ATLFF'15: What I'm Excited About (Part I)

The 39th Atlanta Film Festival kicked off tonight with the overwhelmingly overcrowded and (possibly) overhyped opening night presentation of Justin Kelly’s I Am Michael, the true story of gay activist-turned-Christian pastor Michael Glatze. Star and producer James Franco unfortunately couldn’t make it, due to “unforeseen circumstances,” but the film was received amongst predominantly positive buzz, and I dare call the first day of the festival a success—but maybe that’s just Happy Hour talking (5 p.m. every night at the Highland Inn Ballroom for anyone interested).

So what else has people excited about this Georgia peach of a celebration of filmmakers and filmlovers? From a record number of 3,761 submissions from over 100 countries, the organizers have chosen the strongest and most radical lineup of narrative, documentary and experimental feature-length and short films, and what awaits audiences and guests at the Plaza and 7 Stages Theatres, the Woodruff Arts Center and the Rialto is indeed an interesting roster of screenings, events, panels, workshops, discussions, and experiences.

In the order they’re scheduled, here are the movies that I’m most looking forward to this weekend:

The Sideways Light (Saturday 3/21 9:30 p.m. upstairs at the Plaza)

This atmospheric indie thriller from first-time writer-director Jennifer Harlow follows a young woman named Lily (Lindsay Burdges) who cares for her ailing mother (Annalee Jefferies) when she starts to notice strange occurrences in the house her family has owned for generations. The daughter is haunted by memories as the mother starts losing hers the question raised is whether or not there’s anything else haunting them as well or if every odd incident is just a byproduct of the older woman’s unraveling mind.

Bazin and Cinematic Realism(s)

“The faithful reproduction of reality is not art. We are constantly told that it consists in selection and interpretation….That it why up to now the ‘realist’ trends in cinema, as in other arts, consisted simply in introducing a greater measure of reality into the work: but this additional measure of reality was still only an effective way of serving an abstract purpose, whether dramatic, moral, or ideological…. Realism subordinates what it borrows from reality to its transcendent needs. Neorealism knows only immanence. It is from appearance only, the simple appearance of beings and of the world, that it knows how to deduce the ideas that it unearths. It is a phenomenology”

– Andre Bazin, “Vittorio De Sica: Metteur en Scene” (64-65)

In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Andre Bazin points out the indexical nature of the cinema, the objective character of photography which provides it with a quality of credibility absent in the other arts. We are forced to accept the reality of the object presented, or “re-presented,” by the camera because the image it creates, like a fingerprint of reality, “shares, by virtue of the process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model” (13-14, emphasis in original). Bazin’s essay ends, however, on a note that seems to contradict most of what has come before: “On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language.” If we are to understand that film is not only indexical, but, like language, then, also symbolic, constructed through an arbitrary connection to the object represented, how can we speak of cinematic realism,  “an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image” (“The Myth of Total Cinema” 20)? In order to answer that question, we must first distinguish between the different types of realism that Bazin discusses.

City Lights (1931) Analysis

The Tramp, wearing tails, drives around in a Rolls Royce.  He spots a man smoking a cigar and patiently follows in the car until he drops the butt. The character jumps out of the Rolls, fights off an old, ragged bum who had himself bent over to pick up the cigar butt, grabs it, sticks it into his mouth, leaps back into his Rolls and drives away smoking; the assaulted bum looks on in stunned silence. This little comic bit, one of the countless memorable scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) is more than just a funny sight gag; it is a glimpse into a way of life and into the underlying metaphor of many of the filmmaker’s works. The sequence underscores much of what the great artist’s career was built on: the contrast of wealth and poverty, surface riches and actual need, appearance and essence. What the Tramp needed was never financial success—he was destined, from the time of Chaplin’s Essanay shorts, to fail at attaining material rewards. What the character wanted was of a more spiritual nature: love and acceptance into “proper” society. Most of the time, he was doomed to fail at attaining that as well.

Read my analysis of Chaplin's The Circus here.

Dismantling Narrative Conventions and the American Dream in "A Cool Million" and "The Big Lebowski"

Nathanael West and Joel and Ethan Coen have never been known for playing it straight. A Cool Million, subtitled The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, and The Big Lebowski can be read as satires, if not parodies, of the American Dream of success. Their denial of coherence and lack of narrative discipline, deemed post-modern, their refusal to be constrained by the imperatives of conventional narrative and formal purity can be related to the way these works challenge the assumption that achievement is desirable and possible through hard work. Another connection between the novel and the movie is in the main characters’ embodiment of the Jewish folk character of the ‘schlemiel’—the clumsy, inept, charismatic character that stumbles from one situation to the next, pushed around by circumstances that are not of his own making. In following characters that are not in charge of their own destiny through convoluted plots that are ultimately absurd and somewhat incoherent, Nathanael West and the Coen brothers challenge not only narrative and stylistic conventions, but the conventional ideas of progress and improvement through work.