Urbana.org All Things New Blog - film reviews

New Film about Wounded Knee

Fri, 22 May 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I’ve been watching PBS’ new documentary on the 1973 armed standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

It’s really fun, and the filmmakers do a good job giving the viewer a sense of the seriousness of the situation. In a classic bit of symbolic protest, dozens of AIMers took over the town of Wounded Knee, including hostages, and brandished weapons and a list of demands.

They shot at the FBI agents surrounding the town for two months, killing one. With the world’s media on hand, they were basically daring the Federal Government to repeat the 1890 massacre in the same town.

In the same way that most of today’s terror movements are primarily local in intention, even as they target Western countries, the Wounded Knee protesters were focused on corruption within the Bureau of Indian Affairs (subject of a long-running class-action lawsuit, still underway), and the corrupt chair of the Oglala Lakota tribe.

I’ve had many great experiences on the Pine Ridge Reservation, mostly at the town of Pine Ridge itself, and I loved learning the living history of the area. In part because people are still mad at each other over the affair, now forty years old.

Into Great Silence

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Monasticism is all the rage these days, at least within over-educated Evangelical circles, and I can’t help but contrast this fascination with another parallel trend: that of Evangelical disavowals of “religion”.

The two trends are incompatible, of course, because ascetic communities are nothing if not religious, on the one hand, and on the other: I’ve yet to find an “irreligious” Evangelicalism that has a healthy biblical read on the communion of the saints.

And while I’m generally distrustful of Christians withdrawing from society, monasticism has its place, if it is able to properly function as a specialist organ of the church. See, for example, the scholastic monks who, during the dark ages, painstakingly preserved and reproduced scripture.

Anyway, I enjoyed Into Great Silence, a documentary about the Carthusian monks of Alpine France. These folks are as severe as anyone in the Christian world, and yet: more successfully communal and even multi-ethnic than most churches.

Not Far From History

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I remember when Ceaucescu fell.

I was in high school and quite attentive to the collapse of communist Eastern Europe. First Poland, over the summer, then several others in early autumn, before the highlight, East Germany—marked by dancing on the wall.

I was safely away in Switzerland, listening to it all on my short wave radio. The cold war’s end didn’t change my life. I was only a few hundred kilometers from history, though.

That’s the story of the delightful Romanian movie 12:08 East of Bucharest. Set on the anniversary of the dictator’s flight from his palace, but in a provincial city somewhere East of Bucharest, it is a funny day-in-the-life story of a small-town TV manager struggling to imagine a role for his city during the revolution.

It all revolves around one question: were we out protesting before 12:08, the moment when Ceausescu fled? Or did we merely celebrate in the streets, now that the danger was passed?

It’s a great question, and delivered in such dead-pan fashion—this is a really funny movie.

Here’s the trailer. I could only find the Romanian trailer and one subtitled in Spanish, so this’ll have to do:

Enlightened European Narcissism

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:01:00 -0600

Persepolis works hard to make the Islamic Revolution seem an exotic imposition upon secular Iran (image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics).

Yesterday I looked at Marjane Satrapi’s marvelous Persepolis graphic novels, which tell the story of a childhood during the Iranian revolution and beyond. The story has also been adapted to film, now out on DVD (check your local library). I've got the trailer embedded below. Don't worry: the DVD has an English-language setting.

I loved the books and the film both. The film is visually far better than the books, but preserves the books’ Spartan feel. The film, however, makes a subtle editorial decision, that significantly changes the feel of the story; that decision is described in the special features—in a question-answer session in which French co-director Vincent Paronnaud speaks.

In order to make Marjane Satrapi’s story more understandable, they worked hard to make Tehran and Iran seem more universal, and less exotic. They wanted Tehran to look like anywhere—like San Francisco, or Cincinnati—those are the two cities Paronnaud mentions—or nowhere. Tehran has no mosques, no bazaars, and no strange music. It has anyplace high-rises, anyplace traffic jams, and so on.

Vienna, on the other hand, is other-worldly and fantastic, with haunting cathedral bells, beer halls (Paronnaud inexplicably calls them “Bavarian”), bourgeois punk anarchists, and coffee-houses. Listen to the opening few seconds of the trailer, below: those are European church bells. Vienna, in other words, is made to be the abnormal place, next to which Satrapi’s Iranian childhood seems normal. The intent is to help “us” better relate to her disorientation in Austria. (See Jesus, You Know, a movie I reviewed recently, for Austrian Catholics at prayer).

All this tells us that the subject of this movie is not Marjane Satrapi, but the European viewer, for whom a city like Vienna—with its high-context urban textures, from church bells to classical music to beer halls and bourgeois anarchists—is under normal circumstances “normal”. Non-Europeans wouldn’t need the touch: Europe is already a strange place. This is reverse orientalism.

Furthermore, by sterilizing Tehran, they’ve made the Islamic revolution come off as a foreign imposition—something certainly un-Persian (hence the title Persepolis, the ancient—pre-Islamic—imperial capital). Islam and Islamic revolution are conflated, and alien to “real Iran,” which is a nominally Muslim, thoroughly modern place.

Sandra Mackey, in her book The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation, argues that an important sub-plot in Iranian history is the tension between ethnicity (Farsi, or Persian—an Indo-European ethnicity and language) and religion (Islam, a religion with a universal claim, but which originates in Semitic Arabia). Iran, after all, is one of two countries in the world named after the proto-Indo-Europeans, the Aryans.

Persepolis is a story, told by a non-devout Iranian expatriate/exile. It is now a movie intended for a European audience that, noisy multi-ethnic debates aside, is still quite uncritically unaware of its particularity.

Slumdog Millionaire

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 04:01:00 -0600

Dev Patel and Freida Pinto in Slumdog Millionaire (image courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures)

“Bombay had become Mumbai,” Jamal Malik—a suspiciously high-scoring contestant on an Indian game show—explains to the interrogating police officer. It is the abbreviated history of his times, a young adult’s eye-witness summary of his city’s transformation from slumbering giant to world-class metropolis. Flashing back to a view atop a soaring construction site, we see another character sweep his hand across a landscape crowded with high-rises, and pointing out to Jamal (Dev Patel) that “this was once our slum,” now at the center of the world.

Jamal has been arrested on suspicion of fraud: he’s already won 10 million rupees—how could a slumdog know this much? Question by question, Jamal and the police officer review Jamal’s answers. Why did he know that one? Well, there’s a story … Jamal can account for all his knowledge with over-the-top life stories, topped by one more: he’s not even on the show for the money, which is relatively unimportant to him. He went on TV in the even longer-odds hope (“destiny,” he calls it) of finding his lost love, his fellow street child, now young woman Latika.

Scorning unimaginable wealth for love is offensive—even incomprehensible—to a city, as Salman Rushdie once described New York, boiling in money. Jamal must be a fraud. But he’s also a hero to the crowds across the country, huddled around televisions to see if he can pull off the final answer, worth 20 million rupees.

But Jamal is looking for a bigger prize. For all its flashy colors and seedy urban scenes—complete with gangsters, guns, heavy traffic, dancers, Muslim-Hindu rioting, incredible wealth and incredible poverty—Slumdog Millionaire is a love story, and a fairly simple one at that.

If Jamal’s quest for his beloved is a bit incredible, it hardly feels that way, next to the incredible world depicted here. As with The Lord of the Rings movies, the scenery is a full character here, a stunning backdrop made just a little fantastic with the director’s touch. At times a hip-hop video, at times surreal dream sequence—this is magical realism.

“You wanted to see the real India,” the young Jamal says to two distraught American tourists he has just guided into a slum—“this is it.”

Or is it? A catalogue of director Danny Boyle’s candidates for the real India, from sleek call centers to rough police stations, densely crowded streets, true poverty, false beggars, cricket matches and show business, Slumdog Millionaire may be a 21st century orientalist imagining of the real India: fantastically alive and full-sensual, exotic and a little intimidating to Western tastes.

At the same time, and for the same sensual reason, the love story’s power lies in its modesty. Hollywood’s bludgeon would have left nothing unsaid or unseen, leaving us with steamy disenchantment. We Westerners have everything, and taste everything—and we have no affection. Slumdog Jamal, on the other hand, has nothing but a deeper love than we’ve ever known.

The kind of patient, long-lasting love shown in this film is too precious to spill out all over the screen. Roman poet Ovid’s story of Apollo’s pursuit of the nymph Daphne lends itself to the aesthetic here:

He praises all he sees, and for the rest
Believes the beauties yet unseen are best.

Slumdog Millionaire does not hesitate to show us an astonishing India, but disturbs Western senses with something truly exotic: beauty left unseen. The film concludes with the gentlest embrace I ever remember seeing on screen, and a slight sense of shame at my world, which has seen everything and found no beauty.

The Remnant at Prayer

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 04:01:00 -0600

There is a huge difference between exhibitionism and true vulnerability, in a day when half of teenagers studied go public with drugs, sex, and alcohol, courtesy of Myspace and similar.

It is always a little awkward to listen in on truly intimate conversation, because even today some things don’t get shared. It’s my sense that we’ve as a culture have grown savvy about how we publish ourselves: anger, bravado, risk, sexual experimentation, and sexual humiliation—these are all for public consumption, while insecurities, long-term love, spiritual doubts, abuse, and things that go bump in the dark—these we keep hidden.

Sometimes, I believe, we pseudo-confess sexual stories for the purpose of directing attention away from our real selves. In Christian sub-cultures, I’ve seen people confess sexual activities, for instance, when the deeper issue is their relationship with family.

The shifting frontiers of privacy and confession are partly what make Jesus, You Know so thrilling. It’s an Austrian film from a few years back, now out on DVD, featuring several Catholic believers praying out loud (in German with subtitles), in empty churches, with the camera rolling.

The net result, over several sessions, is an impression of a living, breathing, and small remnant of devout believers in Catholic Austria. In a weird way, it’s a family reunion, in which we meet new cousins.

The narrative I’ve heard over many years of involvement with European protestants (and American missionaries) is that of a largely dead and aggressively anti-protestant (especially missionary protestant), Roman Catholic Church, with close ties to the state. This film, with its half dozen subjects of varying levels of spirituality, has effectively opened my eyes to a broader fellowship of believers.

One person in particular. A young man, roughly 19 years old, who struggles with his parents at the transition to adulthood, entangles this struggle with faith. He wants to choose God over family, but, it becomes clear, “God” means prayer meetings with friends, and “family” means not cleaning his room. His prayer about the problem is so familiar to what I’ve seen through InterVarsity and church that it’s a little unnerving. This could be any small group in the dorms, albeit with baroque crucifixes on hand.