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I finally jumped into the Monteiro set and I have to give a good word out to What Shall I do with This Sword? which is one of the most impressive films let alone docs I've seen in a while. It's very successful and pointed on its political topic acing the propaganda in an informed and multifaceted way without getting bogged down to preaching to the choir which is an extraordinarily rare accomplishment in itself worthy of praise, but it does all that while maintaining one of the best experimental spirits I can think of touching back to the great Soviet silents in its use of montage. While a lot of information is relayed through dialogue even that is delivered dynamically avoiding any talking heads and takes up a minority of an already fairly short run time. The use of stock footage is easily the most amazing element with an early use of Nosferatu to call NATO a plague setting the tone perfectly. It also adds a playful element especially as it interacts with the soundtrack leaving the incoming people as jokes. That's not to say that he leaves them devoid of danger as a late discussion with a young black more than makes up for, but that the technique is just so bright as cinema.

zedz wrote:Which reminds me that Victor Kossakovsky's intimate epic Vivan las Antipodas! is the perfect antidote to this kind of film, and the perfect embodiment of what it could be if it had a brain in its head. And it features the most awesome motorway sequence ever filmed.

Why this hasn't been rushed out on BluRay in R1 is beyond me.

What a magnificent film this is! A visual feast of course, but just as much for how it's filmed as what it's depicting. Like nothing else I can remember having seen, it gives a real, palatable sense of the shape and trajectory of the earth, in more ways than one.

swo17 wrote:

zedz wrote:Which reminds me that Victor Kossakovsky's intimate epic Vivan las Antipodas! is the perfect antidote to this kind of film, and the perfect embodiment of what it could be if it had a brain in its head. And it features the most awesome motorway sequence ever filmed.

Why this hasn't been rushed out on BluRay in R1 is beyond me.

What a magnificent film this is! A visual feast of course, but just as much for how it's filmed as what it's depicting. Like nothing else I can remember having seen, it gives a real, palatable sense of the shape and trajectory of the earth, in more ways than one.

In that case, you'll definitely want to track down Where the Condors Fly to see just how these shots and situations were set up (talk about herding cats!) and to bask in Kossakovsky's adorably neurotic demeanour. It's not a great film by any means, but it sheds a lot of light on its parent feature.

Any idea where I might be able to track it down?

None whatsoever!

What the hell is wrong with Ron Fricke? I'm here masochistically watching Baraka which is as beautifully awful as his work with on the Qatsi films when this shit with the chicks comes up. At this point it's absolutely absurd to be shooting a film making him not only a hypocrite, but a genuinely horrible human being. You don't photograph that sort of thing, you try to get whatever that place is shit down. It's disgusting and wrong that he shot even one frame there.

Can you explain what you're talking about? I haven't seen Baraka, and I don't want to seek it out so I know why it's hateful.

There's a scene about an hour in where Fricke is attempting to say that humans our herding themselves or something stupid like that where he cuts between people and a factory of some sort. In the factory is baby chickens on a conveyor belt where they get poured on top of each other and generally handled like packages for mail. At the point where I shut off the film the individual chicks where being lifted up and burned on their beaks by a piece of metal. They are clearly in a lot of pain and while the horrible music covers over the diegetic sound it is pretty clear they are hollering in pain. One even tries to escape. It is far too grotesque for me and I don't even have troubles watching stuff like Cannibal Holocaust.

knives wrote:There's a scene about an hour in where Fricke is attempting to say that humans our herding themselves or something stupid like that where he cuts between people and a factory of some sort. In the factory is baby chickens on a conveyor belt where they get poured on top of each other and generally handled like packages for mail. At the point where I shut off the film the individual chicks where being lifted up and burned on their beaks by a piece of metal. They are clearly in a lot of pain and while the horrible music covers over the diegetic sound it is pretty clear they are hollering in pain. One even tries to escape. It is far too grotesque for me and I don't even have troubles watching stuff like Cannibal Holocaust.

Knives, those are pretty common practises for preparing chickens to become food. It's widespread. What exactly are you blaming the filmmakers for?

Out of curiosity- is it the fact that such things happen that bothers you, that they're being shown to the viewer, or the way they're being aesthetisized? Like, have you seen Franju's Blood of the Beasts, and did it seem wrong to present that?

I wasn't bothered by Franju, but I don't think he was smirkingly browbeating the audience in the way Fricke was though. Franju seems to be actively grappling with the inhumane actions he is photographing, but Fricke seems to be just passing the buck onto the audience. I'm more angry that his outrage is, within the context of the film, used for a stupid metaphor to beat the audience with rather than doing anything active against such inhumane treatment. At that level of interaction things go beyond metaphor, yet the film smirks in self satisfaction all the same. The entire premise breaks when Fricke is unwilling to do anything to help the earth is is so grumpily shaming the audience for. It's like he's saying, "do what I say, not what I do."

So it's sort of the equivalent of cutting from like an OWS protest to atrocity footage, where the implied analogy and the use of powerful and emotionally involving material is offensive?

Yeah, Fricke seems entirely disinterested in what is happening to these chicks beyond some vague hippie commentary on the state of man. For forty minutes he's been so above it all and to cut so dastardly with the chick footage strikes me as very wrong. At the point where animals are being tortured on screen a stupid metaphor about the assembly line nature of urban environments is not appropriate.

That's different from what you said originally, which was "You don't photograph that sort of thing, you try to get whatever that place is shit down. It's disgusting and wrong that he shot even one frame there."

Seems you were just plain upset the footage was shot in the first place.

That was mostly emotional writing, but I do believe that it was wrong of him to shoot even a frame of footage there for the purpose he did. If it was for a PSA or really anything that directly interacted with what was happening I'd be fine, but between the attitude of the film and the cavalier take on the footage I found it in the context of the film to be extremely bad.

I've never seen the film, but fair enough.

Fair to you too, that first post of mine was rather a mess.

I can confirm that the soldering of newborn chick's beaks is a fairly common practice in US factory farms, though I wasn't aware of footage of it existing anywhere outside of The Animals Film (it's been stolen by other documentarians more than once, and agribusiness owners aren't eager to let it be filmed again after the outrage that it caused in the early 80s). It's done to prevent the chickens from killing each other when they're trying to establish a pecking order in a large pen of a hundred plus chickens. The other option on factory farms isn't much better: battery cages. The birds get to keep their beaks, but they're kept in cages that are literally smaller than their fully grown bodies and thus cannot move in any significant way (they're also constantly shit on by the bird above them).

Knives, there is a way to do something about it though. Stop eating chicken. In lieu of that, become aware of where your chicken comes from. I can guarantee that any fast food chicken that you purchase was raised in one of these two ways (except Chipotle, God bless 'em). With grocery stores and restaurants its more of a crap shoot. Your best bet at buying humanely raised chicken is at a local farmer's market. It's been my experience (though living in college communities may have warped it) that most of the small operations farmers are very open and honest about the methods that they raise their poultry in.

Well I wasn't talking about myself, for the record I generally buy open range duck, but rather the hypocrisy in showing the footage as it is shown in the movie.

Just a reminder: Meat is Murder

er, carry on ...

It kind of reminds me of Fricke's comment in the Samsara interviews that these kinds of image based documentaries "eat up" imagery faster than normal ones. I'd say yes with the added problem that they end up skimming the surface of their superficially impactful images too much, often leaving the viewer powerless in how to react to what they are seeing.

In Samsara, Fricke does a very similar sequence with chickens too, though no beak soldering. It is the other end of the chicken's life cycle as older animals this time get hovered up for processing by a big machine with rotating spokes (a little like the death machine from Caligula!), then cuts from there to the carcasses being conveyored out onto a factory floor above the heads of workers jammed together (like the animals in their cages! Symbolism!), and from there to a wider factory farming sequence of cows and pigs, before moving into the 'condemnatory' section involving First World shoppers loading up shopping carts with entire carcasses of meat (including a fast motion sequence of about twenty individual huge packages of meat being put onto the checkout conveyor belt! Because that happens...somewhere!) and a jaw dropping slow push in onto the three plump clients of a fast food restaurant tucking into their meal. And from there into the wobbly obese stomach being marked up for liposuction!

In the interviews on the disc Fricke says that he found it very difficult to get permissions to film inside the meat processing factories for Samsara but because most of the film was created employing 'local experts' from each area, they were able to cajole the producers that way. I seem to remember that Fricke also says that the difficulties with permissions is the main reason why the factory farming sequences mostly take place in Asian factories rather than anything particularly ideological. But of course he doesn't play down that perhaps unintentional issue at all!

Capturing The Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003) & Raw Deal: A Question of Consent (Billy Corben, 2001)

A pair of extremely harrowing and difficult to watch documentary films but ones which I thought managed to succeed in the way they tackled their subject matter. Capturing The Friedmans deals with a father who gets caught in a child pornography sting operation, with the subsequent investigation suggesting that the computer clubs he ran in his house for a number of years with the help of his youngest son was a front for abusing boys. Both father and son face long prison terms with the documentary following the events of the trial mostly through the home video footage shot by another of the family's sons during this period.

It is quite a gruelling watch at points and while the film raises some very interesting and pertinent points about the wider justice system (especially the way that, facing guilty sentences for multiple (in the dozens) accusations of child abuse, that the accused may possibly feel it necessary to plead guilty to try and escape that fate, which of course only complicates matters even further; or the way that once one boy says that he has been abused in a computer class that obviously means the other hundred boys are repressing their memories of the same, and it becomes kind of a ghastly 'club' that every family in the community has to have a member involved in so as to remain part of the shared grief), the focus remains almost entirely on the family as it self destructs into bitter recriminations. Strangely with the obviously guilty, at least of possession of child pornography, father at the centre of all the troubles remaining the passive silent centre of all of the anger, as the sons focus most of their anger onto their unsympathetic mother (A mother who seems to be using this revelation as an attempt to escape the stiflingly repressive clutches of her family life).

Interestingly none of the home movie footage as presented in the film ever really shows the sons (or mother) questioning their father, as if they all know that doing that will go into territory that none of them want to face relating to his paedophilic urges. This is something that makes the inclusion of the home movie footage both interesting (in the sense that it shows a very early, pre-digital camera, example of a family who cannot stop filming themselves, and using that act of filming as a kind of therapy tool or even a barrier to having to experience events firsthand) and kind of unnecessarily voyeuristic as very few insights arise from seeing the fights in the family over the trial, as the family members aren't coming to terms with what is going on themselves, instead retreating into attacks on their mother or little comic skits to try and not think about things. The film talks later on in the trial of the father abandoning his youngest son to his fate, but you can see that kind of abdication of responsibility throughout the earlier stages of the film too, as the father who should at the very least be being honest about his part in the events that have ripped the family apart remains the somewhat passive, silent centre of all this, observing his family as they tear each other apart in search of blame that they do not wish to place on him.

Instead of any confrontation of the father it is far easier to focus on the more obviously innocent younger son who was kind of caught up in the maelstrom of horror surrounding the discovery of the father's magazines. The film leaves open whether the son, or even the father, were involved in computer club shenanigans or not as the film does a good job in suggesting that the computer club abuse cases were a kind of product of mass hysteria and cajoling of the children involved into making particular statements (and it is suggested that the father admitting his guilt in the face of damning testimony combined with possessing pornographic material wasn't just a, very problematic, way of trying to cut his son free from his actions which backfired, but also a way of the father admitting to his own paedophilic urges that he may have had but not acted upon, yet still felt the need to be punished for holding), and instead takes the more interesting route of looking into whether if faced with overwhelming pressure to admit to something you can maintain your innocence against all odds and the weight of the law, or try and cut some kind of a compromise deal which might reduce your sentence but also irredeemably sullies you by admitting to a crime. Here we get the youngest son in the final moments of the home video being grilled by one of his other brothers (in the way that we never see the father being grilled) about whether these allegations are true, whether anything really did happen, and so on, and maintaining his innocence. Then we cut to the televised courtroom session (itself another questionable issue surrounding intrusive filming that this film lightly raises) of the son bluntly admitting his guilt to all of the crimes he has been accused of.

It is quite a devastating film that in some strange ways is less about the alleged crimes and the trial surrounding them (though it is a devastating indictment of the way that the legal system simultaneously overcomplicates and makes more crude the issues surrounding a case in order to be able to deal with it) but about whether people have a right to a private life and even their memories of their private lives (as in the youngest son's seeming revelation about being abused by his father, along with an allegation of his father abusing his own brother as a child, which the man when interviewed is adamant that he does not recall), or if they give all that up once being accused of a crime, particularly one as emotive and horrific as these. Do you have the right as an individual person to say that you don't have memories of being abused if you simply don't have them, or do you face incredible pressure to make it up so that some 'explanation' or 'mitigation' might be found?

While I am on this subject I also want to highly recommend Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, a film from 2001 that deals with a case of alleged rape of a stripper in a dorm room after an overintoxicated party. This is also a harrowing, yet jaw dropping film that in a strange way is very similar to Capturing The Friedmans in the sense that a video recording of the entire night is at the centrepiece of the documentary.

It starts as a classically made documentary about a stripper who gets hired for a frat party and the events of the night that end with an allegation of violent rape. Which gets even more complicated when the upsetting videotapes showing the events of the night turn up and only add to the distressing ambiguity of the events in which the audience is left to decide whether what they are seeing is just extremely rough, almost S&M-like sex or a horrible all-night rape. Does the woman being on top, albeit held by the windpipe by a guy much bigger than her, mean she was in control of the encounter? Does aggressive sex talk really mean a blunt "No?", especially when it is only seeming to be heightening the man's pleasure in the encounter? What responsibility does the guy who was sat in the room all night observing and filming the action have? In what horrible sense are both of the participants aware of and 'performing' for the camera? (It does also spark off into different interesting sub-directions, such as the way that some of the boys involved who could also bear some culpability use their social connections to get away scot free, while the central accused man is built up into a single older, blue collar, brutish low-class thug as a consequence, similar to the way that the woman gets grilled over whether she is lying about being raped because of her job as a stripper; and the way that the university for obvious reasons wanted to downplay the events, all whilst still remaining intently focused on its central subject of the fateful night)

I think in some ways Raw Deal is the better film as it better shows how an intimate private encounter ends up spreading out and infecting all corners of the community it takes place in (Capturing The Friedmans, apart from the violent encounter with one of the fathers of the abused boys, remains very insular), and leaves the viewer with a sense that some of the worst cruelties come about through simply not thinking of the feelings of anyone else, just using others to achieve short term goals.

knives wrote:There's a scene about an hour in where Fricke is attempting to say that humans our herding themselves or something stupid like that where he cuts between people and a factory of some sort. In the factory is baby chickens on a conveyor belt where they get poured on top of each other and generally handled like packages for mail. At the point where I shut off the film the individual chicks where being lifted up and burned on their beaks by a piece of metal. They are clearly in a lot of pain and while the horrible music covers over the diegetic sound it is pretty clear they are hollering in pain. One even tries to escape. It is far too grotesque for me and I don't even have troubles watching stuff like Cannibal Holocaust.

That sequence was when I gave up on Baraka as well, but not because the content was offensive (it's horrible, but there's much, much worse documented in much, much better films) but because the thinking was. That facile metaphor (people riding the underground are, like, totally like chickens being processed for food, maaan) was completely asinine and exposed just what a rhetorical shell game the whole film is. There are few things in this world worse than being lectured by a complete idiot, but being lectured by a complete idiot who thinks he's exceedingly clever is top of that list.

That's better phrasing than what I was doing, but my complaint is how facile his arguments are and how they go into hypocrisy. Unfortunately his other two films I have on reserve on my library so I'll have to (try to) watch them or else be fined.

Saw Vivan las Antipodas! recently and quite agree its an incredible film. I don't have much more to add to what's been said, but highly encourage others to go check it out.