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2010 Film Festival, Day 11

Monday started at the Paramount, and the enjoyable Waste Land. This film was about those who make a living by picking out recyclables from one of the world’s biggest, fastest-growing garbage dumps (Rio de Janeiro’s Jardim Gramacho), and the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, who went there to work with these people and produce artworks from the material they collect. His idea was that the profits from the works they made could be given back to this community, helping them pull themselves out of poverty.

This was an excellent, enjoyable doco; you got a feel for the lives of the people from the dump before the art project started, and it showed the joy they took from being involved. One of the best things was that it showed that these were not ignorant people – the head of their newly-formed union talked about the books that he had read (books pulled out of the garbage), and mentioned how helpful he had found Machiavelli’s The Prince in understanding the little fiefdoms that the favelas represented for the local gangs, explicitly comparing it to the situation in Machiavelli’s Italy. It was also good to see the people around the artist worrying about whether they are doing the garbage pickers a disservice, gving them unrealistic dreams or expectations; but the artist decided that showing them that bigger dreams are possible wasn’t a bad thing. Thankfully, the follow-up implied that most of the people involved did manage to make a start towards what they had wanted to do.

To hare off on a complete tangent for a minute – photography, particularly art photography, is kind of weird to me. I mean, it’s sort of like music composition, in that it could theoretically be infinitely replicated; but it’s treated like… well, not quite like painting, but perhaps like lithographs, where only a few copies can exist. I think the root of it is that I’m a bit weirded out by value created by artificial shortages, that’s all.

Uh, anyway – the artist’s work (both what he did before the film, and what was created during the film) seemed interesting and accessible to me, and the people that he photographed (and then turned into montage) were strong and interesting. I liked this film.

* * *

Unfortunately, the next film was Police, Adjective… which was good at evoking the tedium of a police stakeout, and made a good point about the meaning of words, and the role we allow discretion to play in policing. But it was SOOOO SLOOOOOOOOW. I mean, not quite The Man From London slow, since I managed to stay awake; but pretty damn slow, nonetheless. Apparently some reviewers thought that it was a humorous commentary on I-don’t-care-because-I’m-bored.

Not a film for the tired.

* * *

Then I walked over to the Film Archive for Collapse, which was a mix of an interview with Michael Ruppert (done in a single session) with archival footage to illustrate the interview. It sprang from quite a different film – they were trying to make a film about the CIA’s involvement with the drug trade, and were interviewing him in connection with his claim that the CIA approached him in the early 70s, while he was in the LAPD, to help them move drugs. But that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about – he wanted to talk about how civilization was going to collapse, and why.

They had archival footage of him pointing at the mortgage-backed derivatives as the likely source of the collapse, and warning of the crunch in credit, which is certainly something he got right; and you could feel the passion he had when he warned of the dangers introduced by fiat currency, compound interest and… er, I can’t remember the term, but it’s when the bank can lend out more money than it has, because people aren’t all going to ask for it at once.

But… I don’t know. He was talking about the need to hoard physical gold against the coming apocalypse, which seemed weird to me. I mean – he argued against paper currency because you couldn’t eat it or use it to run your car, but that’s equally true of gold, and at least paper is lighter. I think that he’s right that there are shenanigans going on with the money supply, but I’m more worried about how convinced he is that he’s got the answers, rather than the questions he’s asking.

An interesting film that asks worrying questions, but gives unsatisfying answers.

* * *

I stayed at the Film Archive for A Film Unfinished, which was based on a piece of unfinished Nazi propaganda, filmed in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, just before people were shipped off to the camps. The film-maker combined the original footage with diary entries from the leader of the Ghetto, reports by the local SS commander, an interview which had been done with a Nazi cameraman after the war, and filming a handful of people who had survived from the ghetto as they watched the original film. They had also found a reel of out-takes, various practice runs where they showed how many of the shots were set up – for example, scenes where starving beggars come up to shop windows full of meat.

I was reminded of “Visions of the Past” by Robert Rosenstone: “For we can always see and feel much that the people in old photos and newsreels could not: that their clothing and automobiles were old-fashioned, that their landscape lacked skyscrapers and other contemporary buildings, that their world was black and white, and haunting, and gone.”

This was a hard film to watch, especially the gauntness of most of the faces, and the mass graves of those who starved; but I’m glad I did.

* * *

Then it was off to the Paramount and Lebabnon, the film of four young Israeli soldiers in a tank as the Lebanon war kicks off. There is a stencilled slogan in the tank that says something like, “The tank is only iron, the man is steel”; we get to see how much of a lie that is.

It is claustrophobic and intense; we only see the outside through the restricted sights of the gunner, and inside of the tank is grimy and grim. While the tank itself survives a large amount of punishment, you understand how terrifying it is to be one of the largest targets on the battlefield, and how hard it is to pull the trigger when you can see faces instead of barrels.

I’m not sure I’m ready to watch this again any time soon.

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