with it. I'm much closer to poets like Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner who wrote Woyzeck - in the early 1820s he wrote literature that belonged to the early 20th century, that was almost like Expressionism. Or Hölderlin the poet, and he's not a Romantic poet either. He's somewhere completely unique. He's like a continent of his own - not really comparable to other Romantic writers of his time...

And when you look at how I depict nature - wild nature for example in Grizzly Man, it's quite evident that it's a completely anti-Romantic view. Timothy Treadwell who was protecting bears and who was killed and eaten by a grizzly bear together with his girlfriend, he has this kind of watered down Romanticism ... that's what I'm completely against. I would stop the course of the film even and in my comment I would have an ongoing argument with Treadwell: "Here I differ from Treadwell." I do not see wild nature as something benign and beautiful and the bears fluffy like little pets. No, they are dangerous and aggressive and nature itself looks rather chaotic and hostile. You look at the universe - it's very, very hostile out there.

For example in Les Blanks' Burden of Dreams I deliver a speech/rant about the jungle and you'll never see anything so clearly against Romanticism and the romanticizing of landscapes, romanticizing of wild nature. ... It's funny because being a German everyone immediately thinks yeah yeah he must have an affinity with Romantic culture. No, I don't.

GM: I think I see multiple sides to Romanticism. It's such a complex movement. What I was thinking of was not so much the warm, romantic with a small 'r' approach to nature but the approach that sees it as terrifying and overwhelming. For example, even going back into 16th century German art I think of Albrecht Altdorfer with his landscapes towering over very small figures, or of Bruegel's Landscape With the Fall of Icarus with the human figures very small in the distance, on through Caspar David-Friedrich's work [in the early 19th century] where you have the two extremes - you either have humanity dwarfed by nature, as in The Monk on the Seashore or you have humanity standing titanic over nature, as in The Wanderer over the Sea of Clouds. So it was in that sense I was asking about nature. Your quote was very striking [in Burden of Dreams] where you mention the jungle as being "full of obscenity ... nature here is vile and base."

WH: Yeah. Obscenity - that was because Kinski kept saying everything is erotic. And he would hug a tree and fornicate with it. [Laughs] Which is really against my inner convictions.

GM: But this comment about the 'harmony of overwhelming and collective murder' - setting aside Kinski's comments, is that how you would see that particular jungle, or nature in general?

WH: No, you would have to be a little bit cautious. It's a rant 'against' the jungle, but it came at a time of enormous strain on me - weeks and weeks and weeks where there was every single day a major disaster. And when I speak of major disaster I mean disasters like two plane crashes. Two consecutive plane crashes, and on and on and on. So, yes you have to see it in the context. But otherwise, thinking about the jungle, it's not completely wrong what I said. But the ferocity of the rant is in a way a result of enormous pressure of disasters one after the other. ... And it's OK, I still like my rant.

GM: It's achieved a cult status on-line. People enjoy it a great deal.

WH: But let me go back to when you speak of Altdorfer [see image below of Altdorfer's St. George in the Forest] - or Matthias Grünewald. Yes, that's where I feel much more affinity: late Middle Ages. But not Romanticism.

GM: And you have an interest in classical culture as well. I saw from your application for your Rogue Film School that you tell people to read Virgil.

WH: [laughs] I do not tell it - it is mandatory. But it's actually Virgil's - not the Aeneid.

GM: But I love the Aeneid!

WH: Yes, so do I, but it's more the programmatic, big writing about celebrating the Roman Empire, celebrating the Augustean Empire, celebrating the evolution of the Roman republic into an empire. ... [It's]the Georgics - it's about agriculture ... about farming. And the beautiful thing is it does not explain anything - it just names the glory. It names the glory of pruning the apple trees, and it names the glory of the bee hive, and it names the terror of the pestilence invading the stables and killing off all the sheeps and goats. So I make it mandatory.

You've got to be serious if you want to apply to my film school. And applications, by the way, are open right now. I do it infrequently and at various locations whenever I have time for it. Basically Rogue Film School is an answer to an ever-increasing avalanche of young people who want to learn from me or work with me. I try to give a more systematic answer to it. There's a mandatory reading list among other obstacles you have to overcome. You have to send in a written application, you have to send in a short film - and I read and watch every single piece.

And I'm the only one who ultimately makes the choice whom I invite. So it's serious stuff. And of course it's not just Roman antiquity included in the reading list. It includes the Warren Commission Report on Kennedy's assassination, which is a wonderful piece of reading. It's the ultimate crime story. Phenomenal in its conclusiveness and in its intelligence and I keep saying everybody puts it down without having read it. Just read it and you can't get it any better.

GM: The Warren Commission Report, plus the Georgics - plus your reading list also includes Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and Bernal Diaz's The Conquest of New Spain. What effect do you think this variety of reading has on the filmmakers in your school?

WH: Well, I point one thing out: Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read read. If you don't read you will never be a filmmaker - a good filmmaker. So, these five or six books could be replaced by five thousand others. I might include a new book I just read that is [an] absolutely beautiful, wonderful piece. It's called The Peregrine, by an English completely unknown person, J.A. Baker, who watches peregrine falcons. It was published in 1967 and there seems to be a new discovery going on of this book. It is phenomenally beautiful in its prose and in the precision of observation and this kind of - this unbelievable quest to meet the peregrine and an ecstasy of observation ... Sometimes the writer lapses into "we": "the peregrine saw us and swoops down and then we swooped down" so it is as if he were morphed into falcon.

GM: Somewhat like Timothy Treadwell [in Grizzly Man] wanting to morph into the grizzly bear.

WH: Yes, but the book has a phenomenal precision and quest and beauty. Can't compare with Treadwell, that was just a misunderstanding, bears as being fluffy pets.

GM: An over-identification with them. Well you make the good point that there are limits between humans and nature, and the Native American man [in Grizzly Man] makes the same point about having a sense of limits.

WH: Yes, I think there was a massive misunderstanding of what constitutes wild nature. It's a very tragic misunderstanding because it cost two human beings their lives and and at the end it cost two bears their lives who had to be killed by rangers. ... The native Aleut people, for example, say very clearly you shouldn't love the bear, but rather you should respect the bear. I think this is a very fine difference. ...

GM: You've said you have an opposition to New Age culture ... You're opposed to yoga, nutritional supplements, self-help [Herzog laughs] and I found a quote of yours [in Planet Magazine] about Avatar - that you considered Avatar "an abomination because of its New Age schlock and bullshit," despite its other accomplishments in terms of technique.

WH: Yes, we should not forget the accomplishments, but it makes me cringe, the New Age sort of content makes me cringe.

GM: So is it the element of pantheism, or that it's this degraded Romanticism?

WH: Well, it has lots of things in it abominable, like degraded Romanticism, also, what did you say?

GM: Pantheism.

WH: Pantheism, yes, yes, yes.

GM: Inspired by Spinoza.

WH: Yeah, making nature as the ultimate God. Whatever. It combines all the stupidities of our time, not only these two stupidities, but it's somehow the embodiment of stupidity and I just can't take it without ranting. [laughs]

GM: So you have greater hope for humanity on its own - or for humanity and civilization perhaps? Or for rational progress? Do you believe in rational progress?

WH: Well, we should be cautious about that. Because the ice of rationality and civilization is kind of thin, this thin ice breaks easily and beneath there is an ocean of barbarism. And you can see it with Germany - a very civilized country with great poetry, philosophy, music and all this and within a very few years it lapses into a state of utter barbarism, and I mean an amount of barbarism we have not seen in millennia.

GM: How do you prevent that in the future from coming back? How do you foster a humanistic culture?

WH: Well, how do we prevent it? I do not know. It has really engaged my thinking. It's a very, very important question. I even traveled to Africa when I was eighteen. I wanted to go ... to the Congo, right after its independence because it was a breakdown of civilization and absence of everything that would be order - tribalism, and killings, [it was] staggering - and I tried to understand what was going on with Germany [by seeing] this, but I actually never made it to the Congo, I became very ill in the Sudan and I barely made it back alive.

GM: Do you think Weimar cinema of the '20s predicted some of the Nazi barbarism? Or was it perhaps more just a symptom of it?

WH: [Exclaims] Maybe, yes, in retrospect, now we can say there was some sort of a vision of something dark coming. Nosferatu [photo above] is the best example, or Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a good example. But they do not really explain - they had this mood of something impending - very dark coming at us. So cinema sometimes has a way to figure out the mood of something coming at us. So this is why I'm taking a good look at what is going on in mainstream cinema, and taking a good look at what television does, with Wrestlemania, and the Anna Nicole Smith Show, because the poet must not avert his eyes.

GM: It all reveals something - all the details. I look at the cinema and I believe it unconsciously reveals things that may be coming in politics or culture or society. There are very fascinating themes ... I even see Weimar themes returning in some of the cinema today.

WH: Yes, but it's not necessarily a direct parallel to ahead of time what's coming - that would be dangerous. But sometimes these moments in cinema occur where you have the feeling , yes, yes, there is a premonition in the films.

Charlize Theron's Young Adult and the Crisis of Narcissism in Our Popular Culture

2011-11-29T11:22:49-05:00

Charlize Theron's new movie Young Adult offers one of the most striking depictions of narcissism to hit movie screens in some time. Directed by Jason Reitman, Young Adult tells the story of Mavis Gary (Theron), a self-absorbed writer of young adult novels who returns to her hometown to steal back her happily-married former boyfriend (played by Patrick Wilson). I had the chance to see Young Adult recently at a screening hosted by The Huffington Post and AOL. HuffPost Founding Editor Roy Sekoff moderated the colorful Q & A that followed at Arianna Huffington's home with screenwriter Diablo Cody and actor Patton Oswalt. In the most memorable exchange of the evening, actress Sean Young (Blade Runner) asked Diablo Cody why she had decided to explore the subject of narcissism in the film. Cody wryly responded that perhaps it was because Young Adult was the first screenplay she wrote upon moving to LA. This drew a big laugh from the crowd, but the implication seemed more serious: what is the ever-increasing narcissism in Hollywood entertainment doing to our broader culture?

Charlize Theron's Mavis embodies all the narcissism of modern popular culture. She's obsessed with reality TV (the Kardashians drone on in the background of several scenes), a medium that has elevated the navel gazing of minor celebrities to the level of major entertainment. Mavis writes young adult novels that are only thinly-disguised relivings of her own high-school glory days, and she's otherwise obsessed with appearances and shallow celebrity status. The film repeatedly shows Mavis studying herself in the mirror -- either in depressed self-loathing after an alcoholic bender, or with vain self-satisfaction as she puts on makeup to impress her former boyfriend.

In keeping with the instability of identity that goes with modern narcissism, Mavis also adopts different personae as it suits her: at home she plays the dumpy writer in baggy jeans and t-shirts, but when she wants to seduce her old boyfriend she dresses in a low-cut black dress and adopts the manner of a big-city sophisticate. Later when Mavis is invited to a baby's naming ceremony, she takes on another guise: that of a sober career woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a high-necked dress and conservative spectator pumps. Her various outer guises fail to impress the people of her hometown, though, for Mavis has neglected to develop any sustaining character traits. Mavis is the classic narcissist: cut off from objective reality, lacking any concern for other people, insecure in private but willing in public to ride roughshod over anyone and everything in order to gratify her whims.

Interestingly enough, Young Adult is one of several upcoming films that explore the dangers of vanity and narcissism. For example, two new adaptations of the Snow White fairy tale, Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman, depict vain queens willing to kill to maintain their beauty -- with Charlize Theron even playing the villainess in the latter film. In keeping with the original fairy tale, the wicked queen's obsession with her own appearance in both films is so extreme that she literally has a spirit residing in her mirror that she calls on to affirm her own beauty -- this spirit acting as the exterior personification of her own vanity.

In Young Adult, Theron's Mavis may not literally kill young women in order to remain beautiful, but her narcissism leads her to disregard all moral standards as she attempts to destroy the marriage of her former boyfriend and undermine the happiness of his wife and baby.

Young Adult vividly depicts what happens when self-love crosses the line into monstrous solipsism. This type of narcissism is becoming a defining trait of our modern cinema, and is taking on ever more baroque forms. It extends into the trend of psychological thrillers like Inception, The Ward, Dream House or Sucker Punch that take place almost entirely within the mind of a character, often one who is mentally unstable. Although these thrillers depict elaborate action, they recast this action as being the involuted imagining of a diseased mind -- or of someone who has lost the will to live. Indeed, in Inception the hero's wife becomes so confused between reality and delusion that she commits suicide. Such films are symbols of a culture in decay -- like the passive Narcissus of Greek mythology, so intent on gazing inwardly at himself that he loses the will to engage productively with the outside world.

The last time such narcissistic themes appeared en masse in Western culture was during the late 19th century Decadent movement, just before Europe collapsed into the conflagration of World War I. Decadent novels like Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray portrayed self-absorbed aesthetes who cared only for their external appearances, using them as cover to commit the ugliest of crimes. Dorian Gray's portrait is the functional equivalent of the "double" seen by Mavis as she stares into her mirror -- or of the reflected doubles that feature in Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman, or even The Devil's Double or Black Swan. Like Narcissus gazing at himself in the forest pool, all these reflected doubles signify the modern split psyche -- alienated from humanity, from moral values, and from objective reality.

In the old days this destructive narcissism was known by another word -- vanity -- and it was considered one of the seven deadly sins. However, in the twentieth century with the rise of photography and the cinema, Western culture has become ever more dominated by the visual image -- and vanity has ceased to be stigmatized, instead being outright celebrated. Of course, there is a glorious life-affirmation inherent in appreciating the beauty of the physical. It would be just as perverse to denigrate beauty as to overvalue it. Nonetheless, Western culture has become so over-preoccupied with outward appearances that it is neglecting the important moral and intellectual qualities that give those appearances any larger meaning.

Perhaps dramas like Young Adult represent a healthy effort to deal with the problem of narcissism. After all, the movie shows how Mavis Gary's self-absorption only leads to heartbreak, as relationships with family and old friends prove more difficult for her to manage than she expected. Reality eventually comes crashing into the hermetically-sealed world of Mavis' narcissism and she is forced to deal with it.

This is as it should be. We can only evade objective reality for so long before being faced with one of two choices: either retreat into the reflection in the mirror and go mad, or look outside of ourselves and reestablish a healing connection with humanity and the larger world.

A Conversation With Werner Herzog, Part I: Into the Abyss

2011-11-11T09:16:50-05:00

Few directors are as willing to venture into the abyss as Werner Herzog. His prolific body of work has ranged from intense dramas like Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Woyzeck that plumb the depths of the human soul to documentaries like Encounters at the End of the World and Grizzly Man that examine humanity's fragile place in the miraculous and terrifying world of nature. The astonishing breadth of Herzog's filmmaking conveys the humanist's sense of wonder at the world - what he describes as the "ecstasy of observation."

Herzog's latest film, Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life (opening this Friday, November 11th) is a compelling look at the contentious issue of the death penalty. Producer Erik Nelson has stated that the film is intended to inform the current Republican presidential debate over the death penalty, in particular with regard to the candidacy of Texas Governor Rick Perry. Herzog himself has issued a Director's Statement expressing his opposition to capital punishment - though in keeping with his lifelong aversion to political interpretations of his work, he has also asserted that Into the Abyss is not a political film. These apparent contradictions point to the enigma of Werner Herzog himself - on the one hand a sensitive humanist with strong moral convictions, yet on the other hand an artist who resists being defined by political activism or party ideology.

Into the Abyss embodies these contradictions. The film tells the true story of a brutal triple murder committed in Conroe, Texas. Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, intending to steal two cars owned by Sandra Stotler, killed Stotler in her home and then lured her son Adam and his friend Jeremy Richardson into the woods and executed them. Perry and Burkett subsequently went on a joy ride in the cars, before winding up in a bloody shoot-out with the police. Perry and Burkett were convicted of the murders, with Perry receiving the death penalty, and Burkett receiving a life sentence.

Herzog interviewed Michael Perry just eight days before his execution, and also interviewed Jason Burkett in prison. Other interviews include those with Burkett's wife Melyssa Thompson-Burkett, who contacted Burkett while he was in prison and subsequently married him; Fred Allen, a prison captain who worked in the execution chamber and who assisted in over 125 executions before resigning in moral crisis; and most significantly, the relatives of the victims themselves: Lisa Stotler-Balloun, the daughter of Sandra Stotler and sister of Adam Stotler, and Charles Richardson, the brother of Jeremy Richardson. Stotler-Balloun and Richardson in particular provide the most heartbreaking testimony of the film, as Herzog does not shy away from depicting the shattering effect of the murders on their lives. As a result, Into the Abyss exists in a complex tension between Herzog's avowed position against capital punishment and his impulse as a storyteller to depict both sides of the story and allow readers to make up their own minds.

I had the opportunity to meet with Werner Herzog in Los Angeles recently and discuss with him Into the Abyss and his extraordinary body of work. Part I of this interview appears below.

GM: I'd like to ask you about the title of your movie, Into the Abyss, because I've seen you refer to the concept of 'the abyss' quite a few times in your work. In Woyzeck you have a line "Every man is an abyss, you get dizzy looking in," and in Nosferatu you have a line "Time is an abyss profound as a thousand nights." This is a concept you keep referring to - what does 'the abyss' mean to you?

WH: It's a good observation, and when I came up with the title Into the Abyss - it dawned on me that it could have been the title of quite a few other films. Like Woyzeck could have had that title, or The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner or even the cave film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, because I've always tried to look deep inside of what we are - deep into the recesses of our existence, of our prehistory - like in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. So it is some sort of a theme that runs through quite a few of my films.

GM: I want to ask you about the relationship between humanity and the universe. There was a wonderful quote at the end of Encounters at the End of the World where Dr. Gorham asks, and I paraphrase, "are we the means through which the universe becomes conscious of itself?" This reminded me of a quote from Blaise Pascal's Pensées:

"A reed only is man, the frailest in the world, but a reed that thinks. Unnecessary that the universe arm itself to destroy him: a breath of air, a drop of water are enough to kill him. Yet, if the All should crush him, man would still be nobler than that which destroys him: for he knows that he dies, and he knows that the universe is stronger than he; but the universe knows nothing of it." (Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer)

This seems to apply to Into the Abyss and its depiction of human beings within this world. In the film you go driving down country roads and you show the trailer parks, the run-down stores, the boarded up gas stations, the bars. It looks like a wasteland that God is somehow absent from, and there are these people in the midst of it who are in a terrible state of pain and confusion - in an apparently indifferent universe.

WH: Let me address Pascal first. Yes, I like him very much. I even invented a quote for the film Lessons of Darkness. It starts with a Pascal quote "The collapse of the universe will occur like the creation in grandiose splendor," and underneath it says Blaise Pascal, but I invented it - and of course Pascal couldn't have said it better. [Laughs.]

But, it's interesting. The wasteland, this forlorn landscape, has become fascinating for me - this lost kind of Americana. And one of the death row inmates with whom I spoke - not in this film but in another film I'm already finishing - he said to me how he saw on his very last trip forty-three miles between death row and the death house where they are being executed in Huntsville. And in this cage in the van he sees a little bit of an abandoned gas station, he sees a cow in the field, and all of a sudden for him, everything is magnificent, and he says: "It looked like Israel to me, it all looked like the Holy Land." And I immediately grabbed my camera and I did this voyage of the forty-three miles and indeed the most forlorn landscapes all of a sudden look like the Holy Land. So I look at these forlorn landscapes all of a sudden with fresh and different eyes.

GM: I was also very struck by the similarities in the comments of three of the people whom you interviewed. Lisa Stotler-Balloun spoke about the four years of terrible loneliness she suffered after the murders of her mother and brother, when her life was empty, when she lived withdrawn from the world and felt her life had no meaning. Then there was Michael Perry himself who, despite the fact that he had killed three people and was on death row, said that the circumstances he was in had no impact on him. He had literally blocked the prison walls out. And then there is Fred Allen, the former prison captain who worked in the execution chamber, who talked about quitting his job and finally discovering his real self. These are all different formulations of the same feeling of dissociation from the world through tragic circumstances - of being split from the world, cut off from reality, cut off from one's own true self. This seems to be a recurring theme in modern filmmaking and literature.

WH: Yes, but ... we shouldn't speak about Perry who was executed eight days later. It was some sort of a mechanism to keep his sanity - to talk himself into being innocent, although he had confessed twice, and in detail, and there is overwhelming evidence against him. So there's no real doubt about his guilt. But the film is not in the business of guilt or innocence.

But let's talk about Lisa Stotler-Balloun and Fred Allen, the former captain of the tie-down team. Both of them in a way are not disassociated anymore from the world, from friends and society. They have somehow managed to move back into it. Lisa Stotler has somehow overcome the worst of her nightmares. Fred Allen is a tormented soul, but somehow he's back. He gave up his profession at the cost of losing his pension and today he has a company that does logistics - supplies for the trucking business. And he all of a sudden discovered for himself a very meaningful life where he sits back and watches nature and enjoys the birds. The film actually ends with the wonderful, wonderful text where he says he keeps watching the birds, and what are the ducks doing, and all the hummingbirds - pause - why are there so many of them? Cut. End of the film. What a fantastic question.

GM: It's a very poetic ending. It reminds me of that shot of Klaus Kinski playing with the butterfly at the end of My Best Fiend, in terms of the individual having that connection with nature and life. So there's hope after all for reintegration with the world.

Melyssa Thompson-Burkett was to me the final figure who was very striking - that she was drawn to this convicted killer. What is it in women that is drawn to that darkness in the death row inmates?

WH: You should answer it [chuckles], you are a woman.

GM: An urge to danger, an urge to nihilism, a desire to tame evil?

WH: I do not know. It's very mysterious. There's always a mystery between men and women, and thank God it exists. [Chuckles.] What kind of life would it be without this mysterious attraction that men and women have for each other, and love? It comes out of the blue, it comes out of nowhere. Melyssa meets the inmate for the first time and falls in love and she witnesses a rainbow from the gates of the prison - to her, she knows he's innocent. And they belong together. So, in a way it's very moving, but more mysterious than anything else.

GM: It's in that mysterious space that all the good art and all the good filmmaking happens, where you have a chance to go into the world of the imagination, to go beyond the world of the intellect.

WH: Yes. That's always been a quest of mine.

In Part II of this interview, I discuss with Werner Herzog his Rogue Film School (currently accepting applications), as well as his attitudes toward Avatar, pantheism, yoga, New Age nutritional supplements, Wrestlemania, and the end of civilization.