BUFS 2023-2024

Once again, the Brock University Film Society operated as a monthly series during the 2023-2024 season.

Our line-up consisted of the following nine films:

Perfect Days—Thursday, April 11, 2024, 7:00 pm @ the Film House

Wim Wenders began his career as a filmmaker in the late 1960s in West Germany, where he quickly became a leading figure in the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Margarethe von Trotta, and Volker Schlöndorff. Films like The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), and The American Friend established Wenders’s reputation as director with a particularly sensitive understanding of West German culture and its ambivalent relationship with American culture. These films also brought Wenders widespread acclaim on the international art house film circuit.

Wenders reached directorial superstardom in the 1980s with films like Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). The former, which starred Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski, captured Wenders’s fascination with America, with American stories, with American landscapes, and with American music (especially the country blues stylings of Ry Cooder) at its strongest yet. The latter, which starred Bruno Ganz (one of the stars of the New German Cinema) and the newcomer Solveig Dommartin, alongside a particularly memorable turn from Peter “Columbo" Falk, playing an unnamed American film and television star much like himself, was one of the definitive portraits of the divided city of Berlin in the period immediately preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It was during this era—the 1980s—that Wenders began to make documentaries with frequency. He would go on to make such celebrated documentaries as The Soul of a Man (2003), about the blues, Pina (2022), a highly ambitious 3D film about the dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, and The Salt of the Earth (2014), a powerful film about the famed Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, but his most famous nonfiction film was Buena Vista Social Club, the behind-the-scenes story of how the beloved Cuban jazz all-stars album was orchestrated and recorded by Ry Cooder, and then taken on tour to perform before adoring audiences in Europe and America.

The documentary that is most relevant here, however, is Tokyo-Ga (1985), a film about Wenders’s love affair with Tokyo, but especially about his love affair with the Japanese auteur Yasujiro Ozu, whose subtle, measured treatment of contemporary life in the Japanese capital in films like Tokyo Story (1953) was such an inspiration for Wenders and others.

Now, with his latest film, Perfect Days, Wenders has returned to Tokyo to tell a tale of contemporary Tokyo that focuses on a particularly humble, diligent, kind-hearted, and enlightened Tokoyite, played by Koji Yakusho. The role won Yakusho the Best Actor Award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. It is exactly the kind of subtle, nuanced role that Ozu would have appreciated greatly.

The Zone of Interest—Thursday, March 7, 2024, 6:30 pm @ the Film House

Like so many directors of his generation—David Fincher, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, and others—the British director Jonathan Glazer specialized in music videos early in his career.  He’d actually gotten his start in theatre, but when he switched to motion pictures, it was through commercials and music videos for bands like Radiohead, Massive Attack, and Blur that he made a name for himself.

By the year 2000, Glazer had transitioned to feature filmmaking, and he did so in audacious fashion.  His first film was Sexy Beast, an outrageous heist film starring Ray Winstone and co-starring Ben “Gandhi” Kingsley as an unhinged sociopath.  The film was notable for its settings—Spain’s Costa del Sol and London—and for Winstone’s brilliant spin on the retired ex-con who gets pulled in for “one last job,” but it was Kingsley who stole the show, and who secured a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards for his performance.

Since then, Glazer has only directed films intermittently, but when he has, he’s tended to make waves.  Take Under the Skin (2013), for instance, an odd, fascinating sci-fi film starring Scarlett Johansson.  In essence, this was a film in that “sexy alien comes to Earth and wreaks havoc” vein, but it played like Roger Donaldson’s Species (1995)* meets Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968), with maybe a pinch of Ken Russell and a little Danny Boyle thrown in for good measure.

This time around, Glazer has made one of the most acclaimed and controversial films of the year.  Based loosely on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest is an ambitious and highly unusual film about the atrocities of the Nazi regime. It focuses almost entirely on the family life of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss—he, the commandant of Auschwitz; she, the hausfrau who cultivated her domestic ideal directly adjacent to the notorious concentration camp.  As Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post has argued, the experience of The Zone of Interest is one of watching two films simultaneously:  one dealing with the banality of evil that is the Höss household; the other, made up of images conjured in our minds, knowing full well the scale of the crimes taking place on the other side of that wall.

Glazer has picked up awards for The Zone of Interest at both the Cannes Film Festival (where it won two major prizes) and the BAFTAs.  It has been nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best International Feature, Best Director, and Best Film.

*Improbably, Ben “Gandhi” Kingsley appeared in Species, too (but not in Species 2).

Anatomy of a Fall—Thursday, February 8, 2024, 6:30 pm @ the Film House

Justine Triet’s star had been steadily rising for about fifteen years, but it reached new heights last May when her latest film, Anatomy of a Fall, took the top prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

Anatomy of a Fall is part court procedural, part murder mystery, and part contemporary family melodrama—the latter featuring a depth and intensity reminiscent of the work of Ingmar Bergman, and a concern with technology and memory that we might find in an Atom Egoyan film.  But it is Sandra Hüller’s fascinating and mystifying performance as Sandra Voyter, a talented and successful novelist who is accused of the murder of her husband, that has electrified audiences.

Indeed, if it’s been a big year for Triet, it’s also been a momentous one for Hüller.  Anatomy of a Fall is nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards, and Triet is also up for Best Director.  Hüller, in turn, is nominated in the Best Actress category for her performance in Anatomy of a Fall, but she also stars in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, another film that has received nominations for Best Picture and Best Director.

One of the themes explored in Anatomy of a Fall has to with the writing of fiction, and where the material that a writer turns into fiction is actually drawn from.  Are Voyter’s novels direct reflections of her personal life?  Can clues to the truth behind her marriage and her husband’s untimely death be found in her books?  What is the stuff of fiction, and how incriminating is it?  It’s a theme Triet has explored elsewhere in her work.  In fact, she even did so in a film that co-starred Hüller—Sibyl from 2019.  In that film, it was a psychotherapist-turned-novelist (played by Virginie Efira) who was basing her novels directly on the lives of her patients.  And Hüller played a director who was making a film about a troubled relationship that mirrored aspects of her own troubled relationship, and that starred her duplicitous partner.  What is the line that separates truth from fiction?

May December—January 18, 2024, 6:30 pm @ the Film House

Todd Haynes burst onto the film scene in 1987 with his underground classic Superstar:  The Karen Carpenter Story, whose odd but fascinating delivery was part camp (the drama was acted out with the use of Barbie dolls), part music film (The Carpenters and the soft rock revolution they helped pioneer, and part family melodrama (with a considerable amount of tragedy, given the story in question and Karen Carpenter’s terrible demise).

Since then Haynes has continued to return to music film with regularity, as evidenced by such films as The Velvet Goldmine (1998), on Glam Rock in the 1970s, I’m Not There (2007), his phantasmagoric study of the Bob Dylan phenomenon of the 1960s an 1970s, and The Velvet Underground (2021), his definitive documentary on the legendary underground art rock band of the same name.

But there’s little question that Haynes’s primary fixation has been with creating unorthodox variations on the family melodrama, and his mastery of this form has resulted in most of his most notable projects:  Poison (1991), his first feature-length cause célèbre; Safe (1995), his first collaboration with the great Julianne Moore; Far From Heaven (2002), his tribute to Douglas Sirk and especially All That Heaven Allows (1954), and his second collaboration with Moore; Mildred Pierce (2011), his inspired mini-series version of the noir classic, starring Kate Winslet; and Carol (2015), his mesmerizing, award-winning adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, “a modern novel of two women.”

Now Haynes is back with May December another utterly bewitching and highly unconventional family melodrama, this one set in contemporary coastal Georgia.  This time it’s based on a story ripped from the tabloids (the Mary Kay Letourneau sex scandal of the late 1990s and early 2000s), but Haynes has taken this material and transformed it into a captivating hall of mirrors.  Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman star, and, as the film’s poster suggests, and as one critic has put it, “it’s a little as if Ingmar Bergman’s Persona had been remade by the Real Housewives of Savannah.”

The Pigeon Tunnel—December 7, 2023, 7:00 pm @ the Film House

This week we’ll be screening the latest documentary by Errol Morris, easily one of the most accomplished nonfiction filmmakers of the 50 years. Morris began his career in film as an upstart and an outsider, one who brought a very unorthodox approach to documentary representation on early films like Gates of Heaven (1978) and Vernon, Florida (1981). His sensibility was darkly ironic, and he displayed a knack for finding quirky characters, but his real gift was that he was unusually good at conducting interviews.* Since then, his best projects— films like The Thin Blue Line (1988), Mr. Death (1999), Standard Operating Procedure (2008),Tabloid (2010), and the series Wormwood (2017)—have all been showcases of his masterful skill with interviews. In fact, a number of these films have seen Morris go toe-to-toe with particularly tricky interview subjects—figures of historical importance known for their slipperiness and their dissembling, like Robert McNamara in The Fog of War (2003) and Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known (2013).

The Pigeon Tunnel is another such interview showcase. Here, Morris’s subject is David Cornwell, the ex-British spy turned master of the spy novel, who was better known by his nom de plume John le Carré. Le Carré is best known for the clarity and brilliance of his insight into the murky and labyrinthine world of Cold War espionage, as well as the impeccable British irony and reserve he brought to the genre in such works as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and Smiley’s People (1979). When the Cold War ended, Le Carré somehow found a way to adapt and even flourish, as evidenced by The Tailor of Panama (1996) and The Constant Gardener (2001). Many of these novels have been adapted into memorable films, with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965), starring Richard Burton, The Constant Gardener (2005), with Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), featuring Gary Oldman, being particular standouts.

As the title suggests, Morris’s film is based on Le Carré’s utterly fascinating 2016 memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life. David Cornwell died in 2020 at the age of 89. Morris was lucky enough to have gotten the opportunity to interview Cornwell at length just before he died. And now we’re lucky enough to have Morris’s film on the great John le Carré.

*As a PhD student in his twenties, Morris prided himself on being able to get an interview subject to fill both sides of a 120-minute audiocassette (remember those?) with the rambling, revealing answer to just a single question or two.

Rush to Judgment—November 22, 2023, 7:00 pm @ the Film House

Wednesday, November 22, 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  To commemorate this solemn occasion, the Film House together with the Brock University Film Society will be showing a new 4K restoration of Emile de Antonio’s 1967 documentary Rush to Judgment, the first important film to address the President’s murder and to call the conclusions of the the Warren Commission Report (1964) into question.

As the title suggests, the film was based on Mark Lane’s book of the same name, which had been released a year earlier to great acclaim—and great controversy—and Lane is a major figure in the film, leading its inquiry.  Lane’s Rush to Judgment (1966) was the first mass-market book to raise serious doubts about the Warren Commission, and to investigate the murders of John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Officer J.D. Tippit of the Dallas Police Department, who Oswald was also accused of having murdered during the same crime spree.  Though it had been preceded by a number of self-published books on the topic, Lane’s book had a certain weight to it.  Lane was a lawyer and former New York State legislator, one who had represented the Oswald family before the Warren Commission out of concerns that the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office had botched the investigation, and, therefore, he was particularly well-versed in the details of the case.  His book was published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and it came with an introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper, a distinguished Professor of History at Oxford University.

De Antonio was a maverick documentary filmmaker whose first film, Point of Order! (1964) was a brilliant indictment of McCarthyism and 1950s anti-communist fear mongering constructed entirely out of archival materials.  He would go on to make such celebrated documentaries as In The Year of the Pig (1968), the first feature-length film to explore America’s involvement in Vietnam in depth and to construct a powerful argument against the war, and Millhouse:  A White Comedy (1971), a trenchant critique of Richard Milhous Nixon that was produced and released during Nixon’s first term, years before news of the Watergate scandal went public.

De Antonio’s Rush to Judgment is a crucial artifact from the period immediately after the assassination of the President, and just a year before the assassination of his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, who was running for president at the time.  It features interviews with numerous first-hand witnesses of the attack on the Presidential motorcade, including Abraham Zapruder, the businessman and amateur filmmaker whose 8mm record of the assassination remains one of the most heavily scrutinized and widely discussed pieces of celluloid ever filmed. After years where Rush to Judgment languished in obscurity due to poor distribution, de Antonio’s bracing documentary has been digitally remastered so it can raise questions anew about this “murder most foul.”

Please join us for this special screening.  After the screening, there will be a discussion of the film led by myself and Dr. Barry Grant.

The Killer—November 9, 2023, 7:00 pm @ the Film House

David Fincher has always been a director of bold visual style.  He’s best known for films like Fight Club (1999), Panic Room (2002), The Social Network (2010), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), and Gone Girl (2014), but he got his start directing music videos in the 1980s, including such icons of pop and postmodernism as Madonna’s “Express Yourself” (1989) and “Vogue” (1990), so he’s very much a product of the MTV Generation.

Of course, Fincher is also know for his stylish, yet macabre fascination with serial killers, as exemplified by films like Se7en (1995) and Zodiac (2007), and the television series Mindhunter (2017-9), all of which delve deep into efforts to investigate, study, and come to terms with the psychology of serial murderers.  Which is one of the reasons this latest project is so interesting.

Here, with The Killer, Fincher has turned his attention to the mind of another kind of serial killer:  a paid one, a professional assassin.  Michael Fassbender plays a high-calibre contract killer whose complicated psychology and brazen amorality are under scrutiny in a tale of double-crossing and retribution that is reminiscent of such classics of the genre as Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967) and Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999).  Did I mention The Killer is “wickedly funny,” too? More than one critic has mentioned how incredibly entertaining the film is.

In the end, it all boils down to that distinctive Fincher aesthetic, though.  As Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian puts it: “This is a thriller of pure surface and style, managed with terrific flair.”

Stop Making Sense—October 22, 2023, 7:00 pm @ The Film House

By 1983, Jonathan Demme was a promising director who had been working in the industry for about a decade but had yet to hit full stride.  He was on the verge of becoming an indie darling with a knack for using hip New Wave-fuelled soundtracks to full effect, as he did with Something Wild (1986) and Married to the Mob (1988), but his blockbusters of the ‘90s (The Silence of the Lambs [1991] and Philadelphia [1993]) were still beyond reach.  The film that stands as the major pivot point in Demme’s career was his first documentary, and, more importantly, his first rockumentary:  Stop Making Sense (1984).

Here, a talented and aspiring director teamed up with the band Talking Heads at the peak of their powers and at the height of their artistic ambitions, and the result of this most fortuitous cinematic alchemy was (yes, you guessed it!) pure gold.  Together, Demme and David Byrne, the band’s singer, lyricist, and resident performance artist, deconstructed the concert film, stripping it of its clichés and excesses (e.g., The Song Remains the Same [1976]).  Then, with his bandmates Tina Weymouth (bass), Jerry Harrison (keyboards and guitar), and Chris Frantz (drums), plus an expanded lineup that included such luminaries as Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic), Byrne and Demme reconstructed the concert film as something both mysterious and mesmerizing, an utterly irrepressible, totally irresistible, hyper-kinetic experience.  As Roger Ebert once put it, “The overwhelming impression throughout Stop Making Sense is of enormous energy, of life being lived at a joyous high.”

From this point on, Demme became known for his taste in music, as well as his genius for capturing it on film.  He made a large number of rockumentaries in the years to follow, as well as many music videos, and he developed lasting relationships with such icons as Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen.  But it’s safe to say that he never achieved the heights of Stop Making Sense ever again.  It’s not clear anyone has.

The concerts immortalized in Stop Making Sense occurred in Hollywood in December 1983.  This Sunday we’ll be holding a special Sunday Meeting edition of the Brock University Film Society featuring a brand-new 4K restoration of the film just in time for its 40th anniversary.  Take Me to the River!  (And don’t forget your dancing shoes!)

Searching for Sugar Man—September 14, 2023, 7:00 pm @ The Film House

Hello, everyone,

That's right—it's that time of year again!  We'll be kicking off our BUFS 2023-2024 season tomorrow, Thursday, September 14, with a special presentation of Malik Bendjelloul's 2012 film Searching for Sugar Man, his documentary on the mysterious life and the remarkable impact of Sixto Rodriguez.  This supremely talented musician and songwriter from Detroit died in early August at the age of 81, and the news came as something of a shock for those of us who are fans—rumors of his death had dogged the enigmatic performer for decades.  Searching for Sugar Man won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary in 2013, one of only a handful of music documentaries to have done so,* but this film is quite unlike most other rockumentaries--there are so many unexpected twists and turns to this story.  

If you've had the pleasure of having seen Searching for Sugar Man in the past, here is your opportunity to revisit the film and pay tribute to the man once again.  If you've never seen Searching for Sugar Man, you (and your students) are in for a treat!

*For those who are curious, the other films in this elite group are Brigitte Berman’s Artie Shaw: Time is All You’ve Got (1985), Morgan Neville’s Twenty Feet from Stardom (2013), Asif Kapadia’s Amy (2015), and Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's Summer of Soul (2021).

Hot Off the Presses!: "Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised): A Docalogue"

fig. a: don’t judge this book by its cover

Very happy to be a part of this fine collection about this truly amazing film.

As the title page for my essay suggests,

fig. b: secret histories

my thoughts on the film were prompted in large part by Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples’ absolutely breathtaking duet of “Precious Lord” during the extended tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.

fig. c: Mavis & Mahalia

I’ve seen Questlove’s film so many times now, and I still get goosebumps during that scene every single time. Anyway, that led to a consideration of the Staple Singers and their outsized role in the early history of the popular music documentary—Festival (1967), Soul to Soul (1971), Wattstax (1973), The Last Waltz (1978)—and how Summer of Soul, which documents the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, fits in with this body of work.

fig. d: Festival (1967)

fig. e: Soul to Soul (1971)

fig. f: Wattstax (1973)

fig. g: The Last Waltz ((1978)

fig. h: Summer of Soul (2021)

If you’d like to know more about this collection, you can find its webpage here.

If you’re a true devotee of Summer of Soul, you can order the book from the obvious multinational technology sources, but wouldn’t it be better to order it from a local, independent bookstore instead? Or just ask for it from your local library. If you happen to be in the vicinity of a university library, it should be pretty easy to track down.

aj

"Reclaiming Popular Documentary"--Hot off the presses!

The UPS guy showed up with such urgency at 9:00 pm last night, the truck’s stereo blaring at top volume as he pulled up.  I wasn't expecting anything and I couldn't figure out what could possibly be so important. Turns out he had reason to be excited. He had my brand-new, hot-off-the-presses copy of Reclaiming Popular Documentary (Indiana University Press), edited by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson. Lots of great material in here : public television and its relationship to the doc ecology; aerial cinematography and the fly-over documentary genre; food docs; popular music docs; eco-docs; melodrama in popular documentary; true crime docs; viral media; etc. The collection also happens to include my essay "Errol Morris, the New York Times, Docmedia, and Op-Docs as Pop Docs” (not sure if the UPS guy realized that, but...)..

What’s the gist of it? Well, you’ll have to read it, but it’s got some scope to it (MK-Ultra, Seymour Hersh, journalism, photography, Abu Ghraib, “docmedia,” online newspapers, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, smallpox, biological warfare, Steve Bannon, etc.), largely because the work of Errol Morris—in motion picture and print form—has so much scope to it, even if one focuses almost entirely on Morris’s involvement with the New York Times alone. Which of Morris’s films are discussed? Well, primarily a trio of his contributions to the New York Times’ Op-Docs series—The Umbrella Man (2011), November 22, 1963 (2013), and Demon in the Freezer (2016)—as well as The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Wormwood. (2017).

Once again, I find myself in excellent company--contributors include Zoé Druick, Mike Baker, Patricia Aufderheide, S. Topiary Landberg, Rick Prelinger,, Ezra Winton, the late Jonathan Kahana, and many others.

If you’re interested in learning more about the book, its contents, and its authors, you can find that information here.

It's been a long, strange, but fruitful trip, Christie and Steve--congratulations, and thank you for all the hard work!

aj

"Mapping the Rockumentary: Images of Sound and Fury" (2021)--Now in Print!

fig. a: Metallica’s Deliverance by Rockumentary

My copy of Mapping the Rockumentary: Images of Sound and Fury (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) showed up on our front door last Sunday.

fig. b: Uli M. Schüppel’s The Road to God Knows Where (1990) as it appears in the opening montage of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), roughly 12,152 days into the life of Nick Cave

This book includes my essay "Minimum and Maximum Rock 'n' Roll: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Rockumentary Form," which deals primarily with two films and two radically different approaches to the popular music documentary: The Road to God Knows Where (1990) and 20,000 Days on Earth (2014). Whereas The Road to God Knows Where can be seen as a ultra-minimalist “anti-rockumentary,” 20,000 Days on Earth is a maximalist meta-documentary, and one of the greatest works of “nonfiction” (the film goes to great lengths to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction) in the last 20+ years, in my opinion.

There’s lots of great material in this collection, spanning folk, jazz, pop, psych, punk, post-punk, metal, country, indie, K-pop, prog, and, yes, rock, and encompassing a wide variety of perspectives and approaches. It’s a book that aims to vastly expand our understanding of the rockumentary genre, its history, and its potential. All told there are 25 chapters broken up into five categories—histories, gender, aesthetics & politics, counter-cultures, and futures—plus an introduction.

I’d like to thank the editors of this fine book, Gunnar Iversen and Scott MacKenzie, for their vision and diligence. It truly was a pleasure working on this project.

aj

The City Symphony Phenomenon--Now in Paperback!

fig. a: judging a book by its front cover

The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars, the book I co-wrote and co-edited with my colleagues Steven Jacobs and Eva Hielscher, and which was originally released in 2019 in a pricey hardcover edition, is now out in a considerably less pricey paperback edition.

This project was set in motion by a symposium that took place in Ghent, Belgium over the course of two days in December 2014. The idea behind this original event was to broaden our knowledge of the city symphony cycle, experimental nonfiction films, made between 1920 and 1940 in particular, that sought to capture the energies, complexities, and dynamism of the modern metropolis. Instead of continuing to focus on the most famous versions of the genre (Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City [1927], Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera [1929], and Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice [1930], not to mention the first of the precursors, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhattta [1921]), we would screen and discuss a dozen lesser-known examples in order to see what could be learned by widening the field of vision. Introductions were presented by scholars from across Europe and North America, the films in question were screened, often with live musical accompaniment (most of them were silent), lively discussions ensued, and all of it took place in a well-appointed movie theatre and was open to the public. Many of these presentations, and the discussions and debates that helped refine them, became the core of the book project.

fig. b: judging a book by its back cover

By 2015, Eva, Steven, and I had managed to track down about 35-40 city symphonies, many of which had long been overlooked or forgotten entirely. We were quite proud of this achievement, and there’s no question that it provided us with a deeper understanding of the genre. However, we continued to scour archives and libraries, and work with curators and other interested parties to find other city symphonies, and our list of films grew considerably. By the time we completed our project, we’d managed to identify over 80 films that together contributed to the “city symphony phenomenon” between the years 1920-1940, and we’d helped organize two programs of city symphonies at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy (as part of the 2017 and 2018 editions).

Our book is made up of three parts:

1. A lengthy and in-depth introduction that covers the genre, its characteristics, its scope, and the reasons for the demise of its “classical” era.

2. A collection of 16 case studies written by ourselves along with about a dozen other international scholars, including Malte Hagener, Michael Cowan, Christa Blümlinger, Malcolm Turvey, Merrill Schleier, John David Rhodes, Ivo Blom, Floris Paalman, Tom Gunning, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Cristina Meneguello.

3. A survey of the city symphonies of the inter-war period, including short discussions of 80+ films, plus production notes,, technical features, archival sources, and other information.

One of the design features that we’re particularly pleased with has to do with the book’s visuals, its stills, photos, and other illustrations. We wanted the text to be image-rich. The topic—”cinema, art, and urban modernity”—demanded it. So we devised a grid, or “mosaic” system to place multiple images from a single film where otherwise only one would have gone, thereby providing a stronger sense of the film’s iconography, its aesthetics, and its montage. Here are just a few examples:

The book has received strong reviews, including the following:

"The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars, a product of scholarly sleuthing and obsession, is a fascinating and valuable achievement."—Charles Musser (Yale University), book review, Film Quarterly, Summer 2019

"With the publication of The City Symphony Phenomenon:  Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars, editors Steven Jacobs, Eva Hielscher, and Anthony Kinik have created an invaluable contribution to the understanding of this compelling form of international film modernism… In choosing the term phenomenon, and in viewing it as a filmmaking movement engaging both amateur and professionals alike, this book makes a compelling case for not only revising notions of how film scholars understand the concept of genre, but demanding a re-evaluation of the boundary conditions under which such scholarly claims are theorized and validated."—S. Topiary Landberg (UC Santa Cruz), book review, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Volume 30 Issue 1, Spring 2021

It directly inspired a comprehensive retrospective of the genre at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in January 2019, soon after its initial release, as well as a seminar (“Expanding and Reconsidering the City Symphony”) at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference in Seattle in March 2019.

And now it’s available in a paperback edition.

aj

This is Not an Interview: A Conversation with Yung Chang About "This is Not a Movie" (2019)

fig. a: This is Not a Poster

As of early March of 2020, plans were in place to host the talented Canadian documentary filmmaker Yung Chang at the Film House in St. Catharines, Ontario so that he might introduce his latest film, This is Not a Movie: Robert Fisk and the Politics of Truth (2019), attend the screening, and participate in a Q & A session with the audience afterwards.

A little over a week later, aspects of the lockdown began to go into effect, including the termination of face-to-face classes at Brock University where I teach, and the cancellation of all events at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, including film screenings at the Film House, and, by extension, any and all Brock University Film Society events.

When our plan to bring Chang to town in person was scrapped for obvious reasons, I conducted a Zoom interview with him in late May 2020 instead and we figured out a way to make the film available to local audiences via the "Film House at Home" program (Thank you, Film House! Thank you, Blue Ice Docs!).

What was meant to be a 15-minute interview turned into something closer to a 60-minute one, but I managed to edit it down to a 15-minute version (plus intro) that focuses in large part on one of my favourite parts of the discussion: the intricate editing of "This is Not a Movie." If you're interested, you can find that edit here .

If, however, you’d prefer to get a sense of the full scope of the interview, what you’ll find below is a transcription, one that’s been edited for clarity and concision.

By the fall of 2020, Chang’s film was getting a wider release in the United States and receiving widespread (and well-deserved) critical acclaim. Consequently, Chang was involved in a whole new round of promotional appearances, some of them on his own, and some of them with Fisk himself. And then the unthinkable happened: Robert Fisk died, at the age of 74, the apparent victim of a severe stroke. In its obituary, The New York Times quoted from This is Not a Movie directly: “You cannot get near the truth without being there.” The choice was fitting. Not only was Chang’s film the final and most exhaustive attempt to come to terms with Fisk and his work on screen, but Chang himself appeared to have taken Fisk’s dictum to heart in the making of the film—he’d followed his subject to Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Syria, among other places, in order to get the story, in order to capture the man, his journalism, and his legacy.

Since that time the tributes to Fisk have continued to pour in from around the world, and This is Not a Movie has made many Best Films of 2020 lists.

R.I.P. Robert Fisk, 1946-2010.

—————

Hello, everyone!  Hello, Film House fans!  Hello, Brock University Film Society fans!  Welcome to an experiment in #stayhome viewing.  

Today we’ll be holding a conversation that brings together two different people—myself and my guest speaker—in two different cities—St. Catharines, Ontario and Toronto, Ontario—united on screen through the miracle of modern videoconferencing.

I’ll be talking to one of the most talented directors working in Canada today, a leading documentary filmmaker with an international profile:  Yung Chang.

Chang has been making waves with his work since his feature film debut in 2007, Up the Yangtze, a powerful and poignant travelogue of a voyage by boat—on a cruise ship—up the Yangtze river—one that studied the impact of the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam on the region.  

Since then Chang has continued to receive widespread acclaim at home and abroad for such films as China Heavyweight, which dealt with the rise of boxing in contemporary China; The Fruit Hunters, a film about fruit, especially exotic fruit, and the characters who obsess over them; and Gatekeeper, a film about suicide and societal taboos in Japan.

His latest film is the film we’ll be discussing tonight and which you’ll have a chance to screen after this intro, if you haven’t had a chance to do so yet.  That film is This is Not a Movie:  Robert Fisk and the Politics of Truth.  

It might very well be Chang’s most ambitious film to date.  It’s a film that has broad appeal for those with an interest in journalism, in political science, in the history and politics of the Middle East, in wars and conflict zones, and in documentary form.  And for all of these reasons, it’s a film that is sure to spark analysis and conversation for years to come.

fig. b: the miracle of modern videoconferencing

AK:  Yung, great to see you again!

So, we’re talking about This is Not a Movie, your latest feature film.  This is a film that is a number of things, but it’s essentially a profile of a single person, the journalist Robert Fisk.  For those who might not be familiar with his work and the many accolades he’s received over the decades, what’s your 30-second elevator synopsis of Fisk and his career?

YC:  Robert Fisk… Well, he’s one of the most well-known British journalists and one of the most lauded foreign correspondents anywhere…. He writes for the newspaper The Independent in the UK.  He’s the only international journalist to have interviewed Osama Bin Laden three times.  He’s had a storied career.  He’s 75 now—he’s working, lives in Beirut.  He’s written a few tomes on his experiences as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East that have become essential readings on the region.  He’s someone who often writes on behalf of those whose voices are left out of the mainstream media’s accounts of the the region, and someone who examines stories that other journalists might not.

AK:  I know this project was long in the making and a true labour of love.  How did this project first come together?  What was the impetus?  What attracted you to the project?  And what were your first conversations/interactions with Fisk like?

YC:  I went to Concordia University in the ‘90s.  I was part of the Fine Arts community there.  And I remember we would gather in this one café—Café X.  That was the place where all the activists would hang out.  And you could use their crappy computer and their dial up connection, and we would get on Z Net and access Z magazine and read these columns by journalists and thinkers from around the world.  And specifically I’m thinking of Noam Chomsky, and Naomi Klein—all the prominent leftist voices.  And Robert Fisk was there, too.  And around 9/11 and its immediate aftermath I really gravitated to his writings.  They revealed perspectives that I just wasn’t getting elsewhere at the time and that I was yearning for in my attempts to understand what was happening in response to the September 11th attacks.

Fast forward to 2016 and that fateful night of November 8 and the Presidential Election.  I think the mainstream media failed us greatly on that occasion. That had me thinking about my media literacy again.  That was a wake-up call.  We have to be our own custodians when it comes to being informed.

And right around that time I received a phone call from the National Film Board with the idea of making a film about Robert Fisk.  The two things collided and I said to myself: “serendipity.”  So I went to Beirut, where Robert Fisk lives, and I met with him, and I was very nervous.  I thought to myself, “It’s going to be scary to meet this giant of journalism.”  And, in fact, he wasn’t intimidating at all.  He’s charming, funny, witty—it was a bit disarming, actually.  And I realized he’s a guy I could get along with.  He’s a guy I could potentially spend a couple of years making a film about.  Because that’s important.  Can you foresee this connection with your subject?  And I thought there was something there.

What really settled it for me was that we were walking through the streets of Beirut.  And he’s like an encyclopedia.  He has a sharp memory—instant recall—and boundless energy.  So we’re walking through the streets and he’s able to point out specific historical references—from the days of the Roman Empire to recent assassinations.  And to me that discourse was something that provided the structure of the movie—a film that could leap back and forth between times, while examining the cyclical nature of history. 

So I knew I had something there, but, as for the rest, this was the first time in my career that I had no idea how to make this film.  I don’t know the subject of the Middle East.  So I had to learn, and being able to be there [Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere] was really important.  And as Robert says, I was something of a blank slate.  The fact that I wasn’t coming in with preconceived judgments was a good thing.

Sorry, that’s a long-winded answer.  

AK:  That’s okay. Continue.

YC: I got a lot of encouragement from my producers.  They told me, “You don’t have to know how to make this film.  Go in and go with your instincts.”  And what happened was that the film was very rigorously structured in the editing room.  I worked with a remarkable editor, Mike Munn—he cut Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell and Peter Mettler’s Picture of Light.  He’s very patient and detail-oriented.  He carved out these very layered, organic moments where subtext and theme would just roll into the next scene.  

For me, when I watch This is Not a Movie, it doesn’t really trip me up.  It’s layered, and it’s this long essay, in a sense.  It’s a profile of Robert Fisk, but it’s a film that’s also meant to spark discussions and debates amongst friends and family on the nature of truth and the truth about journalism.

AK:  This is a film that’s very much about the Middle East and its politics, and how this region and its tensions are covered in the media by journalists.  It’s also film about being a foreign correspondent whose beat is wars and conflict zones.  But more generally it’s a film about the art, the craft, and the ethics of journalism.  What was the most surprising thing that you learned about journalism from the making of this film? 

YC: For me, what was surprising was realizing that journalism is essentially storytelling.  It’s very subjective.  For Robert, he’s always looking for that arc.

Just to rewind a little bit.  The structure of the film is also built around the arc of a character—and that is Robert Fisk’s transformation from a young, idealistic journalist to a jaded, grizzled journalist at the end of the film.  And part of that arc was his connection to [Alfred] Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent and cinema and storytelling.

AK:  That’s a great moment in the film, too.

YC:  Yeah, I love that moment.  It’s not in the movie, but initially [Fisk] was going to become a film critic.  So he knows everything about cinema.  He knows about the French New Wave—that’s his favourite film movement.  He really knows his stuff.  So he understands editing, and the construction of story.  And certainly in terms of the written word and language, he’s an expert.  And so he’s very attuned to storytelling, and for me that was quite illuminating.  “Oh, yeah, [when we’re dealing with journalism,] we are in a way telling stories…”  

But he’s created for himself a rigorous approach to journalism, which is defined by his reporting on the side of those who suffer and to question authority.  These ideas have become a mantra for him, they are what keep him grounded—to the point of controversy.  He’s willing to go to that edge because that’s what he believes—that’s his integrity.  That was something that I learned that was surprising to me, and that makes him so unique as a personality and as a journalist.

Someone like Fisk can push through all the muck and mire of truth online because his system of gathering knowledge goes well beyond the Internet.

AK:  There’s that one moment in the film that I really like where he’s talking about  the voice of his journalism, and how when he writes a piece he’s thinking about it in a conversational sense and he really wants to be as clear as possible and to really communicate with his reader and to not make things impenetrable.  I found that interesting—his concern with just being understood and reaching a vast number of readers.  He wants to be a public intellectual in addition to being a standup journalist.

YC:  Yeah, that’s true.  He’s close with Noah Chomsky.  Edward Said was a very close friend of his.  These are his inspirations—mentors, even.  If you’re not familiar with his work, I would recommend his books—Pity the Nation and The Great War for Civilisation.  They’re emotional, raw, eloquently written.  And you can access all the work that he references in our film—all the columns he’s written—are available on the Independent website.  Just search “Robert Fisk Independent” and you’ll come up with all the articles—and I recommend reading through those.  In addition, on the Independent website we have included some deleted scenes from the film, one of which we had to cut because it didn’t fit the overall tone of the film.  But it’s a car chase scene and it takes place on the streets of Beirut as he’s pursuing an environmental story.  And in it you get to see Fisk in his element, wanting to get the story, being the detective. 

AK:  I want to come back to the issue of editing that you mentioned earlier.  The editing in the film is oftentimes breathtaking.  The first time my breath was taken away was in the opening minute-two minutes of the film.  There’s that transition between Iran in the early 1980s and Syria recently, in the last few years.  And it’s just such a subtle cut—the first time you see it—and such an incredible transition.  It sets a tone.  The editing right from the start is impressive.  One thing that struck me—it’s the only example I can think of in your work where you were working with archival material a lot.  I wonder if you could tell us about that.  At what point in time in the project was it obvious that it would have that archival element to it?  What was the archival material that you had access to?  And did that aspect of the project influence the original material that you were shooting?  Or did that archival angle come up later in the game?

YC:  That’s a great question.  Mike and I approached the story with the idea that we had two pieces of archival material—maybe three—that were essential.  One of them was this series that Fisk was involved with as its host in the early 1990s called From Beirut to Bosnia.  That was a crucial piece.  We had three different archival films that documented Fisk in different eras in his life.  We had the BBC documentary that he did in Northern Ireland—when he had long hair and kind of had a resemblance to a Woody Allen-type character.  And then we had the ‘90s with From Beirut to Bosnia.  And then we had our contemporary material.  And then in between we had another documentary about the Times of London—the one where Fisk talks about [Rupert] Murdoch.  So those we had as sources, but we had no idea how to fit them into the film.  But we knew we would want to be able to jump between times.  And the original impetus for that was that I wanted to be able to interview Fisk and get him to talk about things and reference something—and then we jump to some footage that related to that reference.  And it was impossible to figure out how to do that.  And quickly we realized that the form had to grow out of the editing process organically.  

The opening sequence was actually built around a bit of audio on cassette that Fisk had in his archives.  He had all of these field recordings that he did.  And I listened to them all and I found the bit that we used in the opening.  But all we had was just sound—analogue sound—with no image.  And we were struggling to find a way to visualize it.  I didn’t want to do recreation.  Anyway, one day in the editing room we received a hard drive.  We put it in and turned it on, and here were images related to the actual moments caught on that audiocassette, and you see Fisk in it.  This was archive material from the BBC.  Fisk realized that at the time that the audio was recorded he was with this cinematographer named Gavin Hewitt—a journalist—who was filming.  It’s not exactly in synch, but we managed to find the moments where it felt like it was aligned, and that’s what you have there.  It was a remarkable moment—to discover that.

We knew we wanted to punch in pretty quick—bring you right into the story of Robert Fisk’s career very quickly and succinctly.  And that magical edit to the present really defines the structure of the movie.  It signals the way the film is going to flow.  It gives the audience a sense of the way the movie is going to move back and forth across time.  So to me, that really is one of my favourite moments in the film.  And that’s the story behind it.

The editing process itself—it took one year to edit.  I did 16 hours of interviews with Fisk and that’s the foundation of the voice of the film.  That series of conversations determined where we could go with the film—that, combined with what we filmed with him in person and on location.

Thankfully, Mike Munn is so detail-oriented in his editing that he cut everything we shot into scenes, and logged it so meticulously, so that we could easily move things around so that we could figure out how to structure the film.  It was a puzzle that we had to figure out.  

I often say that it’s a relentless film because there’s so much information coming at the viewer.  But we had to figure out ways to build in breaths to allow the audience to let the material sink in and do so in such a way that they add to the next moments.  

I learned a lot through the editing of this film.

AK:  It’s an intricate film.  It’s clear that a lot of work and a lot of thought went into it.  The transitions are oftentimes fascinating.  Both in terms of where they take us, but also in terms of how they’re constructed.  When you’re looking at its form, it’s a really interesting film to study on that level.

I’m conscious of the time, so I’m going to move things along a bit and ask you a question that’s a little shorter.

For me, one of the most lasting impressions from the film has to do with Fisk’s office, with his filing system, and with his meticulous approach to researching and archiving.  Do you remember the impression this system of his left on you the first time you witnessed it? And I guess the follow-up question would be, have you become more organized since meeting Fisk? [laughs]

fig. c: Chang’s office and his ever-expressive hands

YC:  As you ask me this, I look around me [laughs at the sight of the clutter of his office]…. I just moved into this house in Toronto.  Actually, it’s been about a year.  So I’ve got boxes and boxes of my own personal archives, and they’re not organized as meticulously as Fisk’s.  And I also do not have a PhD, so I haven’t adopted the methods of research and organization that he did.  
He’s built this cataloguing system that’s perfect for his way of approaching his writing and his research.  He recalls and remembers where everything is.  He knows where to find something and he can pull that item out—immediately.  And like he says in the film, he has documents that do not exist online.  Not everything is on the Internet, believe it or not.  So I think his system is invaluable.  And that, to me, was illuminating.  

He has this analogue approach to work that is extremely valid, but it is overwhelming to walk into his office like that [because of its clutter and its enormous number of files].  Fisk struggles with technology and his computer as remarked upon in the movie.  His desktop on his computer—he actually doesn’t like to put things in folders because he worries that it disappears—and so everything is on his desktop—thousands of documents!  But that’s how he finds things…

This is an archive film.  And, ironically, in making this film we learned that the hard material—the actual analogue material—is often the best way to archive something, rather than to digitize it and put it online.  That’s a whole other conversation.

Another long-winded answer:  “Robert’s Archives.” [laughs]

AK:  I just love those scenes with his files and his filing system.  And the way you captured it with the camera was amazing.  It really gets you to think about what choices we make when we archive things.

YC:  Yeah, and that relates to the final note of the film.  The film follows the arc of this character who’s become a jaded journalist by the end.  And the least that a journalist can do is keep a record so that nobody can question whether something did or did not happen.  I think that’s crucial.  

AK:  Especially these days when truth is under fire.

Clearly we’re in the era of #stayhome cinema right now, otherwise we’d be conducting this interview on stage in St. Catharines.  There would be an audience in front of us.  The downside is that we’re in different cities—we’re not together and we can’t interact with each other directly.  And there isn’t an audience with us in the moment.  The upside is that we’re able to overcome geography and many more people have the opportunity to witness this discussion.  But people are actively looking for good material to watch these days, and many people who watch This is Not a Movie will surely be looking to watch more of your films.  Any tips on how they can do so? 

YC:  The easiest way is to just go to my website:  yungfilms.com.  You can find links to things there, and you can find all the work I’ve done.  What would we do if didn’t have the Internet during a pandemic?

I’ve got a question for you, Anthony.  You’re the music expert.  [ed:  Umm, not really…]

U2 wrote a song about Robert Fisk.

AK:  Oh, really?  I didn’t know that.

YC:  It’s at the end of our film, during the end credits.  It’s called “Cedars of Lebanon.”  Bono loves Robert Fisk, and he wrote this song for him.  

Some of the lyrics are a little bit off, but some of them are so perfect.  I have my thoughts about U2.  [laughs]  I know you do, too.  [ed:  Yes, indeed.]

Bono gave us the permission to use the song.  He wanted us to use it.  But actually we had to go to Harold Budd and Brian Eno because the song involves a sample from an album they had done back in the day—a beautiful album.  So the music is quite nice because it’s literally a Brian Eno and Harold Budd tune.  

You didn’t hear that song at the premiere at TIFF because we didn’t have it at that time.  We got it later for our international premiere at IDFA [International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam].

AK:  Okay, that makes sense, because when I watched the film again the other day, I didn’t remember that song.  That’s interesting.

Lastly, what’s in store for Yung Chang?  What are some new and/or upcoming projects that you can tell us about?

YC:  So I’m going back to China now.  China, having been through what we’re going through now, and having come out of it to a certain extent, is opening up to filming.  So I just got greenlit for a new China-Canada co-production and it’s about hockey in China.  This is going to be a pretty wild story.  It’s got great access.  It’s going to follow the rise of a major sport in China up to the 2022 Olympics where the Chinese national hockey team is in Group A with all the top hockey teams.  And the people involved in creating the Chinese team include Wayne Gretzky, and a general manager from Toronto who works with a Russian oligarch.  It involves billionaires.  It involves Chinese-Canadians who have to give up their Canadian passport in order to play on the national team.  There’s a lot at stake in the story.  I’m interested in modern relationships between countries, and I think this story will be a microcosm of that through what we’re calling “hockey diplomacy.”

AK:  Actually, I wanted to ask you.  I recently watched China Heavyweight again, and there’s one scene where one of the Chinese boxers was wearing a Habs [Montreal Canadiens] cap.  Was that a gift from you?

YC:  [laughter]  That was definitely a gift from me!  I’ve had my obsession with hockey, and certainly with the Habs.  I’ve had to let that go a little, because that obsession can become painful.  

I recall being in China not so long ago and following the Habs in the playoffs.  I’d be putting on my jersey at 3:00 a.m. in China and trying to find the Internet connection to watch these playoff games.  

Anyway, it’s called Red Stars.  That’s the working title.  And hopefully there will be something good that comes out of that.

And I’ve got another film I’m working on:  a pandemic film.  Actually, there’s two projects.  One that I worked on with my partner that you’ll see in the next few of months [that film is Pandemic19 , directed by Yung Chang and Annie Katsura Rollins] and another longer film that I’m not allowed to talk about yet that I’m hoping will be quite moving and revealing.

AK:  Excellent!  Thank you so much, Yung!

YC:  Thanks, Anthony!  Great to see you!  I shaved my moustache.  Dang it!  I wanted to go against the whole pandemic shaving thing.  I could have decided not to shave, but I couldn’t do it.  I thought if I do that I’m going to sink deep into a funk if I let myself go.

AK:  It would just be a “playoff beard.”  Don’t worry about it. [laughter]

————

THANK YOU!

BON CINEMA!

aj