How we view Latin America cannot help but be affected by how it has been projected in film since the turn of the century. Filmmaker DeeDee Halleck has compiled the essential Latin American stereotypes into a documentary that is a comedy, a melodrama, an adventure story and finally, a tragic farce. Clips from over eighty dramatic and industrial films are arranged to lay out the essential myths: the hero discovers paradise and bananas, he has a problem with bandits and women, he calls in the marines, the bandits cooperate, and the good neighbors are happy. These images shaped not only how Americans viewed Latin Americans, but through exportation, also affected how Latin Americans view themselves. Through juxtaposition and irony, the film demonstrates cultural imperialism at work.
Halleck has been called "the godmother of the alternative political video." Along with being a professor of communications at the University of California at San Diego, she's also the producer of Paper Tiger Television, the legendary national public access series.
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America
Tribulation 99 has been called a "pseudo-documentary" with "trashy eclat," and its creator, filmmaker Craig Baldwin, "an aggressively backsliding fundamentalist." Baldwin compiled clips from all sorts of footage to prove that the apocalypse is just around the corner. "Thanks to his bargain-basement montage," reports The Nation, "underground cities (from Flash Gordon) seethe with Satanic mutants; President Eisenhower goes for a spin on a U.F.O. from Planet Quetzalcoatl...Tribulation 99 is a virtual encyclopedia of arrows poking across maps, saucers streaking across the sky, foot-high volcanoes erupting, Play-Doh monsters meanacing extras in Army surplus jumpsuits." Hallelujah for "trashy eclat."
Charlton Heston plays a Mexican narcotics agent who's on his honeymoon
with Janet Leigh in, of all places, the seedy border town of Los
Robles, where Orson Welles is the corrupt and corpulent chief
of police. A car bomb explodes, killing the local boss, and Heston
and Welles are reluctantly thrown together in the investigation.
The cast, "assembled as perversely as in a nightmare," said Pauline Kael, includes unbilled cameos by Marlene Dietrich (as the madam of a brothel and former lover of Welles who tells him to lay off the candy bars), Zsa Zsa Gabor (as a stripper), Mercedes McCambridge (as a psychopathic biker), Joseph Cotten and Keenan Wynn.
References to Welles' masterpiece, Citizen
Kane, to his career and to Shakespeare abound. Technically,
Touch of Evil is remarkable in its opening three-minute
uncut shot that begins with a bomb being placed in the trunk of
a convertible and follows it through the streets of Los Robles
across the border.
My Friend Bonito is one segment that was completed from Orson Welles' three-part film, It's All True. Welles had intended to film Robert Flaherty's story, My Friend Bonito, before he became involved in It's All True, and he thought Bonito, which was set in Mexico, could be easily tacked onto the South American project. It's the story of a boy and a bull. The bull is so fierce that he kills 20 horses in the bullring. The boy calls the bull and the bull is allowed to follow the boy out of the ring. Welles described this story to Peter Bogdanovich as "all nonsense except that it's true, and has happened about 40 times in the last hundred years."
Discussion: The Mexican-American Border
Walter Korte, Professor of Drama, University of Virginia
Animal Crackers was based upon the Marx Brothers' own Broadway
hit, as was their earlier successful film, Cocoanuts (1929).
The advent of sound couldn't have been more fortuitous for the
Marx Brothers. Animal Crackers would never have worked
as a silent film because their comedy is too verbal, too ethnic
and too cosmopolitan.
Unlike the 1928 film Abie's Wild Irish Rose, which gently urged ethnic reconciliation and acceptance, the Marx Brothers' "comic aggression...confronts ethnic animosity, attraction and confusion as well as the problematics of assimilation and upward mobility," says Charles Musser in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema.
One aspect of assimilation is role-playing, in which the immigrant must forge a new identity to match his or her new environment. The Marx Brothers aptly demonstrate this in Animal Crackers as they conceal their Jewish backgrounds to insinuate themselves into WASP high society, with varying degrees of success. At an upper echelon party, Chico, in the role of musician Emanuel Ravelli, recognizes the true identity of a pompous art conoisseur. "How did you get to be Roscoe W. Chandler?" asks Ravelli. "How did you get to be an Italian?" retorts Chandler. "Ethnicity is shown to be a constraint-and a construction-from which characters and audiences can be at least temporarily liberated," writes Musser. "Role-playing, which was necessary and typically alienating, could become pleasurable, subversive..." and enormously funny. Shown with two Warner Brothers cartoons featuring a globe-trotting Bugs Bunny and more.
The emergence of a genre of "transnational video," adopting the perspective of exiles and migrant cultures in their movements across borders, will be discussed by Patricia Zimmermann, author of Reel Families (Indiana University Press) and co-editor with John Hess of a forthcoming volume on Transnational Documentary.
Joining Zimmermann to discuss this program will be Chon Noriega, author of Chicanos and Film, and DeeDee Halleck, director of The Gringo in Mananaland. Among the videos on the program will be First World Order (Philip Mallory Jones, 1994, 28 minutes), which presents a global perspective on the African diaspora by conveying the common elements of culture and aesthetic among African peoples in the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. El Naftazteca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 AD (Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Adrienne Jenik, 1995, 60 minutes) is the distillation of a recent live satellite transmission by performance "border artist" Gomez-Pena, and produced at the IEAR Studios in Rensellaer, New York. Gomez-Pena is the Cyber-Aztec pirate who commandeers the commercial TV signal from his underground studio and ushers television into the 21st century. The content? "Weapons, chickens, propositions, cacti, trackballs, commentary, vegetables, wrestler masks, Pepto Bismol, the V.R. sombrero and Generation Mex. Callers from around America. Americanos from around the world." Trans Voices is an international compilation of minute-long video art on transnational economies and cultures by international artists, including Beth B and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.
Director Mira Nair's heroine, Mina, describes herself as a masala-a colorful, tasty mix of spices. Masala is the metaphor that heats things up when different races and cultures collide in Greenwood, Mississippi. The movie opens with Jay (Roshan Seth) and his family being kicked out of Uganda in 1972 because they're nonblack Africans. Jay's family, although Indian, has lived in Uganda for three generations, and he considers it his home, even 20 years later when he's living in Mississippi. Denzel Washington's character, Demetrius, is an African-American who's never seen Africa; Sarita Choudhury's Mina, Jay's daughter, is an Indian who's never been to India. They both live in Greenwood, Mississippi, where black, white and brown for the most part peacefully coexist. Demetrius, who owns a carpet-cleaning business, and Mina, a motel maid, literally collide. As they become Romeo and Juliet, so, too, must their respective communities collide over this interracial romance. The underlying philosophy of Mississippi Masala, according to critic Jim Kline, is that, "by mixing up traditions and cultures and races, humanity will lose its compulsion to label one faction of itself superior to the other and thus avoid creating groups considered inferior outcasts." Nair's world is one beyond "us" and "them."
Alex, a Chinese American schoolteacher, leaps at an offer of free rent from his grandfather if he runs an illegal boarding house in Queens, N.Y. Alex rents to three African Americans. His Dominican girlfriend, Mirabel, who hates his grandfather, moves in. In retaliation, the grandfather rents to three Hong Kong architecture students. The interactions of these eight residents among themselves and with their primarily white neighbors push all of them out of their complacent, lonely, or alienated states, especially when Mrs. Thatcher, their next door neighbor, starts a petition against "renters who destroy property values in the neighborhood."
Says David Chan, who plays Alex: "I wanted to show Alex as many sided: he's a street kid from the Bronx who wants these black roommates, but to the black charaters at first he's just this Chinese guy. He's afraid of his family, he stereotypes 'fresh-off-the-boat' Chinese in his head, but on the other hand, he feels totally out of place in the white neighborhood. It's a complicated identity he's working on."
In comparison to the anomie of Generation X portrayals, the energy of Scenes from the New World is refreshing. Amy Taubin of The Village Voice described the film as "smart and exuberant..on the mark about racial self-stereotyping and cross-cultural anxieties. Best of all, it dares to be optimistic..."
For the slapstick portion of our program, the Virginia Festival
of American Film presents those masters of silliness, Laurel and
Hardy. As the title implies, Laurel and Hardy invade England
and lay siege to Oxford. A prankish group of students, among
them a young Peter Cushing, set Stan and Ollie up at the dean's
residence, which the duo vigorously defends from the dean's attempt
to reclaim it. Seltzer bottles are squirted, food is thrown and
heads are knocked. "The secret of slapstick resides in
incongruity, and what could be more incongruous than these dead-panned
stumblebums-ex-streetcleaners in this case-turned loose amid the
gray towers and ivy-covered walls of peaceful Oxford?" queries
The New York Times.
Scott MacDonald writes: "One of the defining dimensions of the current cinematic moment, especially in alternative film history, is the debate among us and within us about the use of film as a tool for exploring personal identity and ethnic roots and the use of filmmaking as a model for "global" or "transnational" citizenship. The centripetal energy of our internal explorations and the centrifugal energy of our movements into and through other cultures are often thought of in contradistinction, when in fact, for more and more of us, our particular roots reach around the world. This complex interplay of the personal/ethnic and the transnational is evident in many independent films. For example, in Intimate Stranger, Alan Berliner explores the life of a family member, only to find that this exploration of the personal leads him into the international: is Berliner's grandfather an American? a Jew? an Egyptian? a Japanese? All of them? Short Fuse-the final film by Warren Sonbert, who died this year of AIDS-is a rigorous montage constructed from the filmmaker's chronicles of his travels around the world: each change of image is equally likely to locate viewers in a new geography, or to interrupt the pleasure of Sonbert's travels (and ours) with his developing awareness of the ever-shrinking moment of his life. The Journey, Peter Watkins' 14 ½ hour meta-montage (from which a 50-minute segment will be excerpted), was organized and shot in various American locations, and in Canada, Scotland, France, Germany, the USSR, Mozambique, Australia, Japan, Polynesia, and Mexico. It means to confront the world's most conventionally intimate social grouping, the family, with a process of thought, discussion, community action, and international interchange-in relation to the network of global issues (the arms race, hunger, racism, the mass media ... ) that connects us all.
Rock Hudson is the epitome of a Texan cattle baron as Bick Benedict.
On a trip to genteel Maryland to buy a horse, Hudson returns home
with a new wife as well. Elizabeth Taylor as Leslie Benedict leaves
her liberal and cultured life in verdant Maryland for the dusty,
brown Texas landscape, where those Eastern qualities don't play.
Mercedes McCambridge portrays Bick's sister, Luz, who is reluctant
to give up her position as mistress of the Big House on Bick's
sprawling ranch, Reata. She leaves a small tract of seemingly
worthless land to ranchhand Jett Rink, the last role to be portrayed
by James Dean, who died shortly after finishing Giant.
Rink is the consummate misfit in a community of outsiders. Leslie
is the outsider upon her arrival in Texas, where she learns a
woman's place is not joining men's serious discussions and that
kindness to Mexicans is a serious breach. And the Mexican characters
are excluded by racism from the land where they've lived and labored for generations. Even Bick becomes an outsider late in life when the prejudices he's embraced all his life conflict with the family he loves. When his daughter-in-law, a Mexican woman, is refused service in a restaurant, Bick fights the owner. He goes down swinging, but achieves greatness. The movie's final scene shows two grandchildren, one half Mexican, one blond, the future of the proud Benedict family, of Texas, and of America.
Is there a definitive black experience? Is there an essence to
black identity? "Above all, what has this cost us, black
and nonblack Americans alike-this casual assumption of and endless
searching for a 'definitive' black identity?" Award-winning
director Marlon Riggs set out to explore these questions in his
final documentary, Black Is...Black Ain't, which won the
Filmmakers Trophy at this year's Sundance Festival. Riggs died
in April 1994 and his dedicated production team completed Black
Is...Black Ain't from footage and notes he left behind.
As in his other films (including the controversial Tongues Untied), Riggs is as much in front of the camera as behind it, using his own life to illuminate the quest in Black Is...Black Ain't. He compares his art to his grandmother's quilts, and he threads his themes into what Robert Hawk describes as "an interlacing patchwork of poems, postmodern dances, visual essays, first-person narratives, personal confessions, dramatic skits, and what he refers to as 'verite vignettes.'" A cross section of African-Americans, including Angela Davis and Cornel West, discuss their struggle to find both a personal and communal identity.
Interwoven throughout the film is Riggs' own experience with being different in color, class, sexuality, and AIDS status. Black Is...Black Ain't embraces the diversity within the African-American community and demonstrates a notion of identity that acknowledges crisis and affliction, yet is still empowering and life affirming.
Discussion: Beyond Ethnic "Centricities"
Eric Perkins, University of Pennsylvania
When a master saxophonist refuses to participate in a competition to prove who is the master musician, he is met with derision. Has he lost his talent or his nerve? Or has he discovered some new and deeper meaning to his music that others just cannot understand.
Something Borrowed, Something Blue
(World Premiere)
A young artist forfeits her wedding engagement in order to make
her mark in the art establishment. She denies her unique creativity and becomes entangled in an obscure artist's vision of art and love - a twisted reality which forces her to confront the haunting images of her own personality.
Prison to Praise
(World Premiere)
When twenty-three year old Soldier Jim Wilkins collapses on a training run and AWOL, he ends up in the cooler. There he meets Merlin Carothers, who himself had been arrested for armed robbery in World War Two; their stories strangely parallel each other, and the outcome has a surprisingly positive twist. A sixty minute drama documentary based on the best selling book.