Documentary Field Notes and Flashpoints
A syndicated blog about filmmaking by one of Canada’s formost documentary media creators.
Archive of April, 2009
An image from Helene Klodawsky’s documentary ‘Malls R Us’
Last week I had a chance to see Malls R Us, an excellent new documentary by an excellent Montreal filmmaker, Helene Klodawsky. Helene has made some terrific films, my favourite being No More Tears Sister, a story from Sri Lanka which beautifully illustrates the notion that ‘the personal is political.’ Not in a didactic or sloganeering kind of way, but just by telling a personal story set in the context of civil war and exile. One of the most interesting things about that film is the way colour has been manipulated through chemical treatment of the actual film stock.
Here’s a trailer for Malls R Us.
Malls R Us (produced by Ina Fichman of Instinct Films and Luc Martin-Glousset of Point du Jour) is about shopping malls, and the film gets inside the malls, from North America to Dubai, India and Japan, in every conceivable way. Rather than standing on the outside looking in – or spitting at them for that matter – the film takes us inside the mall not just physically but mentally, inside the heads of the people who conceive, design and build malls as well as the people who use them. One way Helene does that is by interviewing an impressive cast of key characters (kudos for convincing them), the other is by capturing some revealing conversations in the mall context. The film is also very thoughtful, about the deeper meaning of the prevalence of malls. Are they the cathedrals of modern times or – as author Ray Bradbury suggests in the film – today’s version of the town square? Or are they monuments to an era dominated by consumerism to the detriment of higher values? In her narration Helene takes care not to hit us over the head with any ready-made conclusions, which actually makes the film scarier, in a deeper and more subtle way. I asked Helene to talk about her creative process and editorial choices.
Helene Klodawsky
In 2006, while editing Family Motel (an alternative fiction film on a Somali refugee family’s journey into homelessness), I read the initial research on a new project being developed by Instinct Films. Writer Harold Crooks and researcher Terri Foxman were working closely with producer Ina Fichman on her idea about the global spread of shopping malls. I soon signed onto the project as director. Right from the start, there were many challenges as the film had been developed and sold as an international coproduction with many themes, contrasts, characters and locations. I needed to find a way to tell the 70-year-old story of these huge temples to consumerism, describe why malls hold such appeal for the billions of people who visit them, as well as provide a critique of their worldwide proliferation. Added to this was the complexity of getting into to malls to shoot. Think of gaining access to a prison; most of the time it was that difficult, and hence we were extremely limited in what and when we could shoot.
Early on I decided to focus on characters that were intensely involved in the world of malls – whether out of passion or despair – rather than intellectuals or social critics who observed malls only from a distance. I felt it was important that my intended audience (those who both adore and despise shopping centres) listen directly to those people who are fully committed to bringing malls to every corner of the globe. I knew I would have only a few days in each location and hence decided to construct a highly stylized post-modern collage made up of mini portraits of each character alongside malls that represented an issue or struggle. Wherever we shot I was surprised by what we found. For example, who would have thought that Science Fiction guru Ray Bradbury would be a proponent of malls, or that young men travel the US mourning the loss of once thriving, but now dead, malls? I am most proud of capturing the little known anti-mall protests in India – as in most of the world, mall developments seems to be a done deal, quietly accepted by most of the population. Audiences tell me how much they appreciate the complex reading that Malls R Us provides – waking us up to ways in which culture and the environment are being shaped by the everyday places that dot our cities and suburbs.
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An image from Lech Kowalski’s ‘Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?’
Last week I saw the most creatively radical documentary I have ever seen, East of Paradise (2004) by Lech Kowalski. It breaks every convention of story development. The first half of the film is made up of an interview with Kowalski’s mother, about the horrors she experienced as a young girl at the end of the Second World War, in Russian-occupied Poland. Then he cuts to a medley of his own films of junkies on the New York underground scene, filmed over the last couple of decades. And what’s the link? The extreme. That becomes clear in the film, towards the end. Kowalski was here in Montreal for a retrospective of his films at the Cinémathèque Québecoise and had a chance to elaborate. To Kowalski life is real when you’re at the extreme limits of what can be tolerated, and that is what throws light on the rest of our existence. He explained how the horrors his mother had experienced set a sort of standard against which, it seemed, all his own experiences had to be measured. This led him to search out, in his own life and work, some extremely harsh realities. So in a sense, the totally unorthodox structure of his film was totally logical. At the discussion after the film the son of a holocaust victim talked about how he totally identified with this psychological dilemma, and brought up the question of a ’survival gene.’ Kowalski totally agreed, he had received that also from his parents. After all they had been through to survive, he would not have the right to waste his own life, to become one of those junkies you see dying of overdose or AIDS in his own films.
Lech Kowalski (Photo Jocelyne Clarke)
Kowalski believes that we are in a ‘post-documentary era’ where reality is too complex to be dealt with in an ordinary film, especially since film production and distribution are largely controlled by vested interests who are set against free creativity and analysis. He has created a web site called Camera War TV to create a new kind of documentary experience. I think this is a great concept, even though I found some of the films on the site less than impressive.
A fascinating encounter. And during the coming month we will have the time to see more of Kowalski’s films. D.O.A.: A Right of Passage (1980), Born to Lose: The Last Rock and Roll Movie (1999), Gringo: The Story of a Junkie (1987), Rock Soup (1991) and two films on Eastern Europe: The Boot Factory (2000) and On Hitler’s Highway (2002).
There is an excellent interview with Kowalski [in French] on the Cinémathèque’s web site.
P.S. I am sure you saw the British clip on YouTube about Susan Boyle, the ‘unattractive’ woman singer whose performance brings down the house in a resounding victory over prejudice (represented by the attitudes of a talent-show jury). A wonderful little film with important issues, suspense, a terrific main character, excellent character development, a surprising turn-around, an uplifting outcome, reminiscent of classical stories like the ugly duckling and Cinderella. What more can you ask of a doc?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY
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Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in shapes of your own choosing…If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, 1949
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
Aldous Huxley, Introduction to the reprint of Brave New World, 1945
Two terrifying novels haunted the 20th Century and continue to trouble us today: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Huxley’s Brave New World. Every day, newspapers invoke their nightmarish visions, whether driven by Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ repression or Huxley’s consumer seduction and conditioning.
Several generations of readers have used these two novels as beacons, throwing light on contemporary realities. Young people still read them today, and use them to make sense of what’s going on in the world. Orwell and Huxley could never have imagined some of the amazing technological advances of the last few decade. But they understood the fundamental tendencies at work in modern society, and that’s why they are still read today.
Orwell foresaw surveillance, repression, constant war and torture. Huxley imagined rampant commercialism, deception, conditioning and genetic manipulation. Today, unfortunately, many of the daily realities we and people around the world experience combine the ‘Orwellian’ with the ‘Huxleyan.’ Our willing participation in the invasion of our own privacy through our use of Facebook and other social sites on the web is just one recent example.
There is a time-honoured tradition of debate about which one of the two authors, Orwell or Huxley, was more prescient. In the end, authors like Margaret Atwood have concluded that the main issue isn’t ‘who was right,’ but in what ways both authors were right – and what we can learn from using their insights. This is also our view.
For several years now, Varda Burstyn and myself have been working on a film about these issues. However, the subject seemed too large and sprawling to really make a good film, and the most enthusiasm for this project comes from young people who are most interested in participatory, interactive web-based experiences. The project has now found a home on the NFB’s web site Citizenshift. Check it out, comment, contribute!
http://citizen.nfb.ca/brave-new-1984
If they came back to life, Orwell and Huxley would feel vindicated for many of the dystopian trends they foresaw. At the same time, they might well be surprised – and delighted - to see the amount of resistance to these trends, all over the world. Huxley called for caution, for vigilance and for a greater awareness of the potential totalitarian power of scientific and technological innovation. Orwell called for a mobilization of the common people against power and privilege sustained by repression and elite omnipotence. These concerns are echoed in many civil society movements today.
That is why we think this project has a great deal of potential to capture the imagination of video makers and web users.
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Annie Roy and Pierre Allard of ATSA with one component of their installation at the Havana Biennial
Annie Roy et Pierre Allard de ATSA avec une partie de leur installation à la Biennale de La Havane
[Français plus bas]
With my close collaborator Simon Bujold, I am just back from Cuba, where we were filming the artists Annie Roy and Pierre Allard of ATSA as they participated in the 10th Havana Biennial. The theme of the event is Integration and Resistance in a Global World. Annie and Pierre made an installation called Cannonballs and Bubblegum, a way of speaking about the repressive and destructive aspects of consumer culture - a kind of warning to people who live in a context of shortages but whose society might well experience huge changes in the decades to come. This was one of the last shoots for our film Creative Emergency (working title) produced by Amazone Film, already in editing and likely to be released before the end of the year.
Avec mon complice Simon Bujold, je suis tout juste de retour de Cuba, ou nous avons filmé Annie Roy et Pierre Allard de ATSA participant à la 10e Biennale de La Havane. Le thème de l’exposition est Intérgration et Résistance à l’époque de la mondialisation. Pierre et Annie sont venus faire une installation qui s’appelle Boules de canon et gum-balloune, façon de parler des dimensions répressives et destructrices de la société de consommation, sorte d’avertissement pour un pays qui vit la pénurie mais qui risque de vivre des changements importants au cours des prochaines décennies. C’était un de nos derniers tournages pour notre film Urgence Création (titre de travai) produit par Amazone Film - nous sommes déjà en montage, le film devrait sortit avant la fin de l’année.
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