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October 27th, 2008 | by Alive Mind Education | published in Reviews
Video Librarian Review May-June 2009 on Mystical Brain
Rating: 3 out of 4 Stars - Recommended!
Philosophical, theological, and scientific questions are raised in Mystical Brain, this fascinating National Film Board of Canada-produced documentary from director Isabella Raynauld, which follows the efforts of North American neurobiologists investigating how the brain reacts during prayer and meditation. In one study, two researchers at the University of Montreal persuade several contemplative Carmelite nuns to undergo scientific tests to try to localize and measure the impact of the mystical experience on their brains. A similar project (although with different techniques) follows a team at the University of Wisconsin working with Buddhist monks, including a translator for the Dalai Lama. Both scientists and subjects feel that the research does not endanger the spiritual experience but rather may aid in our understanding of it—a point driven home in a conference featuring the Dalai Lama, a Cistercian monk, and scientists. Meanwhile, another university researcher is shown here experimenting with a device known as the “God helmet,” which aims to replicate the physiological effects of religious belief on the brain without what the researcher calls the potentially destructive impulses associated with doctrine and dogma. A single documentary obviously can’t resolve fundamental questions about the nature of the soul and the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy, but this one does offer a fascinating look at such profound matters without ever becoming either heavy-handed or dismissive. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
Video Librarian Review May-June 2009 on Through the Eastern Gate
Rating: 3 out of 4 Stars - Recommended!
Directors Mironel de Wilde and Julien L. Balmer’s Through the Eastern Gate profiles three young Westerners who chucked it all for spiritual enlightenment in India and Turkey. According to Sister Yeshe Chodron, “Everything you want, you’ll find in India. It’s a place of extremes: heaven and hell.” At 17, the Australian Yeshe became a Buddhist nun, while Californian Aziz Abbatiello found his calling as a Sufi semazen or whirling dervish, and Finlander Ronela Vainio practices Tantric yoga. Yeshe experienced a terrible sense of loss after the death of her father, and turned to drugs and alcohol, but nothing filled the emptiness until she discovered Tibetan Buddhism. After her confirmation in the Catholic Church, Ronela not only felt “flat,” but no closer to Jesus. Both women were looking for change after these transformative experiences (Aziz, on the other hand, had been raised as a Sufi). Each of the three here credit a particular guru or swami—whose comments are also included—for teaching them how to follow their chosen path, and all feel as if they’ve found the “Answer,” although obviously each has found an “answer” that brings purpose to their individual lives. An engaging look at a trio of modern spiritual explorers, this is recommended. Aud: C, P. (K. Fennessy)
Video Librarian Review May-June 2009 on FLicKeR
Rating: 3 out of 4 Stars - Recommended!
Brion Gysin (1916-1986)—painter, writer, performance artist, and countercultural guru—is hardly a household name, but Nik Sheehan’s documentary clearly demonstrates that Gysin was influential on some better-known authors, musicians, and filmmakers. FLicKeR opens with a conventional biographical sketch that is primarily dependent on photographic stills and overlaid narration, but fairly quickly expands to incorporate a collage of newly-filmed interviews (featuring acolytes such as Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull, and Kenneth Anger, as well as friends and acquaintances), archival footage, and artwork, while covering topics that include Gysin’s collaboration with William S. Burroughs (which resulted in the “cut-up” composition technique of scrambling images and words) and Gysin’s belief that he was “channeling” the 10th-century Persian Old Man of the Mountain, also known as the King of the Assassins. But the central thread running throughout the film concerns Gysin’s construction of the so-called “dream machine,” a contraption (using a light bulb, turntable, and cardboard cylinder) designed to create a hypnotic strobe effect that, according to Gysin (who collaborated with British mathematician Ian Sommerville), could bring a person—if they stared intently enough—into a higher state of consciousness without using drugs. An insightful look at a figure perhaps more notable for his oddity and effect on others than his individual accomplishments, this intriguing profile is recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
‘Theater’ commences attack on war
The Boston Herald
March 27, 2009
THEATER OF WAR: A
If you’re interested in world theater or the work ethic of arguably the greatest actor of her generation, see “Theater of War.” A documentary about an August 2006 production of Bertolt Brecht’s landmark play “Mother Courage and Her Children,” featuring Meryl Streep in the title role, the film is a fascinating account of artists working to bring the play, a shocking, nihilistic indictment of war, to American audiences at the height of America’s intervention in Iraq.
Streep appears with long, dark hair in interviews shot after the production and shorter hair in rehearsals at the Public Theater and on the stage of the stifling, open-air Delacorte Theater in New York City’s Central Park.
Also appearing in the film are the playwright Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”), who adapted Brecht’s 1939 German-language play, playwright-director George C. Wolfe (“Jelly’s Last Jam,” “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches”), the Public Theatre’s artistic director Oskar Eustis and Kevin Kline, who plays the role of the cook in the play.
Director John W. Walter has assembled impressive background material in the form of recordings of Brecht and still photos of a historical 1949 production of “Mother Courage” in the broken, burned-out ruins of Berlin, featuring Brecht’s wife and lead actress Helene Weigel in the title role.
Set during the Thirty Years War, a somewhat murky 17th century conflict fought in Germany and over most countries of Western Europe, the play tells the story of Mother Courage, a Swedish war profiteer, whose seemingly heartless attitude toward mass slaughter is an indictment of war and warmongers in general and the insanity of Nazi-era Germany in particular.
Experience Brechtian alienation in all its hideous power. See Mother Courage, the “untragic heroine,” deny the identity of her dead son, an unforgettable anti-“Pieta.”
Forget those giants of Greek tragedy, evoking our pity and fear (and admiration), and see the real killer clowns - Bourbon, Hapsburg and dynasties closer to home - at work.
Walter’s film owes a debt to Errol Morris’ “Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.” Moreover, if Tony-winning Wolfe is more cheerleader than leader, Eustis blathers fatuously and Kline and Austin Pendleton get lost in the shuffle, “Theater of War” is a must-see event for theater-lovers and Streep watchers alike. Don’t miss it.
Theater of War - Backstage insights into art and ideology
The Boston Globe
March 27, 2009
In the summer of 2006, thousands of theatergoers, stargazers, and people who enjoy Marxist German classics braved impossible heat to attend a production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children” in Central Park. It was more hoopla than Brecht ordinarily receives, even by the standards of the New York stage. But this Public Theatre production was somewhat out of the ordinary. Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline were starring in a new translation by Tony Kushner, directed by George C. Wolfe with music by Jeanine Tesori. And it was free.
John W. Walter, a film editor and documentary maker, was around to film the show’s rehearsals. But it wasn’t just Streep’s star that struck him. It was Brecht’s. “Theater of War,” Walter’s invigorating film, asserts the value of Brecht - and the power of art - for our troubled times.
The film combines backstage footage, interviews with Kushner, Wolfe, Tesori, and Streep, and conversations with two professors, one of whom worked alongside Brecht, the other who teaches his work. What comes of all this is both a film of ideas (call it “Everyday Brecht”) and a modest journey into the dramatist’s life. More than once the two merge into living philosophy.
Much of the playwright’s biography is explained by Tufts University’s Jay Cantor, who discusses how Marxism presented Brecht the intellectual rigging for his political anger. The film applies the basic revelations of Marxism (work is tyranny, labor effaces personality, that sort of thing) to the Public’s production itself. Initially there is reason to fear. Jeremy Lydic, who oversaw the props and wrote his thesis on “Mother Courage,” and Marina Draghici, who managed the costumes, do their jobs while Cantor explains that our work is who we are.
It’s not drudgery we see, though, but a kind of personal pride in craft. Eventually Cantor, who has allowed himself to stare down the Marxist rabbit hole and seems the glummer for it, moves on to the productive uses of Marxism, which, under these circumstances, have more to do with the effectiveness of collective action. That, after all, is how art is usually made.
Brecht wrote “Mother Courage” as an antiwar jeremiad, and the play’s enduring strength is the ugly reach of its moral quagmire. Mother Courage runs a profitable mobile canteen for soldiers that she continues to haul even after the war has cost her her three children. Death is tragic, but so, in a sense, is this woman’s will to live. Walter sees in the Central Park production a parallel to contemporary military conflicts. American troops were spending another year in Iraq, and Israel had just invaded Lebanon.
“Theater of War” is perfectly Brechtian in form - “action and commentary on the action,” as someone points out. Much of the most stirring commentary comes from Streep, who objects to the general idea of filming rehearsals (process looks like “bad acting,” she says), but appears to go with the Brechtian flow, letting us sees flubs, sweat, and tears.
Walter juxtaposes her grueling, almost deranged performance with footage of the legendary performance by Brecht’s wife, Helene Weigel, who appears to be twice as formidable while doing half the work. These backstage scenes explore the Brechtian urge to create and rebel. But the movie wonders whether creation is an adequately confrontational act. What is the value of art in times of strife? Should people be sitting in the theater or rioting in the streets? Walter’s film reminds us that once there was a man whose work made no distinction between the two.
Video Librarian Review March-April 2009 on Absolutely Safe
Rating: 3 out of 4 Stars - Recommended!
In this day and age, breast implants are thought to be “absolutely safe,” a claim that filmmaker Carol Ciancutti-Leyva examines in this thought-provoking documentary. As Ciancutti-Leyva notes at the outset, her mother Audrey chose augmentation after a mastectomy in the 1970’s, a time when the procedure carried greater risks (and before saline became an alternative to silicone). Over the years, Audrey experienced ruptures, joint pain, and chronic fatigue, eventually speaking before an FDA Safety Hearing in 2003 (her testimony is included here). Filmed over a 10-year-period, Absolutely Safe looks at five decades of implant technology, while interviewing women such as former exotic dancer Wendi, who has her silicone implants removed after experiencing health problems, and young wife Denee, who gets implants in order to boost her self-confidence–even though her husband thinks she looks just fine (the film includes some graphic operating-room footage of the procedures for both women). As a toxicologist notes here, these “devices” (as the medical profession refers to them) can leak heavy metals–such as tin, zinc, and platinum–difficult for the body to expel. Offering opinions on both sides, other interviewees include plastic surgeons, a Dow Corning executive, an FDA spokesperson (who cautions that “nothing is free of risk”) and satisfied breast implant customers. Veteran documentarian Jennifer Fox (An American Love Story, Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman) served as executive producer for this documentary, which offers an admirable balance between the personal and the scientific. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (K. Fennessy)
Video Librarian Review March-April 2009 on Forgiveness: Stories of Our Time
Rating: 3 out of 4 Stars - Recommended!
Filmmaker Johanna Lunn’s documentary Forgiveness tells the storis of four individuals who suffered enormous personal losses but worked hard to overcome their grief and rage, ultimately forgiving those responsible for their pain. Toronto woman Lesley Parrott’s young daughter was raped and brutally murdered (but Parrott’s opposition to the death penalty remains unshaken); Anglican vicar Julie Nicholson’s daughter was killed on the London underground subway during the al Qaeda bombing in 2005; Newfoundland woman Anne Marie Hagan’s father was murdered by a schizophrenic neighbor (a young man he’d known for years and treated as a son); and Belfast man Alan McBride’s wife was killed in an IRA bombing (McBride joined a protest group as a means of coping with his anger). Forgiveness combines home movies, stills, and archival footage to provide background for the interviews with the four principals, who reflect on their experiences. A moving film about human tragedy, Forgiveness illustrates the immense struggle required to relinquish the desire for revenge, but also strikes a hopeful note about the possibility of coping with terrible events in our lives. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
Video Librarian March/April 2009 on Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman
Rating: 3 1/2 Stars - Highly Recommended
A six-hour documentary about one New York woman’s sex life and associated neuroses? What is this, Seinfeld on estrogen? Maybe, if Seinfeld had ever dared to be about something. Filmmaker Jennifer Fox (An American Love Story) turns her camera on herself, re-examining where her resolutely independent life has taken her: unmarried and childless by choice in her 40s. In this shockingly personal TV miniseries, Fox discusses her affair with a married man; her deep desire not to turn into the angry women who raised her; the constant pressure from all sides to become various ideals of womanhood; and other issues that modern women cope with on a daily basis. Traveling to 17 countries over five years, Fox meets with a global network of friends who help expand the conversation, as women in places such as Pakistan and Cambodia reveal their most private thoughts on sex and love in cultures where they have far less autonomy than the filmmaker. Surprisingly, not once over the course of six hours does the film seem self-indulgent: Fox’s soul-baring honesty feels both profound and universal. This “special educational package” features all six hours of Flying on two discs, plus two bonus DVDs with film excerpts organized by topic—marriage, abortion, sex trafficking, motherhood, etc.—as well as a print discussion guide. [Note: a lower-priced two-disc home video version is tentatively slated for release in April.] Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (M. Johanson)
Video Librarian January/February 2009 on Hair: Let the Sun Shine In
Rating: 3 Stars - Recommended
In their persuasive documentary Hair: Let the Sun Shine In, Pola Rapaport and Wolfgang Held present the famed musical as more than just a popular stage production that spawned a soundtrack and a movie. As Ben Vereen states, “Hair is not a show, it’s a movement.” With its storyline revolving around the military draft, racial injustice, free love, drugs, and other topical concerns, Hair offered a no-holds-barred portrait of the late 1960s. Creator Jim Rado (who played the role of Claude) and Stephanie Ragni, widow of co-creator Gerome Ragni, briefly talk about the production’s origins, while other interviewees discuss the musical’s significance and their connection to the material. Czechoslovakian director Milos Forman, who would later direct the big screen adaptation, admits he didn’t understand much of the English dialogue initially, but “loved the tunes.” In addition to archival footage of both Hair and the era (Vietnam, Kent State, etc.), the documentary also features excerpts from Rado’s casting sessions for a 2007 revival. Other interviewees include U.S. producer Michael Butler, international producer Bertrand Castelli, composer Galt MacDermot, and performers Keith Carradine, Melba Moore, and Tim Curry. While Hair: Let the Sun Shine In is a celebration of this countercultural classic, the film doesn’t shy away from the dark side of the production’s history, such as the lives lost to drug addiction and AIDS, and a suspicious hotel fire (Hair received threats from a variety of organizations, from the Weathermen to the John Birch Society). DVD extras include casting workshop footage and extended interviews with Rado, Forman, and Vereen. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (K. Fennessy)
FLicKeR review
Reviewed by Dan DiLandro, E.H. Butler Library, State University of New York College at Buffalo
Recommended
November 21, 2008
FLicKeR tells the story of Brion Gysin (the “only man” William S. Burroughs “ever respected”) and his unique contributions to the Arts. Well, indeed, the film cannot completely tell the story, relying more generally on interviews with authors, philosophers, neuroscientists, artists, and other prominent individual from various fields. As a Parisian curator said of Gysin’s most arguably famous work, “It’s a very peculiar piece to classify”; and so is the film itself, following Gysin’s life and work around the loose construct of his “Dreamachine”—a “provoked accident” that related to his own poetry and painting, but also touches upon instances of neurobiology and the anarchic principles of the 1960’s anti-control movements.
In short, FLicKeR is a biography of a person told not about the individual himself, really, but by the recollections of others on the influences of his works — a sort of verbal, artistic Gedenkschrift, in a way.
Beginning with the filmmaker’s attempt to recreate the Dreamachine, the audience is shown that, during a 1950’s train ride, Gysin experienced, basically, a sort of drug trip, caused by sunlight’s interaction with the moving vehicle. The resulting strobe effect was not “grace,” Gysin found, but a physio-neurological effect that stimulated alpha waves in the brain, evincing dreams, hallucinations, and—filmed researchers tell us—epileptic seizures in one out of every 4000 people. The archival images and sound as well as interviews with famous artists (such as Marianne Faithfull, Leila Luce, D.J. Spooky, Kenneth Anger, Iggy Pop) and authors produce a description of Gysin via a description of the machine, and proof of the evolution of the machine out of Gysin’s worldview and artistic standpoint.
There is much talk, as expected, of the similarities of the effects of the Dreamachine to drug use; and the various interviewees express different, though certainly generally uniformly “psychedelic,” visions they experience.
But more than a recitation of subjective emotions is the rich foundation that this machine, and individuals’ thoughts on it, develop for biographical information and, essentially, Gysin’s place within the art world and his true impact upon it.
For instance, we are told that Gysin was obsessed with “unraveling control”—as evidenced by a recording of his spoken poetry repeating “control” over and over again. Via the interviews it becomes clear to the audience how Gysin and his work sought to accomplish this. The artist’s physical art—the graphic, grid-based anagrams; the calligraphic images; the innovative use of “Cut Ups” were, we are told, a manner for the artist to express himself. But the Dreamachine was the “end of art.” The machine provided individual and individualized images to each viewer. No longer was art imposed on audiences by the medium of paint or text; the Dreamachine gave everyone a sort of self-generated, unconscious art show of their own.
It is only toward the end of the film that anything like a more “traditional” biography is presented, but Gysin’s time in Morocco, his belief that he was the reincarnation of the 10th century leader of the Assassins, and other potentially fascinating biographical facts are, as elsewhere, glossed over in deference to more subjective and “artistic” interpretations of the subject himself.
Naturally, given the principle player in the film and the times and ethos from which most of Gysin’s work sprung, there are often reference to drugs and the machine’s (and Gysin’s other art) similarity therein, thereby restricting the film’s audience. So too, the experimental, hyper-visual and –audio “weird” quality of the film itself will necessarily restrict some viewers.
All of the above is fairly heavy intellectual “stuff,” but the film benefits from its high-profile and energetic speakers as well as the real art of the filmmaker. While the visual track can be utterly confusing, the repetitious spoken poetry can be somewhat irritating, the constant flickering scenes of the Dreamachine can be annoying, the insights of the speakers can be truly fascinating and the bridge expressed between kinetics and art is surely educational.
Naturally, the speakers themselves are often quite plain in their admiration or explanation of Gysin, which makes the narrative much more accessible to viewers. Too, the discussions of the utterly failed marketing campaign of the Dreamachine provide levity—but also interesting food for thought as to the commercialization and accessibility of all types of art.
Of course, audiences that are not terribly interested in or adept at Beat and drug cultures, Futurist and post-Dada-type movements (with their textual and individual deconstruction as well as the integration of humans into machines), and anarchic punk movements will almost certainly be divorced from any sense that the film is trying to convey.
Gysin is called “a conjuror swallowed up by his own spell,” and this statement is certainly telling in that the artist is little remembered today; but FLicKeR installs him neatly in his own times while proving that his constructions formed a bedrock for much of the avant-garde and anti-control elements that followed. Our culture has been shaped by his and similar artists’ spell, but this particular magician is, perhaps, less and less in his own creation, hidden by myth, reinterpretation, and the general ignorance of his seminal work.
Of course, for viewers interested in Gysin, Burroughs, these eras and movements as well as the ramifications of poetic movements and the influence of past artistic schools upon today’s “progressive” art movements, FLicKeR is a fine and useful film. It is surely recommended for collections that specialize in specific areas of art, literature, poetry, pop culture, and writing.
The Globe and Mail on FLicKeR - November 28, 2008
Rating: 3 Stars
by Kamal Al-Solaylee
Part literary biography, part science fiction, and part and parcel counterculture certifiable lunacy, Nik Sheehan’s Flicker is a documentary with mood-altering aspirations. For those who like their escapist entertainment raunchier than Twilight but less violent than Quantum of Solace, this Canadian doc will keep the economic news in the papers and the Christmas music in the malls out of your mind for all of its 72-minute running time.
On second thought, escapist may be underselling the ideology that inspired Flicker. Try the chance to achieve transcendence. Travel through the time-space continuum. Soar on a drugless high. After all, these were some of the claims Brion Gysin — sound poet, calligrapher, part-time Canadian and full-time beat-generation Svengali — made when he unveiled his dream machine in the 1960s.
The machine was based on the “flicker effect” theory proposed by W. Grey Walter in his book The Living Brain (1953). By replicating the exact frequency of alpha waves in the brain through the manipulation of light inside a rotating cylinder with patterned cutouts, the machine induces the perception of shapes and images in the user’s mind. Anyone sitting close to the machine with eyes closed can then create “their own spiritual movies” and experience parallel existences (that’s Sixties-speak for hallucinations).
Instead of replacing television sets in every household, as Gysin had hoped, dream machines became a symbol of what’s revolutionary about the counterculture and what’s so boneheaded about it.
Based on John Geiger’s well-received book Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine, Sheehan’s compelling documentary delivers a culturally incisive job of unmasking Gysin. That’s no small feat, considering the mercurial and spectre-like nature of a man who believed himself to be the reincarnation of the 10th-century King of Assassins and who counted writer William S. Burroughs, singer Marianne Faithfull and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones among his friends and lovers.
Sheehan goes out of his way to prove that, for a man who lived in infamy and died (in 1986) in obscurity, Gysin’s influence on today’s culture extends beyond rap and dub poetry and into the emergence of audiences as creators of their own computer-made and distributed entertainment. Experts from stuffy neurosurgeons to hip DJs are interviewed in an attempt to shed light on Gysin as a visionary and the dream machine as a precursor to anything Apple Inc. puts an “i” in front of and sells to the creative masses: iPhones, iPods, iMovies.
Where’s the escapism I promised, you must be wondering by now? It’s there in the journeys that Sheehan and a replica of the dream machine make to New York, Paris and Tangier, among other destinations, tracing Gysin’s wandering existence and giving substantial camera time to counterculture dinosaurs who talk, dress and look as if the Sixties never ended. They may espouse different views but all agree on one thing: A decent haircut is clearly still a sign of selling out.
More importantly, escapism comes through in the open-ended tone of the film. Sheehan recreates Gysin’s world with a skeptic’s belief. Despite the scientific basis of the “flicker effect,” the doc leaves open the possibility that it may all be a load of hogwash. There’s just enough distance between filmmaker and subject to filter in a layer of bemusement, befuddlement even. Guest appearances by the likes of Iggy Pop and Faithfull confirm their reputations as kings and queens of rock — but also its court jesters. Some of the visual tricks to simulate the flicker effect or suggest mind-bending consequences are delightfully tacky without being maliciously ironic.
It all adds up, somehow. Flicker may not deliver the drugless high of the dream machine, but it does its bit to elevate the discussion of Gysin’s legacy while putting down, gently and lovingly, its wackier side. In the hands of the right director, escapism can be a balanced act.
Video Librarian November/December 2008 on Hippie Masala
Rating: 3 Stars - Recommended
During the 1960s, the Beatles traveled to India in search of spiritual enlightenment, but like most other visitors eventually returned home. Some Westerners, however, chose to remain, Ulrich Grossenbacher’s documentary Hippie Masala focuses on four such individuals. One Italian man has devoted his life to the practice of yoga, and now lives a life of simplicity and prayer that makes him virtually indistinguishable from a native holy man. A Belgian woman also continues a meditative life, though she confesses to having difficulty finding mentors and also faces government fines as a result of living illegally in India for so many years. The other two subjects—one Dutch, the other Swiss—stayed in India not so much for spiritual reasons but because of their antipathy towards the Western lifestyle. Both men married native women, but while the Dutch painter with a young wife and several daughters appear to be generally content, the Swiss farmer is struggling to eke out a living, and both he and his wife complain about not being accepted by locals. Much of the entertaining Hippie Masala consists of charming reminiscences from the quirky quartet (as well as a pair of voluble South African twins who’ve also taken up residence in India), backed by footage of their day-to-day lives. Recommended. Aud; C, P. (F. Swietek)
Video Librarian September/October 2008 on Protagonist
Rating: 4 Stars - Highly Recommended - Editor’s Choice
Jessica Yu’s fascinating documentary Protagonist explores psychological observations found in the plays of Euripides to illustrate the universality of human experience. The decision to have wooden puppets “recite” passages in ancient Greek that exemplify the Athenian dramatist’s concepts—as well as to act out episodes in the lives of four modern men whose extensive autobiographical recollections reveal Euripides’ continuing relevance—might have been disastrous. But Yu weaves these elements, together with animated segments inspired by Athenian pottery paintings, into a seamless whole to present an argument that is both provocative and profound. Her extensive interviews with the quartet of subjects—an anti-gay minister who finally admitted his homosexuality, a German terrorist who ultimately rejected the credo of violence, a bullied boy who found release in martial arts, and an abused child who became a bank robber—explore the same themes of obsession and potentially destructive absolutism that Euripides examined in his tragedies. The point, as Greek thinkers were fond of observing, is that human nature is unchanging: the struggles that men and women faced more than two millennia ago are essentially still being played out today. A poignant and serious meditation on human psychology, Protagonist is highly recommended. Editor’s Choice. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
Video Librarian September/October 2008 on LIVING GODDESS
Rating: 3 Stars - Recommended
Ishbel Whitaker’s compelling documentary captures an extraordinary moment in time when ancient Asian customs were threatened by 21st century revolution. In the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal, three young girls—all under the age of 12—have been identified as living deities, which means that their young lives are transformed wildly as they become the center of feverish religious devotion. Outside their world, however, an unparalleled power struggle threatens to disrupt Nepal as the longstanding civil war sparked by Maoist rebels in 1996 continues to wreck the country, while the nation’s power-hungry king launches a military response to a growing pro-democracy movement. Living Goddess presents Nepal as a country literally at odds with itself, as the fussing and primping of the adolescent “goddesses” here is seen in sharp contrast to footage of armed military forces brutally subduing protestors in the streets. Overall, the girls appear to be much too young to comprehend the depth and scope of their religious lives—yes, they enjoy the attentions, but their demeanor and behavior suggest typical kids rather than atypical deities. Brilliantly filmed under fairly difficult circumstances, Living Goddess will definitely appeal to anyone with an interest in Eastern religions. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)
Video Librarian July/August 2008 on The Atheism Tapes
Rating: 3½ Stars - Highly Recommended
In 2004, Jonathan Miller hosted a remarkable three-part BBC series called Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, which was later broadcast on PBS under a slightly different title. Although the documentary combined many elements, one of the most notable was excerpts from interviews that Miller, an avowed non-believer, conducted with a half-dozen figures about their own faith, or—more often—lack thereof. The Atheism Tapes presents the full versions of those interviews—with Miller introducing each segment and occasionally weighing in to explain a particular transition in the discussion—and the fascination of the content compensates for the straightforward talking-head visuals. Five of the interviewees—philosopher Colin McGinn, physicist Steven Weinberg, philosopher Daniel Dennett, playwright Arthur Miller, and biologist Richard Dawkins—are non-believers whose various arguments (as well as disagreements with each other on particular points) are both incisive and thought-provoking. But Miller also draws them out on the subject of what led them to their conclusions—a particularly revealing element in the case of well-known polemicist Dawkins, who discusses his early religious devotion. The sixth interview, with theologian Denys Turner, offers an alternative point of view. Some believers will no doubt refuse to watch these conversations, while others may feel that their faith can only be strengthened by confronting the strongest arguments against it—and The Atheism Tapes definitely delivers the latter. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
Video Librarian May/June 2007 on Pledge of Allegiance Blues
Rating: 3½ Stars - Highly Recommended
In 2004, the Supreme Court found itself reviewing a potential hot potato case: Sacramento-based, blues-playing physician and lawyer Michael Newdow, a self-described atheist, brought a suit against a California school district to remove the words “under God” from classroom recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, citing it as a violation of the First Amendment. The court sidestepped the issue via a convenient loophole—claiming that Newdow, who sued the school district where his daughter was enrolled, was not entitled to bring the suit since he was not her custodial parent (his ex-wife had parental authority). But the fact that Newdow came so far to present a cogent argument against the religious assumptions in the Pledge of Allegiance was a testament to his perseverance. Lisa Seidenberg’s documentary portrait is hardly hagiographic: Newdow, though a powerful figure, often comes across as both arrogant and humorless, but he presents his argument with a laser-focused coherence. Of course, not everyone is swayed by Newdow, who maintains a log of hostile voicemail messages from those who seem to be far more interested in childishly demeaning his intellect than realistically challenging his opinions. Newdow obviously enjoys the camera’s attention, and even makes noted legal eagle Alan Dershowitz (who is interviewed here) seem shy and reserved by comparison. Both as a lesson in law and as an entertaining personality profile, Pledge of Allegiance Blues is highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)
The New York Times - February 24, 2006 - Workingman’s Death
By Stephen Holden
The sardonic epigraph for Workingman’s Death, the Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger’s glamorized documentary examination of hard physical labor, comes from Faulkner: work is “the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.”
Maybe so. But as Chekhov observed, “Man must toil, he must work in the sweat of his brow, whoever he is, and in this alone is encompassed the sense and the aim of his life, his happiness, his raptures.”
The film seems to want to dispute Faulkner. As it observes laborers from around the world going to hell and back, day after day, year after year, to eke out subsistence livings, you are struck by their exuberance, vitality, teamwork and satisfaction in discharging backbreaking duties with a minimum of complaint. The simple act of doing the work, no matter how dangerous, gives their lives structure and purpose; triumphing over fear adds to their sense of accomplishment.
When you’re totally immersed in the physical moment, there is no room left for ennui. At least that’s the romantic way Workingman’s Death likes to imagine hard labor. But tell that to all the oppressed union workers over the decades who have gone on strike for better wages and working conditions.
A film of few words but plenty of indelible images of people (mostly men) risking their lives with hardly a second thought, Workingman’s Death hopscotches to various work sites around the world. It is divided into chapters with portentous titles like Heroes, Ghosts, Lions and Brothers that evoke the Herculean labors of Alexsei Stakhanov, a legendary coal miner in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930’s who was mythicized for his superhuman productivity and is remembered at the beginning of the film.
Jumping to the present, Workingman’s Death visits Stakhanov’s latter-day descendants extracting what coal remains in the Donbass region of Ukraine, where he toiled 70 years earlier.
Squeezing their bodies into narrow crevices known as mousetraps, many no higher than 16 inches, the miners use chisels and pickaxes to dig coal out of these depleted mines.
After separating coal from rock, they haul their meager spoils out of the pit by hand in small wagons, and divide it up. Most use it to heat their homes. The little bit left over is sold for food. Without the coal, one declares, they would freeze to death.
The film’s next stop is a mine at the edge of a volcanic crater in Kawah Ijen, Indonesia, where the earth spits out molten sulfur in hissing yellow fumes that quickly harden into slabs.
Men toting bamboo baskets balanced on their shoulders descend a perilous mountain path into the infernal mist and return bearing 200-pound loads for the three-mile trek back up the mountainside.
The most disturbing stop on the tour is an outdoor slaughterhouse in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where goats are killed, skinned, cut into portions, cleaned and roasted.
The camera’s unblinking views of the bleating animals’ throats being slit, sending geysers of blood gushing onto the street, suggest a dispassionate nature documentary in which humans are the alpha species in the natural pecking order.
Next up are the Pakistani workers in the port of Gaddani who have traveled hundreds of miles from their mountain villages to dismember giant ships, using blowtorches to split them apart and sending great hunks of metal crashing into the water. The pieces are cut up and sold as scrap.
Although the work is extremely dangerous, they toil in an atmosphere of calm. What little leisure they have is devoted to saying Islamic prayers and eating food they cook for themselves.
Workingman’s Death doesn’t go into detail in any of these scenes. It lets the images (underscored by John Zorn’s industrial music) speak for themselves.
The movie has the structure and tone of an epic historical poem that begins in the past, moves into the present and in two final sequences speculates on the future.
The first, set in a Chinese steelworks in Angang, parallels the optimistic communal spirit there with the exalting of collective labor in the days of Stakhanov.
The second, in Duisburg, Germany, visits a shuttered steelworks that produced more than 30 million of tons of steel from 1903 to 1985. With the blast furnaces turned into an outdoor light show, it is now literally a museum piece.
In the film’s production notes, Mr. Glawogger wonders, “Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?” In this visually impressive but proudly unscientific hymn to progress, the answers are yes and yes.
Written and directed by Michael Glawogger; in Russian, Bahasa Indonesian, English, Ibu, Yoruba, Pashtu and Mandarin, with English subtitles; director of photography, Wolfgang Thaler; edited by Mona Willi and Ilse Buchelt; music by John Zorn; released by Seventh Art Releasing. Running time: 122 minutes. This film is not rated.