My first film was at 10am in Te Papa with C. In The Attic: Who Has A Birthday Today is told with a mixture of stop-motion and normal film (with a touch of hand-drawn animation), and is about a society of discarded toys in the attic of a Hungarian home – but a forgotten Communist bust, served by a mixture of deformed toys, insects and a villainous cat, has decided to kidnap the doll Buttercup for himself.
There were many very cool bits, such as the pillows drifting out of drawers and floating as clouds (complete with feathers falling as snow), or when the foot of one of the toys accidentally catches on fire, and he hops around and then jumps on a mirror (which sizzles like a pool of water, and puts his foot out). Or how, when people go inside things like train cars (made of suitcases), we see drawn representations of them through the windows pasted on the side. The film manages to give quite distinct personalities to all the creatures, and I would be quite happy to revisit that world.
There were a couple of puzzling things that were never explained, but I don’t care – I liked this movie a lot.
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After a quick, surprisingly good lunch at the Te Papa cafe, C abandoned me to the next movie: Alamar, the story of a boy going from Rome (where he lives with his mother) to live with his father and grandfather for a bit; his grandfather being a fisherman living in a house on poles on a coral reef in Mexico.
Some scenes were obviously staged, since there was only one camera-man – to get shots from multiple angles while they’re climbing up a pylon, they would need to wait while the camera-man clambered up past them, for example. But I doubt that the film-makers lured the alligator that lurked outside the house, waiting for scraps, or trained a cattle-egret to come and eat cockroaches from the walls.
There was very little explanation of what we were seeing – it wasn’t clear whether the father did this for a living, or was just visiting, though we did show him teaching his son the names for plants and animals, and scaling and gutting fish. We also saw a little of the boy’s life before and after in Rome.
Women were strangely absent on the islands and boats, and it was never explained why; and I would have liked to hear a bit of what the boy thought about the different ways of life. But I enjoyed the movie.
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Then it was off to the Film Archive to see Secrets of the Tribe. There is an Amazonian tribe, the Yanomani, which is famous in Western anthropological circles as being the prototypical “untouched” society, and which has been heavily studied from the 60s onwards – but the title of the film refers to the the anthropologists, and the highly questionable things that some of them have done, both in describing the Yanomani, and to them.
I’m a bit conflicted about this film. I strongly feel that you cannot approach a field of science by saying, “This result would mean something horrible about humanity, so we can’t accept it.” In Freakonomics, Steven Levitt says that the evidence persuasively suggests that making abortions freely available is what led to the downturn in crime a generation later in American cities, rather than the innovative policing programmes it’s normally attiributed to: this wouldn’t be a pleasant truth, but the fact that it isn’t pleasant doesn’t speak to its truthfulness.
But – there’s strong evidence that the leading proponent of the idea that humans are animals too, and that biology needs to be strongly considered in anthropology (Napoleon Chagnon) was also involved in the Atomic Energy Commission research that, deliberately or not, seemed to make the measles epidemic among the Yanomani substantially worse; and he was an ally of Jacques Lizot (disciple of Levi-Strauss), who compiled a Yanomani dictionary… and brought in plane-loads of trade goods which he used to get tribesmen to masturbate him and allow him to have anal sex, and who had a small encampment of young boys near his research camp whom he exploited.
And on the other side… Chagnon’s thesis (that the Yanomani are a fierce people who compete because of competition for women) was challenged by various people, including Kenneth Good, who claimed that they were actually peaceful innocents. Good was then accused of paedophilia, because he married a Yanomani girl (who was of age in the tribe, but not by Western standards), but his books were very popular.
Anthropology and sociology do not come off very well here. Chagnon trumpets the need for statistics over opinion, but Good points out that many of the statistics he relied on to make some of his arguments are flawed (doing a nutritional study on a group so much in contact with the outside world that they had a store you could buy canned meat, for example). On the other hand, even flawed statistics can sometimes tell us something interesting.
The overwhelming impression is that both the Yanomami and the scientific community have not been well served by the antics of many of these people; and that many of them are more interested in justifying their actions than examining them.
It was a good documentary.
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Then it was off to the Embassy for When You’re Strange, a documentary on the Doors. I hadn’t realised how much the Doors frontman Jim Morrison dominated my perception of the band; that is, I hadn’t known how talented the other musicians were, how many of the songs were written by them, and how much they were able to cover for his lapses. It makes me wonder what would have happened if they had been paired with someone who didn’t have such a destructive relationship with drugs and alcohol.
I enjoyed watching this, and felt that I came away knowing more than I did before; and it inclined me towards listening to more.
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Next was Bill Cunningham New York with Jenni at Te Papa, the story of a a fashion photographer deeply embedded in the fabric of New York, yet curiously apart from it. He covers gala events, dinners and parties of the rich and famous; but he will not accept so much as a glass of water while he’s there, since he doesn’t want to feel beholden to anyone. He haunts the streets of New York, riding his bicycle in his blue street-sweeper smock, seeing what catches his eye, and what might be the next big thing. He goes to fashion shows, but sits on the side, because he wants to see what the outfits look like from all angles, and won’t take photos of what he doesn’t think people would actually wear. (He’ll also show when a designer is “inspired” by other creators, showing them side-by-side.)
He seems to be a genuinely nice man – frugal, modest, cheerful, funny, and smart. He doesn’t seem to care much what he eats, or where he sleeps, much to the despair of the estate agent tasked with finding him an apartment by the city (to replace the Carnegie Hall one filled with filing cabinets that he has lived in for decades, since they want to swap the resident artists for telemarketers). There was a moment of darkness, or perhaps sadness, when they asked him why he still went to church every Sunday; it wasn’t fully explained, but that’s as it should be.
I really liked this documentary.
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Jenni & I ambled over to the Paramount for American: The Bill Hicks Story, which was about the career of the outspoken US comedian. It was interesting to see the arc of his work, from goofy character stuff as a teen, to the anger of his drinking and drug days, through the time when people came to see him as a spectacle rather than an entertainer, and then out the other side as a smart, angry and funny comic who was rather more successful in Britain than in his homeland, and who was frustrated that his country didn’t live up to its potential.
It felt like it was fairly honest about his limitations, and his family came across as good people; it is a real shame he died so young.
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I only had one seven-movie day, so I was quite tired by the time I got to Triangle, a horror movie. It is hard to talk about the movie without giving too much away; I’m torn, because there are some bits that work pretty well at giving you a creepy feeling, but I felt that you had to work hard at it to make what people did make sense; and even now, I’m not sure I can make the world shown in the movie consistent with itself, and I think I’m pretty flexible-minded. It’s also quite gory.
I thought they had a pretty nifty idea, but it felt like it needed something.
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