The Prodigal Cinephile

I have been slowly working my way through Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies for the first time in years the past few months. My favorite essays in the book are Farber’s dispatches from the New York Film Festival, which see him taking advantage of the opportunity that watching a large number of new movies in a short period of time presents to draw conclusions about the current state of cinema. This seems to me to be the most highly evolved version of an irresistible temptation inherent in the film festival experience: cataloging the inevitable connections between everything you see. After all, there are only so many techniques and themes available to even the most gifted artists.

The most obvious and potentially meaningful commonality I noticed at this year’s Maryland Film Festival was a preoccupation with fake news. Donbass begins with actors preparing to appear on a television news broadcast as witnesses to a shelling attack. They will return at the end of the movie, when the price of their complicity in this deception is revealed. In between, director Sergei Loznitsa’s protagonist-less film presents roughly a dozen other vignettes depicting life in the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine amidst the separatist conflict which started in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and which does not appear (as someone who reads four news sites every day, it’s crazy how little I know about this) to have ever ended. As the credits rolled, I felt exhausted by the film’s relentless pessimism; three weeks later, however, I find myself thinking about Donbass more often than anything else I saw at MDFF. A room full of well-dressed men on their cell phones begging for money in particular has emerged as probably my favorite movie scene of the year so far.

The hijacking of the media by government interests was a topic near and dear to the heart of the subject of the only documentary I saw at this year’s festival, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. Alarmed by the way the official story about the Iran Hostage Crisis seemed to change nightly, Stokes, a public intellectual and former librarian from Philadelphia, began recording television news programs in 1979. This project eventually expanded into a 24/7 operation capturing everything shown on multiple networks, an endeavor involving more than 70,000 VHS tapes, entire apartments used for nothing but storage, and the assistance of paid help. The film falters toward the end when it tries too hard to use Stokes’s archive to make a case for her as a visionary without really grappling with the fact that only an EXTREMELY WEALTHY person would have had access to the immense (forgotten fact: video tapes were pretty expensive for much of the thirty year period Stokes was recording) resources this project required. Recorder is nevertheless a fascinating story about a unique individual and a welcome nod to the good people at the Internet Archive doing the hard work of making Stokes’s tapes available to the public.

In contrast to the sophisticated propaganda machines in Donbass and Recorder, the military government which haunts Aäläm-Wärqe Davidian’s Fig Tree doesn’t even bother trying to deceive anyone about what it’s up to. While 16-year-old Mina (Betalehem Asmamawe) lives in constant terror that her boyfriend will be impressed into military service, dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam makes speeches castigating the Ethiopian people for raising a “generation of cowards” because they don’t volunteer their sons to fight as soon as they’re old enough to hold a gun. Although Davidian succeeds in creating a palpable sense of what it was like for her to come of age in Addis Ababa against a backdrop of civil war, I felt that Fig Tree was outshined by another debut feature which also ends with a shot of its young woman protagonist running toward the camera, Annabelle Attanasio’s Mickey and the Bear.

Like Mina, Mickey (Camila Morrone) is struggling to navigate a path to adulthood complicated by war. In her case, it comes in the form of her father Hank (James Badge Dale), a survivor of two tours in Iraq struggling with a host of afflictions including PTSD, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, a war injury, and grief at the loss of his wife (Mickey’s mother) to cancer. As Mickey approaches the end of her senior year of high school, Hank’s destructive impulses begin to manifest in increasingly creepy and threatening forms, leaving her with an impossible choice between abandoning a loved one to his demons to accept a college scholarship and risking her own health and happiness to stay by the side of a man the film clearly identifies as being beyond saving. I thought Mickey and the Bear‘s Anaconda, Montana setting and the scenes of Mickey at work in her part time job as a taxidermist were terrific, but wanted much more of both, and I’m conflicted by the film’s depiction of Hank as a problem without a good solution. There’s no denying, though, that Morrone’s and Dale’s performances constitute some of the best acting I’m likely to see this year.

Ham on Rye (yet another debut feature) deals with a similar stage in life, but couldn’t be more different from Fig Tree and Mickey and the Bear. Working with a cast featuring numerous veterans of Disney Channel and Nickelodeon shows such as Danny Tamberelli (All That, The Adventures of Pete & Pete), Lori Beth Denberg (All That), Clayton Snyder (Lizzie McGuire), and Aaron Schwartz (The Adventures of Pete & Pete), director Tyler Taormina and cinematographer Carson Lund (who wrote about his experience shooting the film for Filmmaker Magazine) focus single-mindedly on recreating the feeling of finishing high school and going off to college (or not) in the suburbs in the late 90s and early 00s. As a member of Conestoga Valley High School‘s class of 2000, I was definitely picking up what Ham on Rye was laying down, but I still thought the film was overlong, an impression reinforced by my fonder memories of Little Waves, the short film which preceded it. The latter probably wouldn’t have worked as well stretched out to feature length either, but the point is that it wasn’t.

Rites of passage also figure prominently in my favorite of all the movies I saw at MDFF, South Mountain. It opens with Talia Balsam’s Lila and Scott Cohen’s Edgar hosting close friends for dinner at their home in the Catskills. Edgar excuses himself, supposedly to take a call about a script he’s working on, but in actuality to witness the birth of his child with another woman on his iPhone. The rest of the film could accurately be said to focus narrowly on Lila’s efforts to come to terms with this specific event and its aftermath while still trying to be there for an old friend recovering from breast surgery and her two daughters, one of whom is returning from camp and the other from a sea voyage. It would be even truer, however, to say that it’s more generally about coping with change that arrives at precisely a moment when you are planning on settling down for awhile, a theme that most viewers can likely relate to. I must admit that South Mountain appealed to me in part because of Lila’s house, which in real life belongs to director Hilary Brougher’s mother: I spent much of my time in between MDFF screenings setting up appointments to view houses for rent in Ithaca, so I enjoyed spending so much time with a lovely piece of upstate New York real estate. I was also extremely impressed by how present nature was in the film both visually and as part of the soundtrack.

All in all, the 2019 Maryland Film Festival was a fitting way to say farewell to the Baltimore film scene. I was never able to become as involved in it as I would have liked, but I’m still leaving with quite a few great memories. Most notably: meeting John Waters, meeting DeRay Mckessen (who’s quite the cinephile, by the way!), managing to visibly annoy Alex Karpovsky by not knowing when to let something go at a Q&A for Supporting Characters (“does that answer your question?” he asked, to which I replied, “no, not really . . . “), muddling my way through managing a sold out screening attended by not-yet-disgraced mayor Catherine Pugh, and all my interactions over the years with the wonderful MDFF staff and scores of my fellow volunteers. Special shout out here to Karol Martinez-Doane, who was always awesome to work with as Venue Manager, and who brought me bibimbap from Brown Rice Korean Grill one year just because! Of course, I still have family and friends in Baltimore, so this isn’t really goodbye. Let’s say, instead: ’till we meet again!

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending the 2019 Bastard Film Encounter, a weekend-long event devoted to the screening and discussion of films which are “ill-conceived or received; embarrassing or beyond the bounds of acceptability; poor in conception or execution; undesirable to those who should be caring for them; proof of something that should have never happened.” Although noted cinephile and friend of the blog Brian Darr describes the BFRE as “legendary,” I must confess that I had never heard of it before organizer Stephanie Sapienza, a colleague at the University of Maryland, mentioned it to me a few months ago.

The first three iterations of this biennial affair were held in Raleigh, North Carolina. This year, though, it relocated to Baltimore, with most events and all screenings taking place at The Windup Space. I originally thought I wasn’t going to be able to attend, since we are right in the middle of trying to get our house on the market, but when I learned that a limited number of one-day passes were available, I leaped at the opportunity to snag one. The day began with a public domain film (which is actually available on YouTube) called Tip Over VNR presented by John Klacsmann from Anthology Film Archives as part of a program called “Teach Me, Teacher (Part I).” For me, it was an absolutely perfect way to start. The release of Pet Sematary has drawn my attention to the fact that since becoming a parent, I can’t even read about the death of a child in a movie review without feeling queasy, so it was fascinating to examine my reaction to a film comprised of nothing but fake children being crushed by furniture over and over again and contemplate (as Klacsmann suggested) what must have been going through the heads of the government officials who ran and recorded these simulations.

The rest of the program consisted of a film created to train Target employees to spot “hot” checks which featured an actor that presenter Dan Erdman was able to identify as a former wrestling heel from Minnesota, and a video found in a shopping mall 20 years ago which extolled a philosophy known as “informationalism.” The latter dominated the conversation which followed the films when a debate broke out over whether or not it was genuinely the copy of a copy of a copy that it looked like or some sort of art project. Nothing in the next block of screenings titled “Manly Pursuits” generated the same level of discussion, but the films were, if anything, even more interesting. I was particularly captivated by “A Hidden Index of Female Presence in a Vanishing Container,” which reminded me of the moment in The Tillman Story when I suddenly realized I was watching the creation of those weird video portraits they use in Sunday Night Football broadcasts, the origin of which I had never previously contemplated, and a video celebrating/roasting a Texas businessman which was presented by my fellow past chair of the American Library Association’s Film & Media Round Table Brian Boling.

In between the two morning programs, a number of bastards (as BFE attendees affectionately refer to one another) were invited on stage to show off talents including a Werner Herzog impression and a rendition of “Here Comes the Bride” on a fart piano (which is exactly what it sounds like), and we were treated to a slide show preview of a bike tour that one of the local participants was leading later in the weekend before lunch as well. Lunch itself arrived in the form of a taco bar provided by Golden West Cafe which, if you’re not familiar with Baltimore, is a pretty boss thing to come included for free with the price of registration. As were, by the way, the stylish t-shirts.

Anyway: the afternoon screenings kicked off with a program featuring what is apparently a BFE staple, footage depicting animals being used for medical research, and continued on with one called “Teach Me, Teacher (Part II: The #MeToo Edition),” which the schedule described as featuring “[f]ilms and videos meant to teach women something strange, obscure, or life-alteringly informational.” The latter included a “social media blackout,” whereby the audience was asked on behalf of the presenters to please not take pictures or discuss the details of the film being shown, a request that I absolutely will honor. I only mention it because I believe the existence of such a thing is a crucial part of BFE’s mission to facilitate free and open dialogue about film objects which aren’t typically and maybe even (in some cases) shouldn’t be studied and talked about.

The penultimate program of the day and last one I was able to stay for was called “Children of the Damned.” It started out with a clip from an absolutely fascinating BBC television production called Improvised Drama: An Enquiry Into Its Value in Education, which you can find on YouTube (we started at 13:18). The last two films were rough. The first, The Idiot Child, was an excerpt from Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain, a documentary based on the work of Ivan Pavlov, presented by film studies scholar Marsha Gordon, and the second was a 1971 film called Who Should Survive? which made a fascinating, if disturbing, bookend with Tip Over VNR. Bret McCabe described it thusly in an article for Bmore Art:

The film was ostensibly made to start a conversation around medical ethics. The cultural shifts between then and now, however, are so profound that what once was normal vocabulary in medical science sounds absolutely appalling, and watching it now you might wonder why it was ever made. A better question: How should we think about it now?

The shorter version of Who Should Survive? that we viewed is available on YouTube here. The subject matter of the film is shocking and affecting, but it’s equally noteworthy for the disparate contexts in which it has been seen: its original screening at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was covered by the New York Times as an intellectual event, but according to presenter Martin Johnson it might be all but forgotten today were it not subsequently adopted by the pro-life movement as an emotional appeal to potential supporters of their cause. In the discussion period which followed the film Johnson argued that it should be included in the National Film Registry, a compelling notion that this librarian for one supports.

All in all, the Bastard Film Encounter was a great experience. I connected with a surprisingly large number of colleagues from the University of Pittsburgh and elsewhere who I haven’t seen in years, made a few new friends, and was reminded of some reasons I became interested in movies in the first place which I haven’t thought about in a long time. My major regret is that I wasn’t able to participate in the social aspects of BFE, such as the 16mm mashup dance party, closing night dinner and duckpin bowling outing, and Sunday brunch at the home of two Baltimore-based bastards. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be back in 2021, though, so: next time!

When I left Pittsburgh in 2011, I was a movie lover who worked in a library. By the time I moved to Baltimore in 2012 (following a transitional year in Westminster, Maryland), I had become a librarian who loved movies. The distinction is subtle, but important: whereas I reorganized my entire life to facilitate seeing as many films as possible at the Three Rivers Film Festival each year, the Maryland Film Festival was always an event that I scheduled around my obligations to work and, starting in 2016, family. I actually haven’t seen many films at the festival at all since I started serving as a volunteer in 2013: the theater captain shifts I typically signed up for each represented a six- to eight-hour commitment, so I had to choose whether each day of the festival was going to be one I worked or one where I watched, since as a parent I didn’t have time to do both.

This year’s MDFF is my last as a resident of Baltimore because (as I announced on Twitter earlier this month, but have not yet mentioned on this blog) I am moving to Ithaca, New York in June to begin a new job at Cornell University. To celebrate, I’ve decided to treat myself to an old school festival experience: I’m going to devote an entire day to seeing as many movies as I can. So as not to completely shirk all of my parental duties, I now (updating another recent Twitter post) plan to split this day up into two parts: I’m going to attend movies during the day on Friday and at night on Saturday, with one Thursday screening thrown in for good measure. As I did in days of yore, I’m posting my tentative schedule here. Please let me know if you think I should reconsider any of my choices, or if you’ll be in town and would like to meet up along the way! The full film guide can be found here. Without further ado:

Thursday, May 9

Two films in the last time slot on Thursday jump out at me: Mickey and the Bear, which is part of the ACID lineup at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and Premature. Stephen Saito saw the former at SXSW and the latter at Sundance and hailed both for their acting. This will probably be a game-time decision.

Friday, May 10

I should be able to see three movies on Friday. The first time slot features an impossible decision between Donbass and Manta Ray. Both have already spent some time on the festival circuit, where each of them picked up some impressive endorsements. Daniel Kasman saw Donbass at Cannes last year and described it as “the kind of film [the] festival should embrace, one which attacks the distress of the present with a virtuosic anger and desire to communicate experience.” Steve Dollar saw Manta Ray at New Directors/New Films earlier this month and said that it “has deep affinities with the work of Thailand’s better-known Apichatpong Weerasethakul, while inscribing the screen with its own uncanny grace.” Ray & Liz  is also playing during this time slot. Daniel Kasman saw it at Locarno and called it “one of the few new films here I haven’t been able to stop thinking about,” but others who caught it there or at the New York Film Festival have been less enthusiastic, so I think I’m going to pass.

I’m leaning toward Fig Tree for my second film of the day. Ethiopia is a part of the world I’d like to know more about, and according to Michael Sicinski director Aäläm-Wärqe Davidian “is successful at generating an all-enveloping atmosphere of panic and confusion as she recreates 1989 Addis Ababa and the Ethiopian Civil War.” I am also intrigued by One Man Dies a Million Times, which Steve Dollar saw at the American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland [note to self: research this event further!] and described as exerting “a hypnotic pull into its imagined world […] that is difficult to shake off once the lights come up.”

For my last film of the day I’ll likely either see Mickey and the Bear if I haven’t already or take a flyer on Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, which hasn’t yet been reviewed much, but is about media preservation, a topic that as a librarian obviously interests me.

Saturday, May 11

As a rule I always try to see at least a few short films at every film festival I attend, so that will definitely be a part of my Saturday viewing schedule. Candidates include the “Character Study,” “Altered States,” and “WTF” programs. Depending on which one(s) I go with, I might also see American Factory, which documents the opening of a Chinese factory in Dayton, Ohio or South Mountain, which Beatrize Loayza described as one of the highlights of SXSW.