The footage could be overwhelming (Goodman analyzed 500 films), but she presents it all in a way that leaves the viewer satisfied but wanting more information–just like a good documentary should.
This is a question that can launch us all into stories of our own formative years. I remember my mother–a former home economics teacher–showing me a diagram of the uterus, and factually answering the (many) questions I had, and looking through the textbooks my father–a biology teacher–had strewn around the house. I remember my public elementary school, when in fifth grade girls and boys were separated, and we were taught about periods and given deodorant and pads all wrapped in pastel and hope. A year later, we were separated again, and we girls watched graphic slideshows of STI-ravaged genitals and were given gold plastic purity rings.
Unlike fractions or sentence fragments, our experiences with “official” sex education vary drastically, ranging from helpful, to hilarious, to heartbreaking. Likewise, unlike learning to cook pasta or change a tire, our families’ roles in teaching us about sex are typically not accompanied by cookbooks or users’ manuals. Sex ed in America has historically been the wild west.
Most of us, in recalling our formal sex education, have memories of the film reels shown to us in our pre-pubescent and pubescent school rooms. The history of sex-education films in America is fascinating, and tells us more about ourselves than one might expect. Brenda Goodman‘s documentary, Sex(ed): The Movieshows us a treasure trove of clips from sex-ed films through American history. From early 20th century “hygiene films” and wartime moral panic films, to Disney cartoons and obscure 70s masturbation celebrations, Sex(ed) takes us on a history of not only how we have approached sex ed, but also how we have approached STIs, women, masturbation, menstruation, homosexuality, and relationships. Sex(ed) tells America’s story through archival film clips and in-depth interviews with experts and individuals who have been affected–for better or worse–by their sex education.
Goodman covers a great deal of ground in a concise documentary. She does an excellent job of presenting the clips and interviews with a humanity that is often lacking in the films themselves. The hilarity that ensues from some of the old films is balanced with the tragic weight of anti-gay rhetoric films of the 1960s and the rise of toxic abstinence-only education in the 1990s. The footage could be overwhelming (Goodman analyzed 500 films), but she presents it all in a way that leaves the viewer satisfied but wanting more information–just like a good documentary should.
Watching Sex(ed) is like watching America’s answer to “How did you learn about sex?” What we learn is that what we learn–or don’t learn–can have devastating consequences. We should watch and learn more so that we can more adequately teach future generations about their bodies, sexuality, and relationships. When we answer how we learned about sex, we are also answering how we learned to be human. And as a society, we need to demand better lessons and better answers.
Narrator Jackson Katz uses visuals and film clips to argue that such a view of masculinity is creating a crisis in young boys as they grow up being made to feel that violence=agency and that rape is just fine because you should get what you want—and if the answer is “no,” then you just take it.
Written by Colleen Clemens as part of our theme week on Masculinity.
In a much-needed update to its 1999 predecessor, Tough Guise 2: Violence, Manhood, and American Culturebrings to light the horrid ways masculinity is constructed in the media. Narrator Jackson Katz uses visuals and film clips to argue that such a view of masculinity is creating a crisis in young boys as they grow up being made to feel that violence=agency and that rape is just fine because you should get what you want—and if the answer is “no,” then you just take it.
The film begins with footage from the cafeteria in Columbine High School when two students slaughtered their peers and teachers. Katz uses this scene to exemplify the crisis America is facing at the hands of young boys who are taught that in order to have agency, one must need to “man up.” And if people won’t listen to you, then you have every right to use violence to get them to listen.
Throughout the film, Katz works to show how violence became framed as a “women’s issue,” allowing men not to care about the violence they were perpetrating. (Think self defense classes for women on campuses instead of sessions with men about consent.) This feminization of the problem allowed the media to continue running two storylines side by side–violence against women and men acting violently—as two separate stories that the media depicted as parallel lines instead of intersecting ones. Katz argues that we can no longer consider violence against women as a women’s issue but as an issue related to the violent masculinity being constructed all around us.
Katz draws attention to the media’s coverage of mass shootings in their pathetic attempts to figure out why such violence continues to occur. In an I-would-laugh-if-this-weren’t-so-sad moment in the film, Katz shows a newspaper article that tries to make connections between the shooters—in parentheses is their maleness. Katz argues that the parenthetical, the throwaway, is the answer—not the sideline. That all but one of the mass shootings in recent history have been perpetrated by a man or men is the obvious answer to Katz. The film then uses a variety of films
—from Fight Club to Kung Fu Panda—
to illustrate his point that violent masculinity is reified from the earliest of years in a young boy’s life, and that to undo such a terrible programming feels impossible. Yet our culture relies on us undoing it. One of the many examples Katz investigates is the Western, the quintessence of manhood construction in early cinema. John Wayne, Katz argues, is the “real man,” the one who solves problems with a gun. He is the essence of American “toughness, manhood, and violence.”
Wayne in The Searchers
Katz does little in this film to educate the viewer on what to do next. The film is a long argument defining the problem without offering much of a solution. While Katz gives talks on campuses around the country to discuss what to do, the film leaves the viewer feeling more bereft and shocked than empowered. When I co-hosted a viewing of it at my child’s school (and how cool is a school that wants to investigate issues of gender!), I sent parents to Katz’s TED talk to give them the next step.
The parents wanted a prescription, an antidote to the awfulness they had just witnessed—and I can’t blame them, even if a film shouldn’t have to do such work. I suggested starting with undoing the “boys will be boys” mentality on the playground as a great place to start…
…because boys can be so much more if we open the construct and give them room to feel without embarrassment, to cry without reproach, to love without fear. Boys who feel don’t need to “grow a pair.” Boys who cry aren’t “pussies.” Boys who love don’t need to “man up.” We need more representations of boys and men that undo the terrifying construct Katz unpacks in Tough Guise 2 if anything is going to change our culture of violence.
But it’s hard to be on the side of the documentary that continually treats its female subjects like they don’t know what to do, like they’re little girls who’ve wandered off the trail of goodness, like they don’t know any better and the terrible things they’ll experience here will teach them a lesson. That kind of sex negative attitude, and what’s more, “rescuer” mentality that does more harm than good to sex workers.
This is a guest post by Kyle Turner.
There seems to be a fallacy surrounding much of the discussion around the Netflix distributed documentary Hot Girls Wanted, directed by Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus and produced by Rashida Jones. My friend pointed it out to me the other day that some have noted that it is, by its very existence of showing someone leaving the sex work industry, anti-feminist. I should disclose that I am a cisgendered queer male, but I consider myself a sex positive feminist ally nonetheless. I don’t really have a place to say what is or is not feminist, and I’m disinclined to mansplain. The issue with Hot Girls Wanted, though, is that it takes the cognizance of its subjects and casts it aside in favor of portraying its performers as infantilized victims, which seems like it will do more harm than good.
From the opening moments of the film, a collage of images rushes across the screen in quick succession, a montage ostensibly to illustrate the current culture’s obsession with female sexuality and the objectification of women’s bodies. Included in this clip reel in the din are an interview with Belle Knox, the Duke Porn Star (we’ll talk more about her later) and a clip from Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” music video. Immediately, the film either has a misunderstanding of these clips, or wants to portray them deliberately out of context: Belle Knox has been open about her experiences in the sex work industry, a move that she’s explained is based both in financial need as well as a desire to reclaim a kind of image or agency which is seen to be robbed of women in pornography, or in other facets of sex work. Nicki Minaj’s video is also an interesting thing to pick out and then utilize in this supposed introduction to one’s thesis: sampling Sir Mix a Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” Minaj is overtly trying to subvert and reclaim the gaze upon Black women’s butts, the lyrical and visual content of the full video nodding to denial, sex with a specific goal (personal pleasure), and castration. Yet, out of context, both of these clips just seem like, in the grand scene of this film’s argument, objects for a male audience devoid of autonomy.
It isn’t that that is not true in many cases, that women are often subject to a kind of leering gaze in media that is not used on men, it’s that Hot Girls Wanted has a bunch of rather interesting, very intelligent young women who are cognizant of what they are doing and why, and yet want to invalidate their agency in doing such. The film broadly wants to argue that the pro-am, or professional amateur, porn industry is exploitative and dangerous. While I don’t doubt that that is true, the footage contained in this film not only does not actually show the exploitation it so desperately wants to use as argument, but also, rather than suggest solutions to protect women and other performers in the sex work industry from exploitation (like harsher regulation), suggests rather vehemently that they should not be doing it in the first place.
We encounter and get to know Tressa, Rachel, Karly, Michelle, and Jade, all introduced in some invariably “normal,” inconspicuous way, in addition to their name, stage name, and period of working in the sex work industry via an onscreen rendering of a Twitter profile. This Twitter motif is used throughout the film, but surprisingly little thought goes into it making any kind of cogent meaning with regard to the subjects of the documentary. Though some performers speak explicitly about the characters they play for certain scenes, this idea of performativity, never mind persona, in conjunction to social media is never explored. It’s as if the film is trying to make the subjects seem as bland as possible (which doesn’t totally work) to contrast against the work that they do. They’re all around 18-22, a point that’s made in order to infantilize each person.
Despite the fact that nearly all of the performers are, as aforementioned, cognizant of what they are doing and why, the directors take specific steps to invalidate their words: moribund music cues underline Tressa’s declaration that this is what makes her happy; Michelle says “people are going to see it anyways” not once, but carefully edited so she says it three times; Jade examines the performative nature of facial abuse, but the scene leans on the actual performance to undercut her agency in the matter; Rachel talks about a mild injury on the set of a bondage scene and recalls how sensitive and receptive the crew was in terms of her safety, but the scene it against framed with grim music; the girls watch another Belle Knox interview, which is then juxtaposed against one of Knox’s scenes of facial abuse, again seemingly utilized to invalidate her autonomy in the matter.
The Belle Knox scene is particularly interesting because, for a poor documentary that mostly fails to build any kind of substantive argument (regardless of whether or not I agree with said argument), it’s able to articulate several different discourses that the film at large never seems interested in. On the one hand, it’s several Latina performers, including Jade, watching this interview. They scoff, Jade remarking that, in response to Knox’s vehement feminism and financial need, she and other performers have been doing it for years and already know how that model works. Jade succinctly critiques a racist capitalist model that benefits rich white women going to prestigious universities. (Another thing the film never gets into is why these subjects would be interested in doing this work in the first place, inasmuch as the current job climate necessitating it.) From another approach, there is that sharp contrast between Knox’s confident interview and the facial abuse scene itself, which feels to be used intentionally in a maternal way, skeptical of this young woman’s awareness.
Which is one of Hot Girls Wanted’s major issues: the maternalistic skepticism with which it treats all of its subjects. We follow Tressa perhaps the most closely, from her home life where her mother knows and vehemently disapproves of her work, to her boyfriend, who also disapproves of her work, to the actual work, and back again. As the film profiles her towards the beginning, she mentions how happy this job makes her, how she would hate to live at home (in Florida) and work a minimum wage job. By the end of the film, both her mother and her boyfriend essentially guilt trip her into quitting, almost victim blaming her. “Dignity” and “self-respect” are thrown around in the conversation, inferring she has none because she’s in the sex work industry. The last time we see her on screen, she’s living with her boyfriend, saying that getting out of porn was all she ever wanted. But there’s an odd reticence to her voice, as if she’s trying to convince herself.
Which is where the fallacy I mentioned at the beginning of this piece comes in: it’s entirely her, as it is anyone else’s, prerogative to do sex work or to leave sex work. But it’s hard to be on the side of the documentary that continually treats its female subjects like they don’t know what to do, like they’re little girls who’ve wandered off the trail of goodness, like they don’t know any better and the terrible things they’ll experience here will teach them a lesson. That kind of sex negative attitude, and what’s more, “rescuer” mentality that does more harm than good to sex workers.
The intentions are well-placed to some degree, but the tone deafness and willful ignorance of what its subjects are actually saying and how they feel about the work is worrisome and even dangerous. Hot girls may be wanted, but in an ironically patriarchal move, their voices and opinions are not.
Kyle Turner (@tylekurner) is a freelance film critic and writer. He’s also the assistant editor of Movie Mezzanine and began writing on the Internet in 2007 with his blog The Movie Scene. Since then, Kyle has contributed to TheBlackMaria.org, Film School Rejects, Under the Radar, and IndieWire’s /Bent. He is studying cinema at the University of Hartford in Connecticut and relieved to know that he’s not a golem.
To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, ‘(T)ERROR’ co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.
In most movies, US government agents, whether they are from the FBI, like Mulder and Scully, or from the CIA, like Melissa McCarthy’s character in Spy, invariably play the hero (or heroine) thoughtful, competent, and above all, ethical. The news tells a different story; FBI protection was a key factor in organized crime head Whitey Bulger escaping prosecution for his crimes (which included murder) for decades. When the FBI was investigating the Boston Marathon bombing they interrogated an unarmed immigrant friend of the bombers, and even though he was not implicated in the crime they shot and killed him. Just last week, after targeting a Boston-area Muslim man with surveillance for a number of months, the FBI (teaming with local police) stopped him near a CVS parking lot to “talk” to him. They ended up shooting him dead right there–at 7 a.m. on a workday morning.
To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, (T)ERROR, co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups, “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.
Saeed is an older Black American Muslim whom we see pull up stakes from his home (so he is away from his young son) and his job as a cook in a high school cafeteria to move to a strange city with his dog and his weed, working on getting entrée into the life of a younger American jihadi who makes inflammatory YouTube videos but seems not to do much else. We see Saeed haggling with the FBI about money (he does not seem to earn much–at all–for his efforts) and admonishing them to stop being so obvious about setting this guy up.
Meanwhile, the jihadi, using Google and a piece of mail he sees on Saeed’s car dashboard figures out his FBI connection early in their acquaintance. We find out later that Saeed started his career with the FBI because he himself was charged with a crime, and then set up a man who was a friend of his to escape punishment, a chilling reminder of the questionable use of informants in the US justice system. This cycle perpetuates to the end of the film–someone barely getting by (the jihadi lives in public housing and does not to have a car) preyed upon by someone nearly as desperate, Saeed, as the FBI eggs him on. Saeed seems unrepentant about his targets, saying, “I don’t have no feelings for them. You making the Islam look bad, you gotta go,” but as he smokes blunts and bakes a succession of cakes he seems bent on convincing not just the directors and us, but himself too.
The lie the designated Sundance “breakout” movie Me And Earl And The Dying Girl (which opens this Friday, June 12) tells is familiar–that the experiences of white, straight guys are the only important ones; the main white guy can learn valuable lessons thanks to women and people of color, but nothing they do or say could possibly be as fascinating to us. The “me” of the title is Greg (Thomas Mann) a senior in high school, quirky in that cliché movie way that never crosses into weird or creepy and creative (he makes films at home with pun titles of famous works). His only friend is Earl (RJ Cyler), the Black best friend as stereotype: Earl’s main attribute is his repetition in more than one scene of the word, “titties.” Greg’s mother (Connie Britton) (she along with Nick Offerman who plays Greg’s Dad and Molly Shannon, who also plays a parent in this film, wrest what they can out of the script which bestows no human qualities on them, just more quirks) commands him to visit a girl, Rachel (Olivia Cooke), newly diagnosed with cancer, saying, “You might be someone who could make Rachel feel better.” He hasn’t hung out with Rachel since grade school and she greets him at her house by saying, “I don’t need your stupid pity,” but the two begin a friendship anyway.
Too bad Rachel is really the manic, pixie, dying girl (the one way the movie doesn’t fall into predictability is that she and Greg never embark on a romance) since we find out, too late, she is an artist as well, but her aspirations and thoughts get short shrift. Olivia Cooke does well with a limited role and gives us a glimpse of how much better the movie could have been in one scene when she gives Greg a pep-talk about his future, but when he asks about hers, she suddenly goes quiet.
This film could use a lot more “girl” (Olivia Cooke)
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon directed the script by Jesse Andrews based on his own YA novel; future filmmakers of similar material should note that no one over 20 gives a shit about high school social hierarchy. The film has great art direction and soundtrack selection (with artists like Brian Eno and vintage Velvet Underground), but nothing can disguise or improve its white-guy narrative of “Person unlike me who changed my life for the better,” which seems more fitting for an undergrad college entrance essay than the basis for a film.
Earl has received puzzlingly decent reviews and its trailer seems to have piqued the interest of people who should know better, To try to understand how retrograde this film is, think if it were instead Me, The Girl and Dying Earl. The “me” would still be the white guy, his best friend a white girl who says “balls” a lot (which actually would make her a more nuanced character than most teenaged girls in movies, including this one) and Earl would be a variation of The Magical Negro, this one with terminal cancer who, as a last good deed, gives Greg precious guidance–and a plot that shows us all what a great guy Greg is. No one would hesitate to call bullshit on that film, so I’m unsure why no one is complaining about this one. I was also disappointed that a contemporary film that takes place in the suburb of a large American city doesn’t include any queer students in its high school especially since Greg, Rachel, and Earl would all be more interesting–and their sexless bond more true-to-life–if one or more of them were queer.
As I sat through Me andEarl I couldn’t help thinking of the Sufjan Stevens song “Casimir Pulaski Day” which covers some of the same ground–dying high school girl, quirkiness and a straight-guy narrator–but in less than six minutes reaches depths of feeling this film never comes close to. To equal the duration of this film you could instead listen to that song about 17 times–and save yourself $12.
The tools Varda employs are modest and made for the road. The handheld digital video camera she uses allows for both freedom and intimacy. She puts herself in front of the camera, filming, for example, her aged hands and thinning hair in candid close-up. Can you imagine a Hollywood director doing so? Varda rejects vanity and embraces vulnerability.
Belgian-born French filmmaker Agnès Varda is nothing less than a cinematic treasure. Her career spans decades and she has gained critical acclaim for both her fiction and documentary films. Varda was, of course, a pioneering figure of the New Wave and Left Bank. In 1962, she directed the ground-breaking, feminist classic Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7). In 1985, her powerful, lyrical film about a young homeless woman, Sans Toi, Ni Loi (Vagabond), won the Golden Lion in Venice. This year Varda was awarded an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes. She was the first woman to receive the tribute. At the beginning of the Millenium, Varda also directed the documentary Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000). It is one of the most fascinating ever made.
Poster for The Gleaners and I
Varda begins her documentary by providing the historical, aesthetic and linguistic context of gleaning. We are given the Larousse dictionary definition: “To glean is to gather after the harvest.” The director tells us that it was a mostly female, collective activity in the old days. Today, both men and women glean, more often than not on their own. François Millet’s painting of les glaneuses provides the stimulating starting point for Varda’s creative, humanist journey. Marrying the past and the present, the documentary features interviews with men and women of rural and urban France in the new Millenium who practice various forms of gleaning. People gather everything from vegetables, fruit, and oysters to old dolls, fridges, and TVs. We encounter an impoverished single mother picking potatoes, and homeless young people dumpster-diving outside a supermarket. We also meet a chef scavenging for fruit because he prefers to know where his food comes from, as well as artist gleaners who scavenge for junk to use in their pieces. One of the most interesting people Varda meets is a man with a master’s degree who picks discarded fruit and bread from city markets in the morning and teaches French to immigrants from Mali and Senegal at night.
Recreating the act
The Gleaners and I is not directly political but rather a thought-provoking, humanist study of people on the margins as well as those with reject capitalist norms of production and consumption. Issues of waste and sustainable development have become more and more critical, of course, since the film was made. Interestingly, in an effort to combat waste and food poverty, France introduced new laws this year banning supermarkets from dumping and destroying unsold food. They are now encouraged to give edible food to charities.
Millet’s Les Glaneuses
The tools Varda employs are modest and made for the road. The handheld digital video camera she uses allows for both freedom and intimacy. She puts herself in front of the camera, filming, for example, her aged hands and thinning hair in candid close-up. Can you imagine a Hollywood director doing so? Varda rejects vanity and embraces vulnerability. Her presence is, also often playful. At the beginning of the film, she recreates the actions of the wheat-carrying glaneuse in Jules Breton’s painting of a solitary female gleaner, all the while fixing her eyes on the camera. Varda has the inquiring mind of all great artists. Her humanity and inventiveness are consistently on display in The Gleaners and I. The director seems entirely invested in the subject as well as entirely empathetic towards the people she meets. Varda indeed identifies herself as a glaneuse. She gleans both memories and images in her life and art. In truth, the documentary is not only a study of gleaning but also a beguiling self-portait of an artist as well as an imaginative self-reflexive study of the art and craft of filmmaking.
Villagers being interviewed about the tradition
At once poetic and politically aware, The Gleaners and I offers a captivating portrait of the practice of scavenging. Both very French and very human, it’s a life-affirming film about how people survive and create. There are no subjects more important. The documentary is one of Varda’s essential works, as well as one of the most interesting and finest of all time.
We need new filmmakers like Cecile Emeke to break new ground with digital media. Smash the stranglehold of white filmmakers being the only ones telling Black stories that often dredge up old stereotypes and tired narratives. We need the specificity of Emeke’s vision. And dammit, I need more Rachel and Olivia in my life.
“It would be nice to have a story where it doesn’t always have to relate around men, or drug dealer boyfriend, babymama drama, (gun crime), or my Daddy’s gone. It doesn’t have to be like that. There are other narratives you know.”
–Michelle Tiwo (Olivia in Cecile Emeke’s Ackee and Saltfish)
I happened to be on Twitter the day Ava DuVernay hosted her 12-hour Rebel-A-Thon social media conversation with 42 Black filmmakers on May 27. With the hashtag #Array, various screenwriters, directors, and producers answered questions from fans and interacted with one another. I gave a shout-out online with my support, but also stated that I wanted to see more underrepresented filmmakers outside of the U.S.
Another Twitter user following the hashtag dropped filmmaker Cecile Emeke into my mentions. I quickly went to YouTube and discovered her humorous comedic web series Ackee & Saltfish.
Cecile Emeke, creator/writer/director of Ackee & Saltfish and Strolling
Completely crowd-funded, Cecile Emeke has created quite an impression with her work. She is redefining what Black female writer/directors can bring to the table. And this is critical, especially from a Black European female. Just like Black women in the U.S., it is hella rare for Black women in Europe to bring their voices to the table. The excitement I have for Amma Asante and the success of her critically underrated (and underplayed) Belle only makes me hunger for stories about Black women across the pond. Emeke herself has some strong words about being tired of white filmmakers telling Black stories with a white gaze. This familiar complaint is even more searing especially with the release of Girlhood by French filmmaker Céline Sciamma. (You can read what Emeke has to say about that here.)
Ackee & Saltfish is a very important piece of work that should be signal boosted with viewership and financial support immediately. It has an authentic, playful, low-key coolness that I want to see more of. The two lead characters in the series, Michelle Tiwo (Olivia) and Vanessa Babirye (Rachel), are not contrived stereotypes, and are not dealing with the usual negative tropes ascribed to Black female characters (refer again to Michelle Tiwo’s words I quote at the beginning of this piece). They are carefree Black women just living their life.
Michelle Tiwo (Olivia) and Vanessa Babirye (Rachel) having a typical chat that revels in sharp verbal zingers.
Let me stress this: we hardly ever see Black women just dealing with themselves and their friendships without contrived outside interference. Every webisode centers on Olivia and Rachel just chilling within their friendship. Some viewers may mistake this for being a plot-less series (or may be reminded of the old American comedy Seinfeld being a show about “nothing”). The show hinges on subtle character-based humor. Olivia and Rachel are the plot. The conflict in Ackee & Saltfish is the differences in how Olivia and Rachel interact with one another. Olivia is the more assertive, outspoken realist, whereas Rachel is the more laid-back and soft-spoken one, often looking at her friend Olivia with an expression of incredulous wonder at the things she says. The friendship feels real to me, and the way Emeke films the series, the viewer may often feel like the third person in the room simply hanging out and listening to the two banter about Lauryn Hill tickets, bread backs, how one’s breath smells, or why Solange Knowles should adopt Olivia. The easy back and forth between the two actors may have the feel of improv, but their lines are scripted by Emeke.
Rachel’s boyfriend prepared a dish of Ackee without Saltfish and Olivia has come undone over it.
My favorite episode is about Olivia and Rachel hanging inside a carpet store because it’s raining and they don’t want to get wet. While trying to stay dry they have to contend with a faceless store owner who keeps pestering them with “Excuse me!” when he sees they are not there to buy carpet. Eventually they hear music playing in the store, and they start dancing, doing moves I’ve done myself (like The Butterfly). It’s silly and reminds me of the random moments I’ve had with my friends.
Olivia thinks she’s the next Serena Williams. Rachel is not impressed.
Thus far, all the episodes (including the original short film) only show Olivia and Rachel interacting with each other. I’m hoping that as Emeke’s fan base grows, and she can secure more funding to make more episodes, that she will eventually allow us to see these two besties engage with other characters. I want the web series to be picked up and turned into a TV series with longer episodes. There are six episodes available to watch online. There is also a 10-minute “support” video where Emeke and her actors talk about the work they’re doing while encouraging viewers to give financial support with donations so they can create more content. (I have done that!)
The other project Emeke has in her creative arsenal is the intriguing documentary series called Strolling in the U.K., and Flâner in France. Emeke films young Black people strolling in their neighborhoods as they talk about what it’s like living in their respective spaces. Over nine episodes (about 10 minutes each) participants discuss race, class, gentrification, colorism, colonial legacies, Afrofuturism, what it means to be a Black British person, or a Black French person (or British Jamaican, or British Nigerian), Black mental health, sexuality, sexism, misogyny and the list goes on. The power of this documentary series for someone like me, a Black American, is the decentering of African Americans as the dominating cultural force in the African diaspora. I can listen to new Black voices who share the same transatlantic African history, but who have a differing perspective on how the African diaspora should connect based on where their ancestors landed after enslavement. They are echoing my Twitter call to hear from underrepresented voices from across the pond. Strolling is a Black cultural call and response, a digital “How your people doin’ over there Fam?” and they answer “Living like this, Sis.”
Strolling in the U.K. with young Black Brits in the Strolling documentary series.
In Flaner, Emeke allows young Black French voices to be heard speaking their own truth.
Emeke would like to take the Strolling series to other places outside of Europe, and I am here for it. How amazing it would be if she were able to travel to Japan, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Australia, Indonesia or parts of Canada to record unique voices with unique perspectives? People of African descent are everywhere, blended into other cultures with rich stories to tell the rest of the world. The Strolling series is also an opportunity for White and non-Black people of color to understand that there is not one monolithic “Black” experience. Thank goodness. That would be boring.
We need new filmmakers like Cecile Emeke to break new ground with digital media. Smash the stranglehold of white filmmakers being the only ones telling Black stories that often dredge up old stereotypes and tired narratives. We need the specificity of Emeke’s vision. And dammit, I need more Rachel and Olivia in my life.
Friendship goals. Rachel and Olivia. More please.
P.S. I know you were wondering, here it is:
Ackee and Saltfish the dish. Google the recipe and enjoy.
Earlier on the red carpet, I mentioned to Garbus that Nina Simone is having a moment. Gina Prince-Bythewood has her protagonist sing “Blackbird” in ‘Beyond the Lights’ and Simone’s music seems to be getting a new audience as well. Garbus said, “It’s very interesting. You know I can’t explain that. I was in Starbucks this morning for half an hour and what was playing was Nina Simone. I guess we just needed her.”
S. Epatha Merkerson, Atallah Shabazz, Liz Garbus
This guest post by Paula Schwartz previously appeared at Showbiz 411 and is cross-posted with permission.
Lauryn Hill’s rousing performance following the screening of What Happened, Miss Simone?Monday evening at the Apollo Theater turned into a celebration and tribute to the genius and artistry of the musician/activist Nina Simone. The sensational evening was presented by Netflix and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. (The documentary will air on Netflix on Friday, June 26.)
Hill, who first performed at the Apollo at age 13 where she was booed for singing “Who’s Lovin’ You” off key, got a very different reception last night.
Dressed in a white halter-top and flared pants, Hill looked terrific, and even channeled the legendary singer; her outfit resembled an outfit Simone wore in a legendary performance featured in the documentary directed by Oscar nominated filmmaker Liz Garbus (The Farm: Angola, 1998).
Hill’s voice was raspy from some ailment mentioned by producer Jayson Jackson in his introduction before her set, but that that only made her voice sound even more like Simone’s baritone. In her nearly 50-minute set, Hill danced and swayed and sang signature Simone numbers.
Liz Garbus
The former Fugees singer opened with a moving rendition of “Ne Me Quitte Pas” and followed up with a dynamic version of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” She sang backed up by a full orchestra that included lush sounds of string instruments.
There were problems with the sound mix and some failed starts and stops, but Hill is a perfectionist and demanding bandleader and it all finally came together. For her next number she enthused, “We goin’ try to rap with this,” and Hill performed a new rap song inspired by Simone’s music.
Afterward she introduced the terrific Jazmine Sullivan with, “She can sing for the both of us tonight,” and added, “Watch this!”
Sullivan launched into Randy Newman’s 1977 song “Baltimore,” a tune Simone memorialized, which with Baltimore’s current problems could have been written today: “Man, it’s hard just to live. Oh, Baltimore. Man, it’s hard just to live, just to live.”
The song is included in a Simone tribute album timed to be released in conjunction with the documentary, which includes artists Hill, Common, Usher, Mary J. Blige, and Simone’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, a singer who also appears in the documentary and provides some of the film’s most poignant moments and insights into her mother’s life and career.
Usher
After Sullivan’s performance, Hill returned and ended on an even higher note, with her take of “African Mailman.” The long instrumental showcased the band with solos by the drummer, violinist, and backup singer. But the program was all about Lauryn Hill and her channeling of Simone, and despite the crowd’s stomping and cheering as the show ended its nearly hour-long set, there was no encore.
As suggested by the title, What Happened, Miss Simone? the documentary portrays a musical genius, but also a troubled artist who often fell on hard times. Driven by her art and social activism, and constrained by racism and her own inner demons – Simone was diagnosed late in life with bipolar disorder – she was also controlled by an abusive husband/manager Andrew Stroud, a former cop. He furthered her career but also beat her. There are archival segments of the couple together and present-day interviews with Stroud, who did not attend the premiere. (Simone’s daughter, who is promoting her new album, also did not attend.)
Notable celebrities at the premiere included grandchildren and friends of Simone, along with her longtime musicians Al Schackman, Lisle Atkinson and Leopoldo Fleming. Atkinson, a bass player who played with Simone for five years, told me her legendary tantrums and difficulty as a performer were exaggerated and he never had a bad moment on stage with her. He told me he believed she would want to be remembered for her music.
Schackman, a guitarist with perfect pitch, performed with Simone throughout her career and his astute comments and obvious love and esteem for Simone provide for some of the film’s most perceptive and informative moments.
Jasmine Sullivan
In her introduction from the stage to the film, Garbus thanked Netflix and all the contributors to the documentary and related a story from Simone’s memoir. “Friends say I might have trouble with the crowd here because the Apollo is well known for giving artists a rough time,” read Garbus from Simone’s notes. “And I’m well known for the same to audiences.” The audience laughed. “So the two of us getting together was looked at as a kind of championship boxing match with the Apollo as the champ and me as the contender. In the end we fought to a draw.”
From the time she was a girl of 3, Nina Simone aspired to be the first Black classical pianist. “That was all that was on my mind,” she said in an interview in the doc, where in archival footage she famously said of her political activism that often got her into hot water, “I don’t think you have a choice. How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”
Earlier on the red carpet, I mentioned to Garbus that Nina Simone is having a moment. Gina Prince-Bythewood has her protagonist sing “Blackbird” in Beyond the Lights and Simone’s music seems to be getting a new audience as well. Garbus said, “It’s very interesting. You know I can’t explain that. I was in Starbucks this morning for half an hour and what was playing was Nina Simone. I guess we just needed her.”
Speaking of her inspiration for the doc, Garbus said, “I’m a conduit to bringing her to audiences that didn’t know her before or giving her audience who loved her a little more of her. That’s a wonderful position to be in.”
Lauryn Hill
The director noted that Simone is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century who had 15 ways of singing the same song. When she undertook the project, Garbus told me she didn’t know Simone’s personal life: “But of course as soon as I started to peel away layers of that I was even more committed and desirous of bringing her story to the screen.”
As for what Garbus hopes audiences take away from seeing the film, she told me on the red carpet, “I want them to listen to her music all over again and for that listener it will be a delicious experience because you’re going to know what this woman went through and what she was bringing to that music.”
Celebrities who attended the premiere included John Leguizamo, Sandra Bernhard, S. Epatha Merkerson, Usher, Gina Belafonte, Ilyasah Shabazz, and D.A. Pennebaker.
Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.
These same voices weren’t heard or listened to in the various investigations conducted by the LAPD in the 1980s. The film tells the story of Enietra Washington, Franklin’s only known survivor. In 1988, after Franklin picked her up and attempted to kill her, she gave the police a description of Franklin’s car (an orange Pinto) and described his face to a sketch artist.
Pam Brooks guides filmmaker Nick Broomfield around her LA neighborhood in Tales of the Grim Sleeper.
This post by Leigh Kolb previously appeared at Bitch Media and is cross-posted with permission.
The chilling new documentary Tales of the Grim Sleeper makes it clear that our society values the lives of white people differently than Black people.
At the beginning of director Nick Broomfield’s new documentary, the audience sees a Google Map of Lonnie Franklin Jr.’s home in South Central Los Angeles. In 2010, Franklin was arrested and charged with 10 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder—he heads to trial this June. Many say, however, that Franklin killed more than 100 women in the 25 years since 1985. All of his alleged victims were Black. “How did this happen?” Broomfield asks in voice-over.
How could it happen? Later in the film, Pamela Brooks, a resident of the neighborhood and a former sex worker supplies the answer: “We don’t mean nothing to them. It’s Black women. I’m a Black woman. Who gives a fuck about me?” Brooks offers comic relief at times and hard, tragic truths at other times. She evaded Franklin’s attempts to lure her in one night. He would often pick up sex workers in the middle of the night—promising them crack—and then take them to his home to photograph them, assault them, and often kill them. The numerous cases that Franklin was allegedly involved in are referred to by police as “NHI” cases: “No Humans Involved”—as if killing a Black woman (especially a sex worker or drug addict) doesn’t involve a human.
Broomfield has worked on numerous intimate, low-budget films before, including documentaries about Sarah Palin, Tupac, and military killings of civilians in Iraq. In Tales of the Grim Sleeper, Broomfield could have easily constructed a film in which his authoritative voice drove a persuasive narrative. Instead, he allows the people—Franklin’s friends, victims, and neighborhood residents who fought for justice—to dominate the screen. Brooks’ knowledge and connections specifically give him access to the world that he, as a white British man, is not a part of.
Lonnie Franklin’s booking photo, as seen in Tales of the Grim Sleeper.
These same voices weren’t heard or listened to in the various investigations conducted by the LAPD in the 1980s. The film tells the story of Enietra Washington, Franklin’s only known survivor. In 1988, after Franklin picked her up and attempted to kill her, she gave the police a description of Franklin’s car (an orange Pinto) and described his face to a sketch artist. The sketch was never released and neither were details about his car. While Franklin was “hunting” women and killing them, the police didn’t even tell the public that the killings were the work of a serial murderer. Washington explains the role of racism in the police handling of the case. “Every Black woman is a hooker, don’t you know?” she says with a flippant resignation, explaining why the information wasn’t deemed relevant. It was 20 years before the public was shown the sketch and given details about the suspected serial killer.
To combat that lax institutional attitude, a neighborhood group called the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders formed in the 1980s to attempt to get more media and law enforcement attention on the crimes. One of the most powerful voices in Tales of the Grim Sleeper is Margaret Prescod, a leader of the Coalition. She deserves her own documentary and she makes delivers many of the most powerful truths in the film. “We’re here to say, loud and clear, that every life is of value. Could you imagine if these murders had happened in Beverly Hills?” she asks.
Tales of the Grim Sleeperaired on HBO on April 27, but I first saw it at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Mo. After the film, both Broomfield and Brooks took the stage. Brooks received wild applause, which intensified after she said that she was still clean and sober. She commented on the institutional cycle that allowed the murders to continue for so long. Broomfield added that the issues presented in the documentary and the issues that were unveiled in Ferguson are national issues, revealing “systematic institutional racism.”
While watching Tales of the Grim Sleeper, I couldn’t stop thinking about 2012 documentary The Central Park Five, a film by Sarah Burns, Ken Burns, and David McMahon that tells the story of the five men wrongfully convicted for raping and beating a jogger in Central Park in 1989. The jogger was a young, white woman who worked as an investment banker. The crime made national news—that year, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in New York newspapers demanding the return of the death penalty for “criminals of every age.” Four Black men and one Hispanic man were convicted of the crime. In 2002—after the young men had served years of prison time—a serial rapist admitted to the rape and DNA tests corroborated his confession. In contrast to their trials, the vacating of the five young men’s convictions was quiet.
The New York Daily News front page reporting on the 1989 beating. Via PBS.
Pairing these films creates a powerful narrative that reveals something about whose lives matter in our society. Contrasting every part of these cases—both of which originated in the 1980s, but have been working through the police and justice system for 20 years—shows how law enforcement and media help shape the narrative that Black lives matter less. Certainly more people know about the Central Park Jogger than they do about the dozens of women in South Central Los Angeles who were beaten, raped, strangled, and shot. These women, it would seem, are disposable. And more people know about the “Central Park Five”—Kharey “Korey” Wise, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Raymond Santana—being convicted, rather than their innocence.
While the films chronicle events that happen on the opposite sides of America, the strength in both of the films is that people are allowed to speak for themselves and we are held responsible as not-so-innocent bystanders. At the end of Tales of the Grim Sleeper, photos of Black women—Franklin’s victims—flash by on the screen, just slowly enough that we feel properly uncomfortable and ashamed of the society we live in.
In an interview with TheNew York Times in 2012, The Central Park Five co-director Sarah Burns said of her film, “Part of our goal is simply to inform people about what happened in this case. But we also want people to think about how this happened.”
Broomfield clearly attempts—and succeeds—to reach that same goal in Tales of the Grim Sleeper. He asks at the beginning of the film, “How did this happen?” The answer is much greater than Los Angeles—the answer stretches from Los Angeles, to Ferguson, to New York City. It’s America’s problem.
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
The center of the film is Iris Apfel, who although she had a successful career as an interior and textile designer when she was younger (she and her husband/business partner, Carl, who turns 100 during the film, talk briefly about her work at the White House and he lets slip that “We had a problem with Jackie,”) became well known to a wider public when, as a last minute substitution for another exhibit, a collection of the distinctive outfits she put together for herself (always pants and a top often accessorized by trademark layers of big heavy necklaces which catch the eye like the iridescent breast plumage of exotic birds) became a surprise hit. The exhibit traveled from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida and the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts–making her a star at 84.
Current mainstream and even “indie” narrative film portrayals of older women are pathetic: women graduate from being the girlfriend to the wife to the mother to the grandmother without ever accruing a personality; even those quirky, cranky grandmas who talk dirty for “comic” relief are a tired trope that should be retired immediately. Documentaries are the few films where older women are allowed the complexity they have in real life (like the grandmother we currently have running for the US presidency). Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me showed a woman toward the end of her career (and close to the end of her life) who, despite some serious health problems, wasn’t the mess our worst suspicions about older people, particularly older women, might make us think she would be. Instead she was a funny, frank woman who was trying to figure out each day–just as those of us who aren’t in our 80s try to do.
Iris, currently in theaters (which I saw as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston), is one of the last documentaries directed by Albert Maysles (who died in March at 88) a pioneer of cinéma vérité, which even those not familiar with the term recognize as the predominant style of documentaries today. The center of the film is Iris Apfel, who although she had a successful career as an interior and textile designer when she was younger (she and her husband/business partner, Carl, who turns 100 during the film, talk briefly about her work at the White House and he lets slip that “We had a problem with Jackie,”) became well known to a wider public when, as a last minute substitution for another exhibit, a collection of the distinctive outfits she put together for herself (always pants and a top often accessorized by trademark layers of big heavy necklaces which catch the eye like theiridescent breast plumage of exotic birds) became a surprise hit. The exhibit traveled from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida and the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts–making her a star at 84.
Iris in her Park Avenue apartment
At 93 she continues to wear outfits that sometimes straddle the edge between “genius” and “over the top.” She also does work associated with fashion–debuting (and selling out) a collection on the Home Shopping Network, beautifully styling several career women (including three Black women with wildly different body types and style preferences) as part of a special event for the women’s clothing store (now online only), Loehmann’s (Apfel has her own memory of the original “Mrs. Loehmann” who told her when she was a young woman, “‘You’ll never be pretty, but it doesn’t matter. You have something much better. You have style'”), attending fashion events and even making an appearance on a magazine cover (the outfit the stylists put her in is, of course, the least flattering one she wears in the film).
But she also has the concerns of an older person, telling us she feels the same as an older woman she knew when she was young who told her, “Everything I have two of, one hurts.” Her husband has also “not been feeling well” and is anxious about her well-being too, so she keeps from him that she has broken her hip (which she gets surgery for). Her nephew tells us that she’s told him that she keeps herself busy to stave off depression. She has begun sending away a lot of her outfits to be stored for posterity and to sell off the many items the couple have kept in storage which can’t fit into the Park Avenue apartment crowded with so many one-of-a-kind pieces (like a life-size wooden ostrich whose wing flips up to reveal a small built-in bar) it looks more like a specialty shop–or movie set–than a place where people live.
But none of these complications keep Iris from being delightful company–telling us how all the older women she socializes with have a crush on the filmmaker, her relish in haggling with a Harlem shopkeeper about items she wants to buy or a sudden intense alertness, like a cat stalking prey, when she sees a runway fashion that captures her fancy. Iris, in spite of interests many people consider superficial, is an incisive wit and not in the least flighty, hesitant or forgetful in conversation. When asked why she never had children she simply states that she wanted to work, to travel (her search for items that no other designer could provide led her all over the world), that she didn’t want her child to be raised by a nanny and concludes (in defiance of the paradigm of women “having it all”) “you can’t have everything.”
She and her husband, Carl, aren’t the cantankerous older couple we’re used to seeing onscreen but two people who complement one another (Iris buys the brightly colored and intricately patterned pants he wears with fairly conservative shirts and jackets) and after nearly seven decades together they still seem to enjoy each other’s company. She’s also not critical about what others choose to wear. At one point the photographer Bruce Weber tells her that he hasn’t once heard her badmouth anyone else’s fashion sense and she says, “I can’t judge… It’s better to be happy than well-dressed.”
Maysles, whose much lauded career included Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter, doesn’t just coast on his reputation in Iris: he brings a perspective a younger filmmaker probably could not. We see a tinge of melancholy in the well-wishes, speeches and cake at Carl’s 100th birthday and that mood seems more in keeping for a man whose health isn’t great and may not make it to his next birthday than the relentlessly cheerful “Happy 100th to you” shout-outs of morning television, always delivered by people who aren’t close to that age themselves. Iris’s life is neither filled with loss nor one long, jaunt of constant happiness, but a combination, like the lives the rest of us will lead.
Six brothers spent their lives cloistered inside a messy Lower East Side tenement in Manhattan where only their father had the key. Only once or twice a year were they allowed outside their claustrophobic apartment, subsidized by welfare checks their mother received from home schooling them. They spent the day watching movies. This went on for years and years. This is not the subject of some horror film. It’s a stranger-than-fiction story that is the subject of documentary, ‘The Wolfpack.’
Six brothers spent their lives cloistered inside a messy Lower East Side tenement in Manhattan where only their father had the key. Only once or twice a year were they allowed outside their claustrophobic apartment, subsidized by welfare checks their mother received from home schooling them. They spent the day watching movies. This went on for years and years. This is not the subject of some horror film. It’s a stranger-than-fiction story that is the subject of documentary, The Wolfpack.
Directed by Crystal Moselle, the documentary created a stir at Sundance where it premiered, where the brothers turned up for the screening but spoke very little with the press.
Last weekend, The Wolfpack made its New York premiere at the TriBeCa Film festival at the SVA Theater on 23d Street, not so far from where the boys spent almost all their lives inside the closed walls of their claustrophobic and unkempt apartment.
Five of six Angulo brothers
Everything that the six boys – whose surname is Angulo – knew of the world they gleaned from movies. Quentin Tarantino’s movies were favorites, along with those of Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and David Lynch. The boys – Govinda, Bhagavan, Narayana, Krisna, Jagadesh, Mukunda – spent their time watching movies and then reenacting scenes wearing costumes they created out of thrift shop clothes they retooled to resemble that of their characters.
One of the brothers described their existence as living in a prison. One sibling said they lived inside their minds.
As they got older, once or twice a year the siblings would walk in the streets. It was on one of their rare expeditions that Moselle found them. The production notes from the film said it was like “discovering a long lost tribe.” They were a vision in their waist-length hair and Pulp Fiction-inspired wardrobe, which featured a badly fitting dark suit, white shirt, and sunglasses. Over five years, Moselle gained their trust and recorded their story. She is still very protective of them.
On the red carpet, I asked the director if the boy’s father, Oscar, a Peruvian immigrant, who in the film was often drunk and ranted incoherently, had emotionally abused his sons. She replied tersely, “I’m not going to answer those questions.”
Moselle described her relationship with the brothers as sisterly, so they felt comfortable around her. (Their actual sister, to whom they are very close, is mentally disabled.)
“I watched them grow up,” Moselle told me. “There’s an incredible transformation that they went through so it was a beautiful thing to see this great transformation, and then now they’re making films in the world and socializing and happy people.”
Neither of the boys’ parents, including their mother Susanne, who seems as controlled as her sons in the film, appeared on the red carpet.
I spoke to Govinda, who is the second oldest and has a twin, what life is like now. “Life now is busy. It’s taken off cause this has pushed us to just start relationships with people, and in the filmmaking world it’s all about relationships,” he said like a pro.
Angulo brothers
“Offers are flowing in,” said the charismatic, handsome 22-year-old. “We’re starting our own production company, Wolfpack Productions. We’re working as assistants on sets, so there’s a lot happening for us. It’s opened up a lot of doors.”
The brothers still play out scenes from their movie scenes. “We’ll always do that,” Govinda smiled. “That’s the heart for us, so we’ll takes these movies with us wherever we go.”
They are still stunned by the Sundance success. “What could be more surprising and stupendous than that, the Oscars?” I asked. “You never know,” Govinda told me.
This red carpet stuff is something they’ve dreamed about since they were kids sitting on dirty mattresses watching movies, Govinda said. “This is something that we always dreamt about when we were 12 year olds and we’d turn on the TV and watch people on the red carpet and be like, ‘I want to do that some day! I want to be in front of those cameras some day and be on the red carpet!’”
The boys wore their signature outfits. “We actually thrift shop buy everything,” he told me. “We search around all New York City; we go to all the different stores and then we reference clothes from movies and this is like our Reservoir Dogs look.”
Soon, designers will be calling them and asking them to wear their suits, I told them. “That started already,” Govinda noted. They already have a fashion spread in the works. “We’re doing stuff with big magazines, so there’s a lot of talk in the works.”
Maybe because of years of being shut off from the outside world, the brothers’ speech is still a little off kilter, and Govinda speaks slowly and chooses his words carefully. I asked him how his parents were doing with all the media attention.
“They’re doing well. Dad’s more – he’s not a big public eye guy so he doesn’t like being in front of the camera and everything. You know how he was in the documentary, but mom is all for it.”
How did his Dad feel about the way he was portrayed? “We got a bunch of comments from people saying I wish I could do that to my children, in a joking kind of way,” Govinda laughed. “But my Dad, he loved the movie. The movie was an honest portrayal.”
Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.
We need more documentaries and movies about the lives of pilgrims and activists of non-violence. We also need to be reminded of their power and diversity.
Countless movies have been made about the military but very few about peace activists. Yes, there have been exceptions, such as Gandhi (1982) and Selma (2014), but the stories of soldiers- mostly white and male, of course- and their experiences of war have always been considered more worthy and thrilling than those of people struggling for peace. This has been a constant throughout the history of American cinema. From Wings (1927), the first movie to win a Best Picture Oscar, to American Sniper (2014), Hollywood filmmakers have demonstrated an abiding interest in telling and selling war tales. There is the dramatic, aesthetic argument, of course: cinematic story-tellers are naturally drawn to conflict and war is the ultimate expression of human conflict. War is, also, understood as an historical fact and war stories aim to address this unbroken feature of humanity. Obviously, human conflict should be explored by filmmakers but it must be understood that there is no such thing as an apolitical war story.
Although there have been American anti-war movies, most have been either confused in their messages, ideologically fraudulent, or downright militarist. It’s not just the obviously right-wing, propagandist products that promote a militarist culture and ethos. The lives of soldiers at war are generally understood as dramatically appealing and full of meaning, while military men are commonly portrayed as fascinating, charismatic figures. American mainstream cinema has not only provided a mirror to U.S. militarism; it has also reinforced it. Hollywood, it must be said, has never found peacemakers very interesting. Generally speaking, you have to go to independent and documentary films to learn about advocates of non-violence and pacificist philosophy.
Peace Pilgrim
The documentary Peace Pilgrim: An American Sage Who Walked Her Talk (2002) celebrates Mildred Norman (1908-1981), a remarkable woman who walked for peace for nearly 30 years. Calling herself Peace Pilgrim, New Jersey-born Norman travelled the United States from 1953 to 1981. Mahatma Gandhi said, “My Life is my message.” For Mildred Norman, her journey was her message. She was motivated by faith, namely a belief in “universal spirituality” and the “divine law of love.” In an old interview, Norman describes a spiritual awakening she had some years some years before her peace pilgrimage. Walking alone in the woods at night, she experienced, she says, a desire to surrender herself, and a calling “to give my life to something beyond myself.” Her life before had not been particularly unusual–she had been a fashionable young woman and had married. But she and her husband, Stanley Ryder, divorced after 13 years. Ryder says in an interview that she did not visit him when he was in the service and showed little interest in being a homemaker. Mildred Norman’s pacifist principles and independent spirit were already challenging convention. She was destined for another life.
It would be a while before she could realize her purpose, but in 1953, during the Korean War, Peace Pilgrim finally began her extraordinary journey. She took no money with her and carried only a comb, toothbrush, map, and pen. Peace Pilgrim says she experienced generosity and hospitality on her travels but on occasions when she did not get shelter and food from others, she fasted and slept outdoors. She spoke of both inner peace and peace for humankind. Her observations are often powerful. Consider the following statement: “What we basically suffer from in the world is immaturity. If we were a mature people, peace would be assured.” Many–on the left as well as the right–mock pacifists as strange, romantic creatures but whether you are a pacifist or not, there is no denying Peace Pilgrim’s strength of commitment to peace. Although she tragically died in a car crash in 1981, her message was kept alive by Friends of Peace Pilgrim who brought together her writings in Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words.
Young Mildred Norman
Mildred Norman’s pilgrimage can be read as both politically and culturally subversive. To forsake money and possessions, and advocate peace in a militarist, materialistic society is a profoundly non-conformist act. Further, her pilgrimage denotes a rejection of social norms of post-war American femininity. Although she did not have a child and husband, Norman’s pilgrimage still represents a refusal of the domestic space and personal relationships for the life of the road. There persists a belief that women are more conservative in their lifestyle than the average man but Mildred Norman’s story is a reminder of the long, rich tradition of female radicalism and non-conformism.
Peace Pilgrim features period news footage, stills of newspaper clippings and old photos, as well as deeply felt commentary by cultural and religious figures inspired by her example. Maya Angelou, the Dalai Lama and actor Dennis Weaver all underscore that Norman literally embodied her message of peace. But the film aims, above all, to give voice to the woman herself and honor her pacifist teaching. We see Peace Pilgrim walking through the countryside and towns of America, lecturing in schools as well as being interviewed by reporters around the country. Produced by the Friends of Peace Pilgrim, and scripted and edited by Sharon Janis of Night Lotus Productions, Peace Pilgrim is a modestly made but valuable film.
Being interviewed on the road
We need more documentaries and movies about the lives of pilgrims and activists of non-violence. We also need to be reminded of their power and diversity. Incidentally, isn’t it time someone somewhere made a big, bold documentary about Code Pink, the colorful, dynamic, in-your-face American peace activists of today? Watching them disrupt the meetings of war criminals like Henry Kissinger is surely the stuff of great drama.
