Opening tomorrow at the Quad and Lincoln Plaza theaters in New York City, “Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” is both an affectionate tribute to the first situation comedy on television as well as a rueful look at the McCarthyism that practically destroyed the show. Directed by Aviva Kemper, this is a documentary that will appeal to those with an interest in Jewish popular culture and the American left—in other words, just like the author of this review. But beyond our ranks, I can recommend it as a film that is equal to its subject matter in terms of its universality. Despite its ostensibly narrow focus—the vicissitudes of a very Jewish household in the Bronx—it was one of the most popular radio and television shows of the 30s through the 50s. This was directly attributable to the strength of the scripts written by Gertrude Berg and her performance as Molly Goldberg, the zaftig matriarch.
Born in 1898, Gertrude Berg’s roots were in the Catskill Mountains “borscht belt”, just like mine. Her father owned Fleischmann’s Hotel and she worked as a bookkeeper there in her teens. In a bid to entertain the Jewish guests who stayed there in the summer, she developed a skit based on a character named Maltke Talnitzky, a fiftyish woman who is always bickering with her husband. These skits were the germ of the idea that evolved into her radio and television shows. She eventually married Lewis Berg, a young engineer who she met at the hotel. As the inventor of decaffeinated coffee, he became quite wealthy and encouraged his wife in the arts.
On November 20, 1929 “The Rise of the Goldbergs” debuted on CBS radio and was an instant hit with the American people no matter their ethnicity. It seemed that it didn’t matter what country you came from, everybody knew somebody like Molly Goldberg even if they were named Rosa Cellini or Mary Xenakis. By the 1940s, Gertrude Berg was the best-known woman in the U.S. after Eleanor Roosevelt and also the wealthiest. She was, as the documentary points out, the Oprah of her day with a string of businesses connected to the show. Politically, Berg was a major supporter of the New Deal and the show reflected the populist themes of the day, along with moral exhortations to take part in civic affairs such as buying War Bonds and collecting scrap metal for the war effort. The show was in the forefront denouncing Hitlerism, both in Germany and in its nascent stage in the U.S. where the German-American Bund held mass rallies. At the time, Father Coughlin—the Rush Limbaugh of his day—spoke flatteringly of Hitler on his radio show.
In real life, Gertrude Berg was nothing like the character she played. She came from a wealthy family to begin with and became even wealthier through her show business conquests. During the Great Depression she lived on Park Avenue and probably never set foot in the Bronx. The documentary relates that she would visit the Lower East Side to listen to Jews kibitzing with each other to get inspirations for her next show.
The television show premiered in 1949 just as the Red Scare was taking shape. Celebrities everywhere in Hollywood and on radio or television found their names in Red Channel, a publication that was dedicated to rooting out anybody who had served on a committee to raise funds for the Spanish Popular Front war effort or to defend the Scottsboro boys.
One of them was Philip Loeb, who played Molly Goldberg’s husband Jake. Once CBS and the show’s sponsors got word that Loeb was accused of being a Red, they demanded that Goldberg fire him. She resisted until the very end, but only relented when it became clear that the show would be dropped if Loeb was retained. She did not want to victimize the other people working on the show. Loeb was crushed by this experience and spent the next few years trying in vain to relaunch his career. Eventually he took an overdose of sleeping pills in the Taft Hotel in 1956, an event that was dramatized in Walter Bernstein’s “The Front”—the sole difference being that the Loeb character (played by fellow blacklistee Zero Mostel) jumped out the window rather than taking pills.
Director Aviva Kempner has made other movies about Jews before. Her “Life and Times of Hank Greenberg”, the Detroit Tiger baseball superstar who never played on holy days is excellent, as is her “Partisans of Vilna”, a documentary that leaves the awful “Defiance”, a fictional movie based on the Jewish guerrilla fighters, in the dust. This is a fine addition to her body of work and a must see for New Yorkers starting tomorrow. The film opens in Washington and Los Angeles later this month and national distribution soon afterward. Look for it in your local film news.
About 5 years ago, when I first began kicking around the idea of retiring, a friend suggested that I supplement my social security income by writing for money, especially movie reviews. Since I have written 418 movie reviews on the Internet and have been a fairly long-term member of New York Film Critics Online, a group composed mostly of professional reviewers, I suppose that I could have gotten my foot in the door at one or another print or web based publication.
But after seeing the initial reviews of Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” on Rotten Tomatoes, I was reminded why that idea did not seem that attractive on further reflection.
Village Voice:
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a bewildering, noisy, sloppy, cynical piece of work, a movie that sneers at the audience for 147 minutes and expects us to lap it up as entertainment — and be grateful.
MSNBC
A cinematic avalanche in which Michael Bay eschews anything resembling plot or characters and instead screams at the audience’s eyes for two and a half hours.
I think I would rather take a job as a Walmart’s greeter than be assigned to sit through movies like this.
By contrast, I watched a movie titled “8 Behind the Wheel” last night courtesy of the producer, director and screenplay writer Trace Burroughs. I would estimate that the movie cost less to make than an hour’s worth of production costs when “Transformers” was being made. But in terms of quality, there is no comparison. “8 Behind the Wheel” is far scarier than any Hollywood horror movie since the characters are so ordinary (including a pizza delivery girl), but once you get inside their heads, you realize how sick they are. Not that sickness in itself is sufficient to entice you to watch a movie. In the case of this low-budget movie, the appeal is in how Burroughs takes various forms of sexual and homicidal obsessions and turns them into something that at its most inspired approaches Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground”.
Dispensing with convention, the 8 characters are involved in very little dialog between each other and very little action, which is understandable since they are driving automobiles all by themselves late at night in what appears to be a fairly desolate suburban landscape. As they drive along, they begin to think to themselves about a number of preoccupations in a stream of consciousness manner that becomes more and more disturbing as the film progresses, not the least of which includes the ravings of a serial killer to himself as he seeks his next victim.
Just as is the case in the bigger budget “coincidence” movies like “Babel” or “Crash”, these characters are related to each other in some fashion and are destined to cross paths at the end of the movie. By the time that moment arrives, it is practically anti-climatic since most of the drama has already transpired within their isolated heads.
This is a follow-up to my initial post on the New York Asian Film Festival, which included a review of a pre-festival screening of “High Noon”, a Hong Kong movie about disaffected teenagers. The festival began officially last night and I strongly urge people in the Greater New York area to try to make it as many screenings as possible since on the evidence of the 7 movies below you will simply not find anything better—starting with Woody Allen’s latest flop.
Unfortunately, only three of the movies discussed below have youtube clips with English subtitles. I do include still photos for the others to convey some sense of what these altogether marvelous films are about. I should add that if you do want to see the youtube clips sans subtitles, you can. All are available through youtube searches.
1. “When the Full Moon Rises” (Kala Malam Bulan Mengambang, Malaysia, 2008)
Remember “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, the TV show from the mid-70s that featured Darren McGavin as a reporter for a National Enquirer type tabloid? In each episode McGavin as Carl Kolchak tracked down one mysterious killing or another, inevitably involving some supernatural creature or another—from an abominable snowman to vampires. By many accounts, this show was the inspiration for “X Files”.
This Malaysian flick (the first I have ever seen) was directed by Mamat Khalid and stars Rosyam Nor as Saleh, a reporter in the Kolchak mold. But rather than playing it straight, Khalid made a movie that borrows liberally from Leslie Nielsen movies like “The Naked Gun”. Nor bumbles from one scene to another, having little clue about what is going on about him.
Set in 1956, on the eve of Malaysian independence, Saleh stumbles into a vast conspiracy of Communists who seem to style themselves as Nazis, ghosts, were-tigers, vampires and midget gangsters. The plot is almost incidental to the movie, which is much more about genre-subversion. Mamat Khalid is a huge fan of cheesy 1950s movies in Malaysia (apparently it was a thriving industry) and has created a pastiche that both honors and pokes fun at the past. The movie’s style is one part Tim Burton and one part Charles Ludlum’s Theater of the Ridiculous. Any attempt on my part to analyze the movie would prove futile, except to say that it is a pie in the face to conventional nationalist mythology.
2. Dachimawa Lee (South Korea, 2008)
This is very much in the spirit of the flick above. Dachimawa Lee is a comic version of the Korean version of James Bond anti-Communist movies of the 70s and 80s. Like Saleh the reporter and Inspector Clouseau, superspy Dachimawa Lee often creates havoc no matter his best intentions. The plot revolves around Lee tracking down Japanese spies who have stolen a Golden Buddha. But as was the case with “When the Full Moon Rises”, the real purpose of the movie is to set up one comic scene after another and to mock nationalist mythology, all of which involve a running sight gag—namely lead actor Lim Won-Hie’s baby face. It is rather like casting Lou Costello as James Bond.
3. Breathless (Ddongpari, South Korea, 2009)
This is a powerful study of a loan shark enforcer who despite his sadism and his misogyny emerges in the end as a sympathetic character, at least within the context of a society that accepts such behavior as normal.
Yang Ik-June, who directed, wrote and played the thuggish anti-hero Sang-Hoon, touches raw nerves in this his debut film. As a young boy, Sang-Hoon witnessed the killing of his mother by his father who has just been released from prison after 16 years.. This brutal act has done nothing except make Sang-Hoon eager to brutalize the rest of the world, including his father. In the very first scene, a man is beating his girlfriend on the street. Without a word, Sang-Hoon drags the man away and beats him to a bloody pulp. When he is finished, he begins slapping the woman around. Clearly, social improvement was not on his mind when he stepped in.
A day later he crosses path with a high school girl who calls him to order for spitting on the ground, a little too close to her feet. This prompts Sang-Hoon to punch her in the face. Yeon-Hee (Kim Gol-Bi) is no pushover and demands restitution from Sang-Hoon, who lives by his own warped code. Her insistence, however, impresses him and the two rapidly become companions even if much of their conversation consists of him calling her a cunt and her calling him a gangster scumbag.
Yeon-Hee developed her own callousness living with an abusive brother who aspires to be a gangster himself. As it turns out, he eventually lands a job as Sang-Hoon’s trainee and puts up with daily beatings for not being tough enough with the hapless souls from whom they extract repayment.
As is the case with the best Korean movies, the personal becomes the political. Sang-Hoon’s is the prototypical Korean male, even though his toughness is exaggerated for effect. Director/writer Yang Ik-June is really interested in diagnosing a deep-seated malaise through the film medium. Unlike “The Raging Bull”, which this film bears some resemblance to in its relentless brutality, this is more than just the portrait of an individual. In an interview with Twitch magazine, Yang tried to put the domestic violence that occurs throughout the film in a broader context:
As for domestic violence, the ones who commit that are always the fathers, as you can see in the movie. And there is a reason for that: in the past Korea was colonized very often, it was also invaded very often, so the economic situation in Korea was very hard, very difficult. And so the fathers, who were responsible for the family, they did not have an attitude of good behavior or love towards the family. What they were thinking was: “I need to earn money, so that my family can live good”. So there is a difference between that. Instead of love for the family they want to earn money. Because they are so obsessed with earning money they drag their family with violence towards that goal, instead of going there together. And that is where all that domestic violence comes from.
4. Equation of Love and Death (Li Mi de caixiang, China, 2008)
This movie should appeal to the audiences who go for the “coincidence” movies like “Amores Perros”, “Crash”, “Babel”, et al. As is the case in this genre that has gone viral in international film circles, the major characters bump into each other to life-altering effect. And as is the case with the rise of China economically, this particular film not only competes with the Western product but also exceeds them handsomely.
The main character is Zhou Xun, a young female cabdriver whose boyfriend disappeared years earlier and whose memory still haunts her. In the beginning of the movie, she runs into two poor and desperate peasants trying to make their way home. They are not above robbing her to pay for their airfare back to the rural village that they have not seen in practically as many years as she has been separated from her boyfriend.
In a scene that evokes the crashes in Paul Haggis’s dreadful movie “Crash”, Zhou Xun and the two desperados come together in a highway accident that sets the gears of the movie into motion.
What makes Equation of Love and Death far more interesting than its Hollywood counterparts is its relentless energy and brilliant acting. Of particular note is the performance of the two captors played by Wang Baoqiang and Wang Hanyui, who effectively stand in for the hundreds of millions of farmers and temporary workers screwed over by the Chinese capitalist system. Wang Baoqiang might be familiar to those who have seen “Blind Shaft”, another Chinese movie about super-exploited workers in the coalfields. Wang Baoqiang plays a hapless peasant desperate for work that is victimized by a couple of con artists promising work. He is outstanding in both films.
5. Plastic City (Dangkou, Hong Kong, 2008)
This has a most unusual setting for a Hong Kong crime movie, namely São Paulo, Brazil. This joint Hong Kong-Brazil production tells the story of a crime boss involved in counterfeit goods trafficking, a far cry from the drugs or professional assassination angle these movies rely on so often. It is also a male bonding movie with the older crime boss Yuda (Anthony Wong) relying on a young and handsome Japanese man named Kirin (Joe Odagiri). Their relationship is like father and son, but has homoerotic overtones as well.
Yuda and Kirin have rivals in the counterfeit goods business, as might be expected. They are also pressured and extorted simultaneously by crooked cops. Although I expected the movie to unfold according to the conventions of Hong Kong crime movies, it took on the character of a magical realist novel before long including a confrontation with an albino tiger in the rainforest.
6. Ip Man (Hong Kong, 2008)
An “old school” martial arts movie based loosely (very) on the life of Ip Man, who trained Bruce Lee in Kung Fu. As might be expected, the movie involves one choreographed fight scene between Ip Man (Donny Yen) and the bad guys after another. In keeping with the proud traditions of both Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, the fighting is pretty close to the real thing.
As it happens, the bad guys are Japanese soldiers who are occupying China during WWII. The movie makes no attempt to render them as complex characters and they serve mainly as punching bags for Ip Man, who seems capable of ridding China of its occupiers all on his own.
If you are looking for shaded characterization and subtle dialog, look elsewhere. But if you are looking for the exciting, kinetic action that put Hong Kong cinema on the map, this is a must-see.
7. Warlords (Tau ming chong, Hong Kong, 2007)
This is a historical drama based loosely (very, once again) on the Taiping Rebellion with superstars Jet Li, Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro in the leading roles. As the movie begins, General Pang Qingyun (Jet Li) finds himself the sole and bloodied survivor of a battle between the Taiping rebels (who had been led by a man claiming to be related to Jesus Christ) and the Qing army that Pang served in.
After being nursed to health by Lian (Jinglei Xu), a peasant girl that he becomes intimate with, Pang moves on to a nearby village where he tries to blend in with the local population that is being victimized by a bandit gang led by Zhao Er-Hu (Andy Lau) and Zhang Wen-Xiang (Takeshi Kaneshiro). Drawing upon his tested combat skills, Pang confronts Er-Hu and spares his life just when he has his sword at the bandit’s throat. Impressed with Pang’s prowess, Er-Hu invites him to join his gang. In no time at all, Pang becomes co-equal with the two bandit leaders as the three embark on a series of confrontations with the imperial army.
Showing his strategic acumen, Pang suggest to his two comrades that they enter the imperial army as a group so they can get their hands on rifles, which were essential to further success. In those days, soldiers were often rewarded with spoils of a vanquished city rather than wages so being properly equipped was a sine qua non.
As the three warlords become ever more powerful, Pang succumbs to hubris and begins to identify more and more with the royal family. When it becomes necessary to slaughter 4000 soldiers who have surrendered, Pang does not hesitate. This act of cruelty costs him the friendship of Er-Hu and Wen-Xiang who had long given up their bandit ways under Pang’s guidance. When they remind him of how he has forsaken his principles, he replies that the ends justify the means which for him is defeating the enemies of the throne.
Although the movie is first-rate entertainment, I was disappointed in its utter lack of interest in the historical context and which even the usually sagacious Subway Cinema, the organizers of the film festival, refer to as “an insane putsch led by a warlord claiming to be Jesus’ younger brother and it resulted in 20 million deaths.”
Despite the strange religious beliefs of the top Taiping rebel, farmlands under his control were seized from the feudal overlords and distributed to the peasants. He also banned foot binding and declared equality of the sexes. It also sought to eliminate class distinctions and in so doing was hailed by Mao Zedung as a forerunner to the revolution he led.
One of these days, a movie might be made that is sympathetic to the Taiping rebellion (if one has not been made already.) Now that’s one I’d pay good money for!
Last week I mentioned to my wife that very few things keep me committed to the hedge fund manager’s playground that Manhattan has become other than the ethnic restaurants we love exploring and the film festivals that feature the offbeat and the interesting. Despite being a film enthusiast, I have only stepped foot in a neighborhood theater once this year and that was to see Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell” (not recommended).
But when I received word a couple of months ago that the yearly New York Asian Film Festival was scheduled to open on June 19th, I felt like a tot awaiting a visit from Santa. I have been covering this festival as a NYFCO critic since it began and it has afforded me some of my greatest film experiences over the past decade.
As you might expect, the festival includes low culture as well as high. To be more exact, the low culture martial arts/gangster movies that Hong Kong pioneered incorporate many high culture aspects, incorporating innovative film techniques and penetrating looks at an Asian society where cops and gangsters often play interchangeable roles. For those who want a Marxist analysis of this genre, I strongly recommend “City on Fire”, a Verso book written by my friends Michael Hoover and Lisa Stokes which can be read online here.
Additionally, the festival screens movies that represent serious efforts to examine the human condition and that are clearly influenced by classic traditions in film going back to Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa, not to speak of great American and European film.
Last night I attended a pre-festival screening for “High Noon”, a movie made in Hong Kong last year by a 24-year-old director named Mak Hei-yan who spoke during a q&a session. Mak’s movie utilized a screenplay about teenage angst and rebellion written by Tom Lin that also figured in companion movies made in Taiwan and Mainland China. Each director took liberties with the script to capture the local conditions where the movie was made. Mak’s movie captures the febrile energy of Hong Kong where at least some young people from the lower classes apparently remain immune to its dubious charms. If her title “High Noon” evokes the 1952 western classic about a sheriff discovering himself under the crucible of an outlaw threat, then the plot and style of “Rebel Without a Cause”, the 1955 movie about teenage angst.
Whether or not Ms. Mak has seen the James Dean vehicle, she has as acted as a medium for its message. Like the U.S. in the 1950s, today’s Hong Kong seems to have lost its moorings despite material abundance.
During the q&a, in response to my question about what social or economic conditions could be driving its youth to self-destructive behavior, Mak stated that they still have hope that friendship and love are possible despite all odds. For someone like me who was about the age of the characters in “High Noon” when “Rebel Without a Cause” was popular, I felt that this dialog between James Dean and his love interest would have fit in with her film:
Judy: I love somebody. All the time I’ve been… I’ve been looking for someone to love me. And now I love somebody. And it’s so easy. Why is it easy now?
Jim Stark: I don’t know; it is for me, too.
Judy: I love you, Jim. I really mean it.
Jim Stark: Well, I’m glad.
The travails of Mak’s characters are not that different from those that afflict characters in American flicks, including drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and mindless gang violence. But it is what she does with these problems that set her apart from her peers in the West, including the feckless producers of “Juno”, a movie about teen pregnancy that treats it like a lark. Additionally, a key plot element involves one of her male protagonists uploading a video showing him having sex with his girlfriend that eventually becomes viral—to shattering consequences. All of these problems are treated without kid gloves and to greater dramatic impact than what we have become accustomed to from Hollywood.
Beyond her ability to treat the inner lives of her characters with a depth and maturity that belies her own youth, Mak has a flair for the dramatic visual statement that is the mark of a real genius with a camera. In one scene, one of her seven male students and a ketamine addict (a drug originally used by veterinarians but has emerged as a drug of choice at raves) tries to shut himself inside his mother’s vinyl suitcase, a gesture evoking a desire to go back into the womb in some ways. When he proves too large, he begins jumping up and down on it instead. This mad behavior serves to describe his psyche much more dramatically than the words of a social worker or priest, the customary Greek chorus in Hollywood teen angst movies.
“High Noon” will be shown again at the film festival. I can only urge New Yorkers to bend every effort to see as many of these movies as they can since they are unique opportunities to get a bird’s eye view of Asian society as well as superb entertainment. Scheduling information is here.
Any visit to the world’s most secretive country was bound to be remarkable, but it was the cinemaqoers themselves that most fascinated at North Korea’s Pyongyang International Film Festival. By James Bell
Travelling to the Pyongyang International Film Festival in North Korea was going to be a trip like no other. What greeted me at Beijing airport to fly me to the world’s most secretive country confirmed this: waiting on the runway, in the otherwise ultra-modern airport, was an ageing Tupolev that had seen its best days in the 1970s. Its thick, pile carpet and wooden interior were reminiscent of an early Bond movie.
The rigorously controlled nature of any North Korean visit was made clear as soon as we arrived at Pyongyang Airport. Mobile phones are banned, so we handed ours to customs officials who assured us they would be returned upon leaving; laptops are allowed but there is no internet access for foreigners – or the majority of North Koreans.
In the arrivals lounge I got my first glimpse of the two smiling faces that proved inescapable at the festival: the Great Leader Kim Il-sung, and his son, the Dear Comrade Kim Jong-il (Dear Leader since 1994). Pictures of the pair hang outside buildings and on indoor walls across the country; every citizen wears a tiny Kim Il-sung badge on their left breast and all locally made films refer in some way to the glory of their achievements.
Pyongyang is immediately and strikingly different from any other city I’ve visited: few cars traverse the meticulously clean roads and every street is lined with bushes and trees. We passed huge squares and towering monuments, including a 60-foot bronze statue of Kim Il-sung. The mostly white buildings are free of advertising – except for the many murals that remind us of the need to resist American imperialism, and the ubiquitous portraits of the Kims, of course.
The hotel that houses all foreign guests is cut off from the rest of Pyongyang on Yanggakdo Island, which sits in the middle of the city’s Taedong river. Just in front of it is the Pyongyang International Cinema, a looming concrete structure straight out of a sci-fi set where the festival’s opening ceremony takes place. As the mix of wide-eyed foreign guests and sombrely suited Korean men made their way into the ceremony, an all-female marching band dressed in dazzling white-and-blue costumes sang stirring songs and performed a tightly choreographed dance routine. In contrast with the suited men, most women wore a traditional, flowing, primary-coloured dress known as the Hanbok. Our hostess wore a yellow Hanbok and delivered her introductions in a high-pitched, near-ecstatic tone. Atrociously soppy and predictable, the opening Chinese film, The Tender Heart, prompted many foreign guests to skip out early. For me the film was worth staying put for, if only to see how moving the Korean authence found it. My mission, in any case, was not to assess the latest international releases on the festival circuit; I was there to see what function cinema plays in the world’s most repressed and secretive society, and what locals might take from films offering them rare glimpses into other countries.
Pyongyang’s festival was founded in 1987, and has been held every two years since 1990. Initially known as the Film Festival of Non-Aligned and Other Developing Countries, its selection was limited to films from the Communist bloc and a handful of other sympathetic nations (didactic documentaries from Libya were reportedly a staple). With the fall of the Soviet Union, the festival slowly began to widen its reach, and this year’s edition was the most open yet. There were of course no films from America, Japan or South Korea, but the selection included works from Iceland, France (The Page Turner), Australia ( Unfinished Sky), the Czech Republic (Empties), Britain (Atonement, Elizabeth: The Golden Age), Germany (The Counterfeiters – somewhat ironic given North Korea’s reputation as a source for forged dollars) and many more. In all, 108 foreign films from 46 countries were screened. Outside sponsorship was also allowed for the first time, with DHL contributing $16,000 to assist in the transportation of prints, and there were other signs of new openness; whereas in previous years separate cinema entrances had been insisted on for foreigners and locals, this time everyone queued up together.
The propaganda programme
The first few days were like finding your way through a fog, until I worked out who to approach for information. A personal guide accompanied me at all times and I was forbidden from exploring the city alone; I would have to wait for the many trips to the various national monuments, shows and museums that made up a tight schedule. Strangeness was never far away. At one point my guide told me, “Tomorrow the delegation from Earth arrives.” She was referring to the Attenborough-fronted BBC nature-documentary Planet Earth, but in the island’s bubble-like confines, one could easily imagine a more fantastical scenario.
With no press office on hand to answer questions and arrange interviews, getting a sense of how films had been chosen proved difficult. Eventually, discreet interviews were arranged, and I spoke to a representative from Korfilm, the organisation with sole responsibility for theatrical distribution in North Korea. On trips to the Shanghai and Berlin festivals, she and her colleagues had made an initial selection of 500 films, which was then whittled down by a small committee of filmmakers, government officials and academics to the 108 screened. Pressed on what this committee were looking for, she answered, “Films that suit the feelings of the Korean people.”
Though there was no single obvious theme linking the selection, there were many sentimental films about families. Large-scale period dramas were also popular- Chinese director Feng Xiaogang’s Assembly, set in 1948 during the Chinese civil war, took the festival’s top prize. British costume pics proved especially welcome – perhaps because they don’t show the contemporary reality of life in the west. There was an angry crush at the doors of the sell-out screening of Elizabeth: The Golden Age. British films had apparently also been the hits of previous festivals; the 2006 festival screened Bean, Billy Elliott and Bend It Like Beckha m, and the 2002 festival featured a fondly recalled programme of classic Ealing comedies.
Apart from this festival, the vast majority of the population have almost no access to films from the west. They are limited mostly to a diet of the older Soviet, Cuban or Chinese films that can be bought at DVD stalls in the city, and occasional screenings on the Mansudae television channel. Accurate information about viewing habits was scarce, though some was gleaned by quizzing the guides, many of whom were English students or teachers at one of Pyongyang’s three universities and therefore had uniquely privileged access to DVD collections of English-language films. (Pirated DVDs smuggled over from China are now rumoured to find their way to the general population, much to the government’s dissatisfaction.)
Choice, therefore, isn’t as restricted as you might expect for some film lovers. Nearly all of the guides had seen Titanic (which has an added symbolic significance in North Korea because late President Kim Il-sung was born on the same day the ship sank, April 15, 1912). Most of the others had at least seen Gone With the Wind and Braveheart – both films that could be seen as examples of oppression at different times in western history. One guide had a more surprising list of films she had enjoyed at university: as well as Pride S- Prejudice and Great Expectations there was the adaptation of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. There were American films, too. Tom Cruise was “cute” in The Firm, while the English-language film she had seen most recently was National Treasure, with Nicolas Cage.
As well as foreign titles, the festival hosted a programme, organised especially for foreign guests, of what they deemed to be classic films from North Korea’s 60-year history. Virtually all studios and archives were destroyed during the three years of the Korean War. After 1953, the studios had to be rebuilt from scratch. Like Stalin and Mao, Kim Ilsung extolled the propaganda value of cinema, and ordered films reflecting “socialist reality” to be made: “Like the leading article of the Party paper, the cinema should have great appeal and move ahead of the realities… it should play a mobilising role in the revolutionary struggle.” From the 1960s until the early 1990s, an average of 20 films were made each year, but it was frequently as many as 100. The Soviet Union and China supplied money and technology and, in turn, North Korean films were screened across the communist territories.
The Flower Girl(1970), adapted from a 1930 play written by Kim Il-sung, is a perennial favourite – it is referred to as North Korea’s Gone with the Wind. Set in the late 1920s and 1930s, when Korea was under Japanese occupation, it follows the misfortunes of a poor family brutalised by their Japanese landowners. Two sisters sell flowers to pay for medicine needed by their ailing mother who refuses to allow them to degrade themselves. The horrors of Japanese occupation are laid on heavily – in one scene the younger sister is blinded by hot grains. There’s a clear message for younger audiences about the suffering their elders endured, and of heroic female sacrifice, both recurrent themes in the programme. The Flower Girl was a hit in China, and is still remembered affectionately. In a Beijing taxi on my way to the airport with a fellow British journalist, we mentioned that we were heading to Pyongyang. “Ah, Flower Gir!.” the driver exclaimed before breaking into the film’s title song.
Older films in the programme usually referred even if only allegorically – to the wars with Japan and America and to the collective effort needed to rebuild the country. Bellflower(1987) told of a man’s regret about his youthful decision to leave his lover and follow a wandering, indulgent life. The lover had selflessly stayed behind and helped to rebuild her village. Despite the sloganeering (workers sing lines such as “Happiness is not a windfall, but is created by our hands”), Bellfiower was the most cinematic film in the programme. There were on-message genre films too. The 1986 kung-fu film Hong hi dong aped the Shaw Brothers, but also told of a fight against foreign invaders: “It’s clear they are from abroad,” a local hero says. “As a nation we must rise up and defeat them.”
Since the 1990s, North Korean cinema has displayed a more realist aesthetic. Topics such as the generation gap and the devastating famine of the late 1990s come in for relatively serious treatment. Yet like all North Korean films, they suggest the answers are devotion to the state and the leadership of Kim Jong-il. As North Korean cinema expert Antoine Coppola has noted, political repression aside, North Korean cinema has typically been propaganda by instruction, not omission.
Party not personal
The economic realities of the post-Soviet world have been harsh on film production, with only five or six films produced annually since 2000. Only one new feature was screened at this year’s festival, the unremarkable The Kites Flying in the Sky another story of female sacrifice, based on an apparently real-life case of a woman who abandons her promising career as a marathon runner to take in orphaned children. More interesting was the veteran director Jang In-hok’s film A Schoolgirl’s Diary (2006), about a student unsure whether to follow her father into a life devoted to scientific research. In an impromptu interview at the hotel bar, Jang described how in 2007, Kim Jong-il, concerned at the failings in North Korean film, personally called a temporary halt to film production and installed Korea’s directors in a hotel (”Not quite like this one”) where they were apparently put through an eight-month course that involved watching 250 films handpicked by the Dear Leader himself. These included films by Zhang Yimou, Japanese film-maker Yamada Yôji and even Steven Spielberg. A representative from Korfilm corroborated this far-fetched sounding story to explain why only two features have been released in the past two years. She added that seven films, all beneficiaries of the Dear Leader’s scheme, are due for release in 2009.
Kim Jong-il is well known to be a film fan. He is said to have a personal collection of 20,000 DVDs, and would have become a director if he hadn’t been called upon to lead the country. Many people shared admiring anecdotes of his visits to film sets, where his timely advice to the director on the shooting of key scenes proved decisive. His fascination seems genuine; bookshop shelves groan with pamphlets and books reportedly written by him, such as On the Art of Cinema from 1973, on how films can and should support the revolutionary ideas. The entries range from directing and acting, through to make-up and music.
Cinema in North Korea can only really be understood in relation to the state. The directors and actors I spoke to denied that their work had anything to do with personal expression. An ‘underground’ of unsanctioned locally made films is simply impossible. There are five key agencies responsible for producing films: a documentary studio, a ‘youth-film’ studio, an animation house (the few examples of North Korean anime I saw were surprisingly bold), a body for ‘military’ films, and the studio for feature-film production.
We visited the feature-film studio lot at the end of the programme, a wander through mocked-up Japanese, western and South Korean streets, complete with decadent bars and misspelled posters for western films. There were historical Korean castles and villages, too. That day a scene was being shot for a period film, with women in traditional dress sifting rice. Whether it was for show or not was unclean the crew seemed quite unconcerned at the guests peering into shot and letting off flash bulbs.
Few films screened in the programme had much to offer western authences other than historical or exotic interest. It’s doubtful that there are countless treasures in Pyongyang’s archives waiting to be discovered by intrepid cinéphiles. Nevertheless these films provide an insight into a country of which most in the west know little, and so deserve to be seen. Paris-based distributor Pretty Pictures released Schoolgirl’s Diary into French cinemas last year, and are planning on releasing it as part of a four-DVD set with The Flower Girl, Bellfiower and the two-part The Tale of Chun Hyang. As yet no UK distributor, exhibitor, festival programmer or broadcaster has expressed any interest. Will anyone take up the challenge?
This is a clip from a 1991 North Korean movie titled “The Girls in my Home Town”. It is not included in the four films discussed below, but it is the only North Korean movie that can be seen on the Internet—or more accurately, an excerpt of that movie. It will give you a flavor of the combination of sentimentality and overheated rhetoric that can be found, however, in practically all North Korean movies. A review of the movie can be read at http://www.socialistfilms.org/2007/12/girls-in-my-hometown-dprk-1991.html
*****
When I received an invitation from the Korea Society in New York to attend a 4-part screening of North Korean films, I jumped at the opportunity for multiple reasons. To begin with, I am a huge fan of Korean movies, admittedly those that come from the south exclusively. As a relic of the cold war, North Korean movies–like Cuban cigars–are hard to come by. I assumed that they would be much different than the deeply ironic, sophisticated and urbane South Korean movies that I had become devoted to, but was curious to see whether the national culture that had been developing for millennia could still be detected in the dogmatically Marxist north.
While many of the finest South Korean movies are unavailable on home video, you can rent “Save the Green Planet” from Netflix, which summarizes the movie thusly:
Believing that aliens in human form are systematically destroying the planet and all humankind, Byung-gu sets out to capture an alien leader and force him to confess. Because all the aliens look like humans, Byung-gu makes an educated guess and kidnaps the head of a chemical company.
I also wondered if North Korean movies would give me insights into one of the two remaining socialist countries in the world, giving the word socialist its broadest interpretation of course. As a long time supporter of the Cuban revolution, my attitude toward North Korea was probably like most leftists. We did not want to see North Korea victimized by economic sanctions or military attack, but there was little to identify with in a society that was bound together by an odd combination of 1930s style Stalinism and centuries old Confucian beliefs.
To understand North Korea would be more imperative than ever given current events. Just as the film series began, an underground nuclear device was detonated in the north and once again the threat level escalated, including the possibility that freighters would be intercepted on the high seas if they were deemed to be carrying nuclear material.
In a move that seemed calculated to deepen the perception of North Korea as a family dynasty, it was reported today that Kim Jong-il had designated Kim Jong-un, his youngest son, as his successor. Although comparisons with Raul Castro taking over from his brother Fidel might be raised by pundits hostile to socialism across the board, one can at least acknowledge that Raul Castro was a central leader of the armed struggle that toppled Batista. But why would the 23 year old grandson of North Korea’s version of Fidel Castro become head of state unless, of course, North Korea was governed as a kind of immense extended family in which blood ties mattered more than talent?
Events in South Korea also reflected the impact of the north. On May 26, former president Roh Moo-Hyun committed suicide Saturday by leaping to his death from a hill behind his house. Roh was the first South Korean leader to cross the demilitarized zone and meet with Kim Jong-il and believed in the tension-easing “sunshine policy” of his predecessor, Kim Dae-Jung. He killed himself after being implicated in a bribery scandal. Street protests by his supporters blame the ruling conservative party for hounding him to the point of no return.
For a summary of the four North Korean movies, go to the Korea Society website. Unfortunately, my own brief takes on the films below cannot be accompanied by a Youtube clip for obvious reasons. But after seeing these four most interesting movies, it did occur to me that North Korea could do itself a big favor by simply making them available on the Internet. Despite their obvious propaganda purpose, they are all distinguished by a charm that would go a long way in breaking down stereotypes about the “rogue state”.
1.Traces of Life(1989)
This is the story of Ji Jun, the widow of a sailor who swims out to an American warship with a mine in his hands and destroys it Kamikaze fashion during the Korean War. The sailor is a true believer in the revolution, while his wife cares more about what goes on in the household. In a change of heart, she decides to return to his farming village and work with the other beneficiaries of land reform to produce food for the revolution. The movie climaxes with her being awarded for presiding over a bumper crop.
Obviously, this movie owes a lot to the Stalinist “people’s hero” movies of the 30s and 40s but it is redeemed by surprising admissions that a collective farm is no paradise. When a disabled sailor is rejected as a member, he reacts bitterly and drowns his sorrow in alcohol. The ties between Ji Jun and her two children are also fairly complex, given the propaganda parameters. They feel that she has not given proper respect to her dead husband, but in the end family and nation are reconciled.
2.The Tale of Chun Hyang (1980)
This is a socialist retelling of a Korean folktale set in the feudal era about a woman from the lower classes who marries a member of the gentry despite her mother’s warning that aristocrats will always betray the poor. At the end of part one of this 148 minute epic, the mother appears to have been vindicated since the husband moves with his parents to Seoul leaving her behind.
Part two of the movie finds the heroine in the clutches of the local magistrate who is bent on turning her into his concubine. Meanwhile, he is oppressing the local peasants by stealing their grain and acting for just like the landowners who made life miserable for the Korean peasant in real life before the revolution. The husband, now a secret royal commissioner, returns in the nick of time to lead a peasant revolt and rescue his wife.
The movie makes liberal use of song, even to the point of approximating an opera. In its synthesis of ancient themes about love and faith and modern ones about the class struggle, it is essentially North Korean.
3. Wolmi Island(1982)
When I was growing up in the 1950s, there seemed to be a Korean War movie about once a month. I still remember “Bridges at Toko-Ri” that resulted in a nomination for best director by the Director’s Guild in 1956. (The director, Mark Robson, was also involved with the liberal McCarthyite “Trial” made two years later.)
Given the flag-waving character of these productions, the perfect antidote is “Wolmi Island”, based on a battle that took place in 1950 which the movie represents as a heroic effort by a small garrison of sailors near Inchon to hold off an American fleet as the bulk of the North Korean army organized an orderly retreat to the North.
I found the battle scenes far less interesting than the interaction between the various characters, including a young female recruit who sacrifices her life in order to restore a communications line that will allow the North Korean guns to resume counter-attack. In all the scenes she appears in, she manages to upstage the male actors.
4. The Flower Girl (1972)
This was my favorite. Set during the Japanese occupation during the 1930s, it tells the story of an impoverished family consisting of a widow and her two daughters that relies on the meager income of the older daughter’s flower sales on the street. The other daughter was blinded by a vicious landlord when she was a tot. There is also an older brother languishing in a Japanese prison. The Japanese rely heavily on the wealthy landowners and their cops to keep the peasants and poor urban dwellers in line.
The most moving part of “The Flower Girl” is her trek to visit her brother in prison. Upon arriving there, she is told that he has died. As it turns out, he has actually escaped from prison and joined the guerrillas. The film ends with a rousing attack on the landlords and the reunion of brother and sisters. All in all, the movie reminded me very much of “Sansho the Bailiff”, a Japanese movie from the 1950s about the cruelty of landlords and the separation of a brother and sister.
*****
Along with a number of other North Korean movies, “The Flower Girl” is analyzed by U.C. Santa Barbara professor Suk-Young Kim in a lecture titled “Kim Jong-il and North Korean Films” that can be seen online at http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=4103. (But not in Firefox. You have to use IE or Safari). Kim also gave a talk at the Korea Society on the opening night of the mini-festival that is not online, however. I cannot recommend her lecture highly enough since it is both illuminating for its insights into the role of North Korean movies and the video clips she discusses in the course of the lecture. You will see a longish excerpt from “The Flower Girl” as well as one from a remarkable Robin Hood/socialist type movie drawn from Korean legend that includes Hong-Kong type martial arts.
In framing her approach to North Korean movies, Kim explains why Kim Jong-il was so keen to promote the medium:
Now, why was film so important for Kim Jong-il, in addition to all the reasons that I laid out here? We tend to think that Kim Jong-il is a leader who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, which is true because he was the biological son of the founding father of North Korea, Kim Il-sung. But we have to think that North Korea is the first hereditary socialist country, where power to rule was passed down from father to the biological son. And before this was officialized, we did not know who the next leader of North Korea would be. I mean, it was certain that Kim Il-sung would handpick somebody before he passed away, but it wasn’t sure if it was going to be his son or somebody else in his political retinue.
So in a way, Kim Jong-il had to really work his way through — he had to use whatever talent he had to really pave the road to power. And he was — he is known to be an extremely talented artistic person by all accounts, and he tapped into his artistic talent to really prove his filial piety for his father, Kim Il-sung. And this is an extremely interesting fact if we consider how North Korea is still observing traditional Confucian values of patriarchy, and in this light, the nation itself is seen as an extended family structure. So to respect and preserve the authorial power of the patriarchal national leader was extremely important.
And another factor that plays into this rationale is that Kim Il-sung, the founding father of North Korea, lived long enough to have witnessed de-Stalinization campaign in the Soviet Union, and whatever happened to the Maoist legacy after the Culture Revolution. So he was extremely keen on preserving his legacy after death, and in this sense Kim Jong-il effectively used film to really create this mythical aura about his father and perpetuate his legacy by creating these everlasting images.
Whatever one thinks about North Korean society, surely it makes sense to reduce the tensions between the U.S. and the beleaguered state. In going through Bruce Cumings’s essay “Decoupled from History: North Korea in the ‘Axis of Evil’” that appeared in the 2004 “Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Truth about North Korea, Iran, and Syria”, you are struck by how the potential for war has always been heightened by U.S. refusal to accept a non-capitalist system on its own terms. Given the hostilities that have existed since 1945, the defensiveness of the North Koreans begins to seem normal. As someone once put it, even the paranoid have enemies.
Most leftists probably have the same impression that I do, namely that the U.S. intervened on behalf of the south after war with the north began. Cumings makes a convincing case that the conflict dates back much earlier, when the U.S. decided to back the landlords and corrupt officials who had collaborated with the Japanese during the 30s and 40s–in other words, the same villains who made life miserable for the poor in “The Flower Girl”. Considering the brazen disrespect shown for Korean independence, it is no wonder that the propaganda movies of the 1980s exhibited such passion. Despite being propaganda, they were rooted in the lived experience of the nation.
In 1945 the U.S. occupied southern Korea and set up a three-year military government that was directed from the Yongsan military base in Seoul that the Japanese built in 1894. James R. Hodge, the American commander, took over the executive mansion known as “the blue house” that the Japanese governor-general had occupied.
Hodge then decided to build up a bureaucracy using the same discredited civil servants who had been trained for military government in Japan, a complete slap in the face to Koreans who had fought on the side of the allies in helping to liberate East Asia from Japanese rule.
During Japanese occupation, a powerful leftwing movement had developed in the south that was completely independent of Kim Il-Sung. This mattered little to the U.S. which considered all grass roots movements together as pawns of the Kremlin. Merrell Benninghoff, chief political advisor to Hodge, reported:
Southern Korea can best be described as a powder keg ready to explode at the application of a spark.
There is great disappointment that immediate independence and sweeping out of the Japanese did not eventuate.
[Those] Koreans as have achieved high rank under the Japanese are considered pro-Japanese and are hated almost as much as their masters.
All groups seem to have the common ideas of seizing Japanese property, ejecting the Japanese from Korea, and achieving immediate independence.
Korea is completely ripe for agitators.
The most encouraging single factor in the political situation is the presence in Seoul of several hundred conservatives among the older and better educated Koreans. Although many of them have served with the Japanese, that stigma ought eventually to disappear.
William Langdon, another State Department hack, appeared to agree with the North Korean propaganda film’s assessment of the old regime but put a plus where the Communists put a minus:
The old native regime internally was feudal and corrupt but the record shows that it was the best disposed toward foreign interests of the three Far Eastern nations, protecting foreign lives and property and franchises. I am sure that we may count on at least as much a native government evolved as above…
South Koreans rose up against the quisling government without any assistance from the North and were brutally repressed throughout 1946 to 1948.
Eventually, an anti-Communist government stabilized in the south and the two parts of the country found themselves on a collision course. The George W. Bush’s of the day who advocated preemptive war saw the Korean War as an opportunity to roll back the revolution in both the north and in China, Korea’s main ally. Carpet bombing of the north, as well as other punishing measures, left two million dead half of whom were civilians. With a population in the north of just under 10 million at the time, this was the equivalent of 60 million dead Americans. Considering the response of the U.S. to the loss of just 3000 of its citizens on 9/11, the North Koreans appear almost Gandhian by comparison.
In 2000, during the final days of the Clinton administration, it appeared that a thaw between the U.S. and North Korea was developing as reported by the NY Times on October 20:.
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said tonight that “important progress” had been made in her talks here with North Korea’s leader toward persuading North Korea to “restrain missile development and testing, as well as missile exports,” though any final agreement will have to await further talks.
Missile specialists from the United States and North Korea will meet next week to explore further the specific ways in which North Korea will limit its missile program, she said.
In particular, a quid pro quo of shutting down the missile program in exchange for launchings of North Korean satellites by foreign governments will be discussed further, a senior official said.
The idea was first raised in talks in July between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the North Korean leader.
The six hours of talks between Dr. Albright and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, were the first between such a high-level American official and a North Korean leader.
“Everyone leaves here rather struck by the breadth and depth of the discussions,” the senior official said. This was largely because the Americans heard firsthand from Mr. Kim, the only decision maker who counts in this country, “what he was prepared to do.”
The two-day visit ended on a cordial note. As a parting gift, Dr. Albright presented a basketball autographed by Michael Jordan to Mr. Kim, who turns out to be an ardent fan.
As they said their farewells in the lobby of a government guest house tonight, Dr. Albright encouraged Mr. Kim “to pick up the telephone any time,” an American official said. And Mr. Kim, — the leader of one of the few countries to deny its people Internet access but who is himself a keen Internet browser with three computers in his office — replied, “Please give me your e-mail address.”
One of Dr. Albright’s goals on this trip was to plan for a possible visit here by President Clinton, but she declined to be drawn out on whether Mr. Clinton would come. Instead, she said she would report to Mr. Clinton on the results and it was up to him to make the decision.
Another goal was to assess the North Korean leader who, in his six years in office, has remained virtually unknown as a personality or a policy maker. His father, Kim Il Sung, founded the Communist Party here and ruled the country with an iron hand until his death in 1994.
Dr. Albright said that after negotiating with Mr. Kim and socializing with him at two dinners and at the performance in honor of the 55th anniversary of the North Korean Communist Party, she found him a “very good listener, a good interlocutor.” And she added, “He strikes me as very decisive and very practical.”
Not a year later, the WTC and the Pentagon had been attacked by Islamic terrorists and a new more aggressive foreign policy based on “preemptive” warfare was implemented. Along with Iran, North Korea became a “rogue state” whose leader was depicted as a madman rather than the “very practical” official that she was ready to exchange email addresses with.
It is difficult to predict whether Obama will ratchet up tensions with North Korea given all the other foreign policy adventures he has on his plate revolving around the need to subdue the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One only hopes that the antiwar movement in the U.S. will have the internal resources to oppose war across Asia given what is at stake. While one can have all sorts of opinions on the North Korean social system, we can all agree that another Korean War would be a disaster for its people as well as for working class Americans who will bear the brunt of the fighting.
Opening at the IFC Center in NY on June 5, “24 City” is the latest envelope-pushing movie by Jia Zhang-ke. Incorporating fictional elements, this documentary casts a cold and clinical eye on the new China and expresses nostalgia for the Maoist system symbolized by an actual state-owned munitions factory replete with “Iron rice bowl” support pillars. Named “Factory 240”, as an internal security code for the Chengdu Engine Group, it is about to be relocated in order to make room for an enormous real estate development geared to China’s rising professional classes and called “24 City”.
The movie consists of interviews with the actual workers, all male, middle-aged, and harboring sympathies for the Maoist system to one degree or another, as well as with three actresses who narrate experiences in line with the real workers. This device allows Zhang-ke to highlight certain themes crucial to the telling of this story.
His last film “Still Life” was a fictional work that examined the horrific impact of the Three Gorges Dam. “24 City” is more oblique. Like “Still Life”, it is unmistakably hostile to the rapid “advances” that have left the countryside immiserated and workers stripped of all the protections they once enjoyed under the admittedly repressive Maoist system but the interviewees focus on their private lives and their experiences as workers rather than reflect upon the changes sweeping China.
Like the pensioners in Soviet Russia who lived, fought and suffered through WWII, the Factory 24 workers have vivid recollections of their role in a revolutionary society. The oldest recalls working behind Red Army lines in the 1940s in order to keep the fighters armed. Younger workers talk about fulfilling their duty during the Korean War and Vietnam War. For these workers, a job was more than a job. It was a way to defend their revolution and those of brother and sister workers.
Throughout the movie we are reminded of how the factory kept workers bonded together beyond the factory floor. One 40ish worker is seen shooting hoops at a factory basketball court. At the end of the movie the court is demolished in order to make way for new luxury apartments. We also see a group of women, real workers not actresses, rehearsing a “People’s” opera from the 1950s. China may have moved on but they have not. Toward the very end of the movie we see the entire workforce singing “The International”. It is in a word deeply inspiring.
In the press notes for “24 City”, Zhang-ke describes his goals:
The stories of these characters, both real and fictional, center on a state-owned factory which supplies the Air Force and other sectors of the military. The factory was founded 60 years ago, and was moved to Chengdu City 50 years ago. It has weathered all of the successive political movements under communist government. I’m not interested in chronicling this history as such, but rather in seeing how a century of experiments with Socialism has impacted on the fate of Chinese people. To understand the complexity of these social changes, we need to listen to the direct and in-depth testimonies of the people who lived through them.
And listen we should to their voices in this important documentary that opens on June 5th at the IFC center.
“Offshore” might not be the first movie about Indian call center workers—“Slumdog Millionaire” has that distinction—but surely this dark comedy is the first produced by Indians that deals with the cultural and economic dislocations, not to speak of the outright racism, when they get these jobs as a result of outsourcing.
As a joint Indian-U.S. production, the movie tries to tell both sides of a story that is all the more topical given the current economic downturn. It begins with a visit of Voxx call center executive Ajay Tiwari (Sid Makkar) to the offices of Fairfax Furniture in Detroit in order to line up a deal to relocate their call center to Mumbai where it will be staffed by Indians.
But before the move can be consummated, it will be necessary for a cadre of Voxx workers to be trained at Fairfax headquarters where they will be on a forced march to learn the model line in two months. Voxx had proposed a nine month preparatory period but the Fairfax bosses were anxious to cut costs as soon as possible.
The three Indian workers are given the cold shoulder in the company cafeteria and are convenient scapegoats for the long-time employees who are on their way out. Even worse, the company trainer makes their daily sessions a hell on earth demanding instant answers to obscure questions about how to assemble a coffee table, etc. The Indians are models of perseverance and good will but come close to breaking on a daily basis.
Director/writer Diane Cheklich explained her motivation in making such a movie:
Almost everyone these days has been personally touched by outsourcing, whether as a customer calling into a call center for service or as a worker who has lost their job to an offshore company. The concept resonates with people on both sides of the ocean.
While I found the movie altogether compelling, it did leave me with a somewhat deflated feeling since the drama was posed in terms of “cowboys versus Indians” as the film-makers describe it. In an epoch of an almost Hobbesian struggle of workers of one ethnicity against another for the right to be exploited by a Fairfax or a General Motors for that matter, the audience, well at least this member of the audience, would hope for a resolution that favored all the workers against the bosses who set them against each other. “Offshore”, perhaps acknowledging current realities, does not offer such a pat resolution. “Offshore” opens tomorrow at the Imaginasian Theater in New York. A trailer can be seen at the official website: http://www.offshorethemovie.com/
****
“Food, Inc.” is a powerful indictment of corporate farming that opens at the Film Forum in New York on June 12th. Inspired by the writings of Eric Schosser (“Fast Food Nation”) and Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”), who provide a kind of tag-team running commentary throughout the documentary directed by Robert Kenner, it is the definitive statement on how America produces crappy food to the detriment of the people who eat it, the animals who are treated cruelly in farms and slaughterhouses, and the largely immigrant workforce that labors in unsafe and low wage conditions. The only benefactors it would appear are the men who run Monsanto, Purdue, Smithfield and a small group of other huge multinationals that only see food as the ultimate commodity. When they look at a tomato, they don’t see something to eat but something to turn into a dollar no matter the consequences to society.
While I have been paying close attention to these issues for well over a decade, I was surprised to learn that I only knew half the story. It is far worse than I imagined, especially when you are dealing with camera images rather than words on a page. I was shocked to see what chickens raised in factory conditions look like. The film’s producer went to dozens of large-scale chicken farmers who were under contract to Purdue or Tyson to get permission to film inside a chicken coop (a warehouse would describe it better) but were thwarted each time, only finally to get Carole Morison—a Purdue supplier—to allow them inside even if it meant the end of her business. She was disgusted by what was taking place and wanted to get it off of her chest.
She had already put up screened windows so her chickens could see daylight over the objections of Purdue, but had no control over how the animals were raised. The chickens had been bred to have larger breasts and mature twice as fast as normal with the intention of supplying the supermarkets with a more cost-effective product. What this does not take into account is the inability of a hen to walk properly with the extra weight on top placed on spindly underdeveloped legs. As a consequence, the sheds were filled with crippled hens crawling about the floor, often close to death or already dead. The floor of the warehouse was littered with these casualties to the profit nexus and their feces. No wonder Purdue and Tyson didn’t want you to see how your food looked before it came to the meat bins at your local supermarket.
Despite the grizzly aspect of factory farming that is depicted throughout the film in a kind of homage to Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”, the branding for these commodities tries to evoke a long-lost period when farming was a far more local and organic mode of production. The pictures on the labels for well-known food products make you think you have been transported to Dorothy’s farm in the Wizard of Oz when the reality behind the label is much more like Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”. In one particularly grotesque scene, we are in the control room of a mega-corporation where a bank of computers oversees the production of ground beef at various far-flung farms under its control. The key to success, the owners tell us, is that the beef is sterilized with chemicals in order to prevent e-coli disease. Apparently this is exactly what Burger King et al are looking for since they anticipate that more than 90 percent of all fast food burger patties will be produced this way in a few years.
Unfortunately, Barbara Kowalcyk, one of the interviewees, was not fortunate enough to have had one of these chemically treated hamburgers served to Kevin, her 2 ½ year old son, on a vacation some years ago. The meat carried e-coli bacteria that killed him after several days of agony in a hospital bed. Now she campaigns to see “Kevin’s Law” passed in order to close down any plants that have repeated violations of contaminated meat. Surprise, surprise. Washington has not seen fit to pass the bill.
Although I strongly urge my readers to see this movie, I do feel obligated to offer some criticisms that get to the heart of my differences with Schlosser and Pollan, no matter how much I applaud their work. A significant part of the movie is devoted to an examination of Stonyfield yogurt, a product that is always in my refrigerator especially since yogurt is a staple of the Turkish dishes I enjoy preparing. The CEO of Stonyfield is one Gary Hirshberg who is seen conferring with Walmart representatives who were about to introduce his products to their vile stores. Hirshfield justifies dealing with Walmart because he believes that there is no alternative to capitalism, even though he doesn’t quite use those words. If we are going to make wholesome food grown in conditions respectful to the environment and to animals, you need retailers like Walmart to make the organic sector grow.
The press notes for “Food, Inc.” quotes Walmart on this score:
“Actually, it’s a pretty easy decision to try to support things like organics or whatever it might be based on what the consumer wants. We see that and we react to it. If it’s clear that the customer wants it, it’s really easy to get behind it and to push forward and try to make that happen.”
– Tony Airosa, chief dairy purchaser for the nation’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, which recently began carrying organically-produced food in its store. Wal-Mart has since stopped carrying milk containing growth hormone.
In my view, it is utopian to think that the factory food system will be transformed incrementally in this fashion. The Monsantos, Purdues, Tysons and Smithfields of this world are not going to be displaced by organic farming for the simple reason that they were produced by the forces of production that have taken a century to mature. American society is under enormous pressure to compete with other capitalist powers in an epoch of stagnating profits. As such, factory farming is geared to the economic imperatives of a nation that is being forced to attack the living standards of workers and farmers alike.
If any evidence of the bankruptcy of the system is needed, as well as its talent for self-deception, you can start with the White House itself—a symbol of American corporate power and its strategy for continued world domination.
When Michelle Obama planted an organic garden on the White House lawn, Michael Pollan hailed the move in the Huffington Post:
Perhaps the most encouraging action so far has come from the East Wing, where Michelle Obama has been speaking out about the importance of real, fresh food, home cooking and gardening. By planting an organic garden on the White House lawn, she launched a thousand victory gardens (vegetables seed is suddenly in short supply), gave conniptions to the pesticide industry (which wrote urging her to use some of their “crop protection products” whether she needed them or not), and at a stroke raised the profile and prestige of real food in America.
He also was encouraged by Obama’s appointments:
Tom Vilsack has sounded a welcome new note at the Department of Agriculture, where he has appointed a proven reformer — Kathleen Merrigan — as his deputy, and emphasized his commitment to sustainability, local food systems (including urban agriculture); putting nutrition at the heart of the department’s nutrition programs (not as obvious as it might sound), and enlisting farmers in the fight against climate change. He has been meeting with the kinds of activists and farmers who in past administrations stood on the steps of the USDA holding protest signs.
I wonder if Michael Pollan watched the movie he appeared in, since Monsanto was rightfully pilloried as using its control over genetically modified soybean seeds as a way of maintaining a monopoly over farmers, who once had the right to reuse seeds. (Monsanto patented the seeds and sues any farmer its detectives find in violation.)
* The biggest biotechnology industry group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, named Vilsack Governor of the Year. He was also the founder and former chair of the Governor’s Biotechnology Partnership.
* When Vilsack created the Iowa Values Fund, his first poster child of economic development potential was Trans Ova and their pursuit of cloning dairy cows.
* Vilsack was the origin of the seed pre-emption bill in 2005, which many people here in Iowa fought because it took away local government’s possibility of ever having a regulation on seeds- where GE would be grown, having GE-free buffers, banning pharma corn locally, etc. Representative Sandy Greiner, the Republican sponsor of the bill, bragged on the House Floor that Vilsack put her up to it right after his state of the state address.
* Vilsack has a glowing reputation as being a shill for agribusiness biotech giants like Monsanto. Sustainable ag advocated across the country were spreading the word of Vilsack’s history as he was attempting to appeal to voters in his presidential bid. An activist from the west coast even made this youtube animation about Vilsack.
The airplane in this animation is a referral to the controversy that Vilsack often traveled in Monsanto’s jet.
Despite these criticisms, I strongly recommend “Food, Inc.” that opens at the Film Forum in New York on June 12th.
Although at first blush far removed thematically from his Samurai trilogy, Yoji Yamada’s “Kabei: Our Mother” has many of the same elements. This is a tale of how the wife of a Japanese professor imprisoned in 1940 for “thought crimes” struggles to raise her two young daughters under the most difficult of circumstances. It is a searing attack on the authoritarianism and stupidity of a social system that retained many of the feudal traits of the period depicted in the trilogy. It is also an embrace of the decency and the courage of humble people being crushed underfoot by a system operating through a combination of repression and intense social pressure. At the age of 78 and now having made his 74th movie, Yoji Yamada demonstrates once again his kinship with such members of the great humanist tradition in filmdom shaped by radical politics—including his countryman Akira Kurosawa, Senegal’s Ousmane Sembene and India’s Satyijat Ray.
Sharing the meager circumstances of the underemployed Samurai of the trilogy, Teruyo Nogami (Miku Sato) is a one-time philosophy professor fallen on hard times. He is 3 months behind on his rent and has just learned in the opening scene that his latest book has been turned down by a publisher. Unlike most of his countrymen swept up by the ultranationalist fervor of the ruling party, he opposes the invasion of China and has the courage of his convictions to say so publicly. He has the misfortune to take philosophy’s teachings seriously, a flaw not shared by fellow academics who learn to get along with the system, just as they were doing in Nazi Germany.
A day or so later, he and his family are woken in the middle of the night by a pounding on the door. The cops have come to investigate a “thought crime” and pour through his books and papers looking for evidence. Convinced that Nogami is a traitor, they tie him up with rope, take him to police headquarters, and throw him into a holding cell. The other prisoners, discovering that he is some kind of “red”, try to make him as comfortable as possible.
Unlike her husband, Kayo Nogami is apolitical and only has the hope that he will be released from jail and returned to the happy if impoverished household that they share with their two children, a 12 year old girl named Hatsuko and her 6 year old sister Teruyo who provides the narrative and point of view throughout the film. As such, the film evokes Fellini’s “Amarcord”, another film about life under fascism seen through the eyes of a child. Unlike “Amarcord”, the emphasis is less on lyrical youthful evocations (although there is much of that) than it is about injustice and the struggle for dignity and freedom.
Indeed, Teruyo Nogami was a real person and this film is based on her semiautobiographical novel about her wartime experiences. Although the film does not make a point of this, the adult Teruyo Nogami worked with Akira Kurosawa for over 40 years in different capacities, including supervising the script of “Rashomon”. As alluded to above, Kurosawa and Yamada are kindred spirits.
Before the Japanese state had converted itself into an authoritarian war machine, Kurosawa traveled in CP circles as a youth. Some of his early student works were “socialist realism” exercises. After WWII began, he went to work in the Japanese film industry turning out propaganda films that glorified test pilots and female factory workers. Unlike Teruyo Nogami, Kurosawa succumbed to social pressure.
But one assumes that his early training in socialist realism acquitted him well, just as it did American CP’ers in the film industry. Kurosawa was extremely rueful about his role in all this. Perhaps shame motivated his desire to create a new kind of film for postwar Japan, one that would criticize a society that had become adrift. Although it no longer celebrated martial values, it still lacked a higher purpose. His youthful leftist beliefs combined with his family’s aristocratic sense of ‘noblesse oblige’ led to the creation of distinctly Kurosawan type of film, one in which a lone individual struggled to define a personal ethos against a callous and self-centered society.
Clearly, Kurosawa’s celebration of the selfless Samurai hero attacking a vicious feudal system and Nogami’s novel about WWII repression resonated with Yamada’s own values and experience. Program notes for a Yamada film shown at the Film Forum in 1982 stated that he was “’a member in good standing of Japan’s Communist Party”’ and usually tried to make some reference in his films to man’s disaffection with society.
In a January 31, 2008 interview with the Japan Times, Yamada was asked: “Kaabee is set in the early 1940s, but its themes, including the suppression of dissent, still have relevance today. Was that your main reason for wanting to make this film?” He replied:
What attracted me first was the childhood memoir by Teruyo Nogami. Her father was actually arrested under the Peace Preservation Law (which had the goal of clamping down on communists, labor activists and opponents of Japan’s militarism) and spent time in jail. That’s what Japan was like in 1940 and 1941, but Japanese today don’t know this. I wanted to rekindle their memories. Those were frightening times, when Japan started the Pacific War with an unstoppable wave.
Can we say the same frightening, out-of-control forces that started that war are absent from Japan today? In 1945 we made what was supposed to be a strong commitment to peace. But now (certain forces) are trying to change the “peace Constitution.”
Japan should have remained the one country in the world with no military and a prohibition against war (in the Constitution). Now Japan is going along with America and the Bush administration. I have doubts about whether that’s right.
For those who want to see film-making at its best, as well as a celebration of the values we cherish in our own struggle with another barbaric social system, a visit to the Quad Cinema in New York is not to be missed.
For serious scholars of film and politics, as well as amateurs like me, the Turner Classic Movie channel (TCM) is an invaluable resource. While most of the time it is recycling warhorses like “Citizen Kane” that can be rented from Netflix, you will occasionally be able to watch some extraordinary movies that are not available in home video. Last night I chanced across a couple that were part of a series occurring this month titled “Race and Hollywood: Latino Images in Film”.
Last night’s movies were selected and introduced by Chon A. Noriega, professor of cinema and media studies at UCLA and director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. The two that I saw had deep associations with the left, either positive or negative.
“Lawless”, a 1950 movie about anti-Chicano racism in a California town, was directed by Joseph Losey, who was blacklisted shortly afterwards and forced into exile in London. Communists in Hollywood tended to make movies that had only a glancing connection to Marxism, preferring instead to package New Deal populism as mainstream entertainment. Losey took another tack. Despite conforming to Hollywood convention in many ways, “Lawless” is about as hard-hitting an indictment of anti-Latino racism as I have ever seen.
Only 5 years after “Lawless” was made, Hollywood had gone full swing in an anti-Communist direction making it impossible for directors like Joseph Losey to make a living. A product of this period was the 1955 “Trial”, a movie that depicts Communists in the worst possible light. As the title implies, the film is a courtroom drama involving a Chicano youth who is being railroaded for sexually assaulting and then murdering a white classmate. His defense attorney is a well-meaning but inexperienced liberal hired by an experienced but utterly cynical and corrupt lawyer who is in charge of fund-raising through his CP connections.
Both “Lawless” and “Trial” feature race riot and lynch mob scenes that were very much in the recent memory of a 1950s audience. From the Zoot Suit confrontations of the 1940s to the attack on the Paul Robeson concert that Chon A. Noriega described as an inspiration for the scenes in “Lawless”, these movies were describing social reality.
The TCM website has a fairly useful write-up on “Lawless”, including this background information:
Shot on location in Marysville and Grass Valley in late 1949 for a mere $407,000 (Losey once claimed he had but $150,000 to spend, but this is not borne out by studio documentation), The Lawless takes place in a fictional California small town riven, like so many real ones, into two classes: the middle class whites congregate in Santa Maria, a self-proclaimed “Friendly Town.” The local fruit industry depends on low-cost labor, provided in large measure by Mexican immigrants, derisively known as “fruit tramps,” living in a shantytown called Sleepy Hollow. They work long hours for meager pay, are reflexively considered unreliable layabouts and eyed with suspicion by the police. In any ghetto, the hardships of life can wear down people’s civility, and so Sleepy Hollow has its share of problems and violence—which community organizers like intrepid journalist Sunny Garcia (Gail Russell) work to resolve. But when angry young men from across the tracks come to Sleepy Hollow full of anti-Mexican resentment, looking to start a fight, even the noblest of intentions fall short.
Less useful, however, is this attempt to make the anti-racism message of the movie a thing of the past:
For those of us living today in the post-Civil Rights era, when the biracial son of an African father can ascend to the highest office in the free world, it can be all too easy to forget how recent were the struggles that created this world.
Perhaps David Kalat, the TCM essayist, has not been reading a newspaper lately but things have not changed that much based on this report:
NY Times, May 17, 2009
After Pennsylvania Trial, Tensions Simmer Over Race
By IAN URBINA
SHENANDOAH, Pa. — Ten days ago, shortly after two white teenagers were acquitted of the most serious charges in the beating death of Luís Ramírez, a Mexican immigrant, several white students at the local high school told Felix Bermejo that he would be the next person to get a beating, he says.
Last Sunday, Eileen Burke, a former Philadelphia police officer who found Mr. Ramírez unconscious on the ground outside her Lloyd Street home after he was beaten, found that her car had been egged after she was quoted in a local newspaper saying she believed that the police had mishandled the investigation.
Last week, a fight broke out between a group of white teenagers and a group of black and Latino teenagers and someone pulled out a gun, an escalation that several onlookers said never would have happened before.
The trial stemming from Mr. Ramírez’s death ended nearly two weeks ago, but tensions continue to boil in this small Pennsylvania coal town of 5,100 northwest of Philadelphia, where Mexicans and other Latinos have been settling in search of affordable housing and work in the mines or apple and peach farms.
“It’s only gotten worse since the verdict,” said a white woman at a downtown store who asked that her name not be used because she was afraid of how her neighbors might react to her having talked to a reporter. “The whole thing has set us backwards, and if the trial had swung the other way, it would have just been the whites who were angry.”
Mel Neuhaus’s piece on “Trial” is an exercise in stupidity, making the case that the movie is somehow a statement against HUAC and other McCarthyite bodies:
It was no wonder that courtroom dramas were all the rage in the 1950s; television had brought the real thing into millions of viewers’ living rooms via the broadcast of the Army-McCarthy hearings. MGM, under Louis B. Mayer, had been virulently anti-Communist, but with Mayer long ousted and the studio under the new Dore Schary regime, the climate was positively liberal.
McCarthy’s deserved humiliation and defeat on live TV may not have ended the blacklist; however, it set the tone for a lengthy healing process that would eventually span more than two decades to vindicate many of the political victims. It seemed apt that Metro would take on a project encompassing a number of controversial topics, and Trial (1955), based on the best-selling novel by Don Mankiewicz (who also penned the taut script), zeroed in on every falsehood perpetrated by the dreaded HUAC moniker.
In fact, “Trial” contains a scene that is even more fantastic than anything Joe McCarthy could have cooked up. The lawyer for the victimized Chicano youth is invited to speak at a rally in New York that was organized under the auspices of the “All Peoples Party” and Barney Castle, the shady lawyer who hired him. It makes the Communists who built and attended the rally look like a mixture of fools and guttersnipes, who only donate to the cause because higher-ups in the party tell them to. What’s even more unlikely is Barney Castle’s failure to make a single political statement throughout the film. He approaches the entire project as a way to siphon off funds for his personal gain. In the film’s climax, the defense attorney played by Glenn Ford confronts Castle (Arthur Kennedy) who has decided to engineer a guilty verdict in the courtroom for the Chicano youth since “the party” decided he would be more useful as a martyr than a free man. In the final moments of the movie, as Castle becomes more and more of a red scare bogeyman, you don’t know whether to laugh or to scream at the images on the screen. This, of course, is exactly the reaction that most people have to these 1950s McCarthyite movies.
For what its worth, Don Mankiewicz, who wrote the novel that “Trial” is based on, also penned the original TV pilot scripts for Star Trek.
