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Docs ‘n Shorts at SFIFF by Tony Reveaux
For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (USA 2008, 82 min)
In the theater, no two pairs of eyes see the same film. At the core of this shared experience is the universally loved quality of film to fuse reality and imagination. The evolving role of the film critic has been as referee, cheerleader, jury and even judge.
Boston Phoenix critic Gerald Peary spent eight years weaving together this warmly informative hundred-year-long tapestry of the men and women who have penciled, typed, broadcast and blogged upon the ever-perplexing plots of wonder bursting from the screen.
With its archival footage, photos, excerpts and wealth of interviews, For the Love of Movies serves as a unique witness to film history. As the forms and shapes of exhibition change from nickelodeon to picture palace to art house and multiplex, we hear the fearless voices emerge - Vachel Lindsay, Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, Stanley Kauffman, Molly Haskell, and deacon of moral direction Bosley Crowther. We see Siskel & Ebert's TV show shoehorn the silver screen into the very box that challenged it, and witness the bi-coastal jousting between our own Pauline Kael and New York's Andrew Sarris that enriched us all.
As Peary shows, the iconic published film critics are dropping like flies because of our paper media's meltdown. He gives a fair coda on the democratizing spread of amateur criticism on the Web, but notes that for all but a very few of these earnest nextgen bloggers, film criticism is a part-time hobby, not a dedicated and committed career.
California Company Town (USA 2008, 76 min)
Filmed in 16mm from 2003 to 2008, Lee Anne Schmitt's long, wide mural is an epitaphic essay that reveals the dusty bones of more than 20 failed, lost and abandoned sites whose skulls still haunt our state. Human society is catalyzed and defined by the urban seed of the settlement, and the author lays bare our Chernobyls, the remains of towns that didn't work out in the end.
We see the traces of company lumber towns like Scotia, idealistic but short-lived social and religious utopias, the Japanese internment camp of Manzanar, the Salton Sea resort that nature foreclosed on, a forsaken United Farm Workers headquarters, a discharged Air Force base. Closer to home are the oil company kraal of Richmond and the ghosts-in-waiting of Silicon Valley.
Each is rendered with one deadpan master shot. The veritŽ of Schmitt's merciless reality puts you there alone with the wind's echo whistling through the weeds and tattered tarpaper. At key points she inserts archival footage of what the structures were like and what was done there. The voices of Ronald Reagan and CŽsar Ch‡vez lend resonant substance. But Schmitt misses one of the rules of docs: if its more than five minutes long, don't narrate it yourself.
A Sea Change (USA 2009, 84 min)
We have sold our oceans out on a one-way acid trip. This persuasively proactive environmental documentary stars Sven Huseby, a 65- year-old Norwegian-American retired history teacher, who acted as a co-producer with his wife, director Barbara Ettinger.
The film's narrative path follows Huseby's search for the causes of ocean acidification and for our options going forward, marked and milestoned by his reportage to his 5-year-old grandson Elias. This camaraderie and rapport is laid on a bit thickly, but Ettinger consistently succeeds in achieving an elusive but worthy tone; a multigenerational POV.
From the first frame, Ettinger captures and communicates the lyrical wonder of the oceanic pulse of life of our planet, from tiny pteropods to whales, showing why we should care that carbon dioxide is being absorbed by the oceans and dooming our shared ecosystem.
Large grants from foundations provided a travel budget with long legs, bringing them to Washington, California, Connecticut, Vermont, Alaska and Norway. This enabled them to have meetings and interviews with key writers, scientists and environmentalists, including sculptor Maya Lin. All this leverages the piece as an effective educational resource. Fittingly, it concludes with visits to alternative energy sites and installations that serve as weathervanes pointing the way to come clean.
A Thousand Pictures
This collection of independent animation from many countries gifts the viewer with eye-opening inventive surprises, many of them one-of-a-kind experiments that test the limits of the object and the illusion.
Aanaatt _(Max Hattler, England 2008, 5 min) Hattler's elegantly choreographed object animation tilts the camera so that the mirrored table surface seems to be the ceiling. In smooth stop-motion replacements, he explores the abstract logic of tubes, discs, cylinders and other shapes as they grow, shrink, slide, and change to the ethereal murmur of ambient music.
Far Away from Ural_ (Katarina Lillqvist, Finland 2008, 25 min) This eerily charming and mysteriously enigmatic drama of stop-motion miniature puppetry is rendered in richly detailed 19th-century theatricalism. Its design seems to blur between Slavic folklore and Goya's Disasters of War. A discharged Russian soldier meets strangely motivated characters on his wandering way to Madagascar. Surrealist undercurrents at times endow them with four legs or moth wings, and let them fly through the air to their murky assignations.
The Heart of Amos Klein (Michal & Uri Kranot, Israel 2008, 15 min) In animation both painterly and sketchpad, the fractured and agonized history of modern Israel is viewed through the childhood and compromised adulthood of Amos, always the underdog.
Kanizsa Hill_ (Evelyn Lee, USA 2008, 8 min) In a graphic style that successfully melds free-form, sketchy expressionistic lines and textures and others representing clinical diagrams and symbols, we see the process of a soldier being shot and wounded. But Lee presses forth a bold parable, where the patient's head is being amputated. Body and head independently wander and ponder until their wary reunion.
Lies_ (Jonas Odell, Sweden 2008, 13 min) Odell's versatility alone is enough to recommend this title. The first cartoon story is of a middle-aged burglar pulling a caper in an office complex. Figures are rotoscoped and the geometric environs are shuffled like a pack of cards in a monochrome and duotone palette. The second, rendered in box-and-blob character design, is of a schoolboy and the consequences of his lifting a100 Kroner from his mother. The third is rotoscoped 2D figures and primary colors, and tackles the complex issue of a woman's identity. As a young girl she always had to hide that her family were gypsies. Her deceptions became chronic through a chain of foster homes, a marriage and then divorce. In the end she comes to terms with herself in the mirror.
__Photograph of Jesus (Laurie Hill, England 2008, 7 min) The archives of the Getty Images is an infinite landscape of cabinets, files, binders and stacks. A worker muses on the odd requests they try and satisfy within the vastness of the glaciers of metal and paper. A miniature Victorian damsel peels up from a photo, and in delightful stop-motion and CGI collage animation, she goes in and out of books and interacts with a historical variety of other characters. In full size, they move around and carry on mischief through the halls, showing that the past never sleeps.
Slaves_ (David Aronowitsch, Hanna Heilborn, Sweden 2008, 15 min) Poetically rendered animation rarely has had to shoulder the burden of the world's tragic horror, as Slaves does so well. The sound track is a real-time interview of two children abducted by militia in Sudan, recorded by Swedish members of the organization that rescued them. Their stories reveal the daily practice of raw, wanton brutality - without remorse, without accountability.Posted on Jun 19, 2009 - 05:41 AM