- by Rahul Chadha, April 29, 2011
Stranger Than Fiction co-presented the film Cinema Komunisto at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.
Viewers of Mila Turajlic’s film Cinema Komunisto might be surprised to learn that Yugoslavia’s state-run Avala Film Studios was not dedicated solely to enlarging the cult of personality surrounding Joseph Broz Tito, although it certainly did not shrink from that task. Relying on copious amounts of research and a trove of archival material, Truajlic’s film shows us Comrade Tito the cinephile—one who watched a film almost every day, and transformed his Yugoslavia into a prolific locus of filmmaking, for both artistic and propagandistic purposes. The heart of the film lies in the scenes bearing Tito’s personal projectionist, Leka Konstantinovic. In a powerful moment, Konstantinovic is shown arriving at Tito’s old estate in Belgrade for the first time in decades, where he ceremoniously hands over his key to the property to its current caretaker, who receives the gift with relative indifference. From the front, the house, though lacking a door, appears to be relatively intact. It’s only when Konstantinovic goes inside that he, and the viewer, discover that the projected reality of the edifice’s facade masks a hollowed out shell of little substance. Following the screening, Turajlic held a Q&A with the audience. Click “Read more” below.
[Photo courtesy of Cinema Komunisto]
Question: Could you talk about what inspired you to make this film?
Mila Turajlic: I initially was going to make a very small film about film studios. I went there for the first time in 1999 during the NATO bombing and it was kind of an eerie time in Belgrade generally. I had been to film school and no one had ever told us about them, that they were still there in this hill above Belgrade, that they were still employed there, that all of the costumes, props and sets were there, and they hadn’t made a film in 20 years. I was so inspired by the place that I just wanted to document it before it disappears. The film studios are still government property, and they’re going to be sold very soon. In fact, two weeks ago there was a press conference where the people at Avala pleaded with the government not to sell them—the real estate is very valuable. There was no answer from the government. We’ve actually started a petition, we’re going to try to preserve it before they throw everything away. There’s absolutely no awareness in Serbia that there’s something worth preserving as our cultural history. When I started looking for archives of the studios I began to realize that you could actually tell the whole story of Yugoslavia playing with this metaphor of a fictional country, of living in an illusion. That’s when I realized it was a good way to help people understand how the country came to be and how it collapsed in the end.
Q: I was surprised by how many funny, oddball moments there were. Did that surprise you?
Turajlic: There were several surprises when I was making it. In Yugoslavia, everybody knows Tito is a film lover. But it took me one year to get access to his personal archives, when I went in there and discovered that he had copies of scripts and that he had written notes on them. And he had received telegrams from actors. That’s when I realized that it was more than that he just loved film, this man directed the story of our country. Quite literally, he is the master illusionist behind the reality we were living in. That’s when I began to realize that he has to be an element of the story. I didn’t know about his projectionist. In fact, his projectionist had never given an interview, and it took me a long time to persuade him. Really taking him back to Tito’s residence I realized he’s going to be the heart of the film. The bizarreness and the comedy of the stuff, a lot of that came from looking through the archive and then in the editing room, because it was just so highly entertaining. “Nema Problema,” this is how they did things.
Q: Can you talk about how you found the films that you included?
Turajlic: Making this film took a little more than four years. There were two really hard elements to doing it. One was finding the archive. It’s very ironic because the main archive of Yugoslav newsreels—during the NATO bombing one of the bombs fell in the Yugoslav museum of history in the room where the index cards were kept. So they have the archive but they don’t know what they have. Some one would tell me a story and then I would figure out when it might have happened, and then I would go to them and say, could I just look at everything you have from that month or year. If they didn’t have it there, I’d ask them to go into the vault and look at the unused material from the newsreels. It took a long time—things would get flooded, disappear, then reappear because they were moving boxes around. They’d call me and say they just found the sound archive of Hitchcock.
It was a blessing that I had time because I could always go back. They said I was the biggest file in terms of someone who kept coming back—I’m kind of an archive junkie. Then I went to Croatia, then Slovenia, then Bosnia. Much of the archive is in a way orphaned material because no one really inherited the rights to it. It was made by something called the United Yugoslav Producers.
Then the other part was when we came up with the device of telling the history of Yugoslavia from feature films, because that’s the whole play of the film. How was the story told in fiction? But I didn’t realize that it was really hard to find old films. Of the 750 films made in Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1989, I managed to track down 320, and that was after two years of searching. There are some really intense film collectors in Serbia who have lists, but they won’t show you their lists until you show them yours. They won’t give you film unless you have something to swap that they don’t have.
I was driving all over the country trying to persuade these guys that I wasn’t a collector, I just needed the stuff for a film. But it worked out. Then I watched the 320 films, then as I was watching them I would write down a time code of things that I thought were interesting, that portrayed the reality of the country. I would enter them into a database, so in the end we had something like 1,300 clips. So we would say, let’s make a montage of funny deaths in partisan films, and we would type in “funny deaths” and get 40 or 50 clips to play with. That made it a little easier to go through the material.
Q: Can you tell us about how the film was received in Belgrade?
Turajlic: Tito’s a very contentious topic in Belgrade. Tito’s Yugoslavia is an undebated issue in Serbia today. We were kind of nervous about how this would play, and it ended up being more spectacular than anyone imagined. We had our premiere in the biggest theater in the Balkans, it was 3,5000 seats and it was full. Some of the characters were there—Tito’s projectionist didn’t live to see the film. In a way I blame myself because I didn’t want him to see it at home, I wanted to give him this premiere where he was onstage and could get the recognition for being such an amazing character. He died three months before the premiere, so he never got to see it.
But it opened a huge debate in the press, not just about Tito and Yugoslavia, but this whole question of, was Yugoslav cinema in the service of an illusion? The most spectacular thing that happened is that the next day we were contacted by multiplex theaters, and they said this has to go in cinemas. So we became the first documentary in Serbia to go in multiplex cinemas, which was completely unexpected. It proved that the time is ripe for a discussion of these things. Particularly in the 90s during Milosevic and then the 10 years that followed, Yugoslavia was kind of shoved under the carpet as something embarrassing in our past that we shouldn’t talk about, because how were we ever such idiots to be part of this story. Now, slowly they’ve started discussing again the nature of the country and what he had been for Yugoslavia.
Q: The Battle of Netva, do people still watch that film a lot? Is that why the blown-up bridge is such a big tourist attraction?
Turajlic: The film wasn’t really watched for about 20 years, and then two or three years ago it was shown on every national television station. In Croatia, it was the highest ratings for any show they’ve shown on Croatian television. There is a huge interest in this now, but for the last 20 years there wasn’t. There’s kind of been a rebirth in interest in the partisans and the Second World War and Tito.
Q: Did you encounter any difficulties in getting people to participate in the film?
Turajlic: To be honest, with one exception, every one of the characters said no when I first approached them. It was a long process to explain to them that I was not going to leave, and that I was going to keep coming back. I would look in the archive and when I would find something interesting I would go and show it to them. Slowly they began to realize I was really dedicated and they began to talk, it took a long time to get their participation. When we traveled around, people wanted to talk about Yugoslav cinema. Yugoslav films, particularly these big epics, schoolchildren are taken to see these films. Almost everyone knows someone who was an extra in these films. They were a part of the national heritage, so everyone has something they want to tell you. They really are part of our collective consciousness.
- by Rahul Chadha, April 28, 2011
Stranger Than Fiction co-presented the film Bombay Beach at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.
The U.S. government doesn’t even consider Bombay Beach a city, instead describing it as a census-designated place (with the population in 2000 recorded at a scant 366 people) comprised of one square mile of land in the California desert that hugs the eastern shore of the Salton Sea, a rift lake whose salinity now exceeds that of the ocean. Once touted as a vacation destination for Southern California’s well-heeled, the area today scans like the physical manifestation of the death of the American Dream. Alma Har’el’s film Bombay Beach is an intimate portrait of those living in this impoverished afterworld, who strive mightily for survival at society’s margins. In some of its most powerful scenes, the film shows the children of a post-apocalyptic landscape wandering the salt-encrusted detritus of a middle-class existence that no longer exists, appropriating from abandoned houses whatever they can to aid their amusement. The film is a needed reminder that poverty in America takes on a number of forms, and is too often ignored as a topic of discussion in mainstream media outlets. Perhaps it’s the sort of story that be best relayed with clear eyes by someone like the Israel-born Har’el, someone with some objective distance on the myths of America. Following the screening, Har’el and the film’s music composer Zach Condon (who performs under the band name Beirut) held a Q&A with the audience. Click “Read more” below.
[Photo: From left, director Alma Har’el, film subject Benny and musician Zach Condon, courtesy of Simon Luethi]
Question: How long were you shooting?
Alma Har’el: I moved there for about five months two summers ago, and we shot a lot of stuff. Over a year I would come back while we were editing and kind of fall on stories, film the dances, hang out, go to the beach, eat ice cream and wait for it to unfold. It was an intense period where I found the characters and the story because I didn’t come there with something, and then just following it for a while. The whole thing was probably a year and a half.
Q: How did you come across that community and area?
Har’el: It was this guy here [gestures to Condon]. I was actually doing a music video for Zach, which is what I usually do with my time. He went to Coachella to perform and we were in the middle of the video and didn’t know how to finish it. So I said, let’s go there and we’ll do a kind of back story as if you’re from the desert. But then he ended up being busy and doing press and drinking and hungover in the morning. I woke up alone in the desert and decided to do a location scout, and that’s how I met these guys [gestures to film subjects Pamela and Benny]. A friend of mine said, hey you’ve got to check out this place, it’s really cool and I think you’re going to like it. When I came there, Benny was with his brother Mike hanging out at the beach. I said, hey do you maybe want to be in a music video? Benny wasn’t in the music video, Mike was in the music video, because Benny was a little too wild. When we finished the video I really felt that I wanted to come back there and do a whole movie about that place and keep working with Zach’s music because it all felt so good. For a while, I had the idea of doing a documentary film with dance sequences in it. So it just felt like the right time and place to do it.
Q: Is this Benny’s first time in New York?
Har’el: It is. It’s his first time outside of Bombay.
Pamela: I’m very excited to be here. I can’t wait to check out some of the sites. I’m just so excited, it’s so different from where we’re from. But I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent here, it’s really amazing. We’re having a great time.
Q: I was very disconcerted to see how much medication Benny is on. Who monitors that? How’s he doing on those meds, and how’s he doing in school?
Har’el: Unfortunately, the way it goes over there is that the doctors don’t think it’s really necessary to have therapy with the medication, so they just kind of try to put on a lot more medication in order to get the results they’re hoping to get. Pamela’s definitely been trying to get more answers, ever since we started working on the film and talking about it. There’s definitely more awareness. I know that when he’s in New York, when there’s more to do and more to look at it’s actually easier. So he’s actually not on medication today, right? It’s a matter of time, I think. I can only expose Pamela to things and see what she can do because it’s very hard out there to get any help. I can tell you that Benny learned how to read this year, and he was student of the month.
Q: The music was so perfectly matched to the scenes. Did you have the music in mind, and then match it to the footage? Or did the footage speak to you and lead you to the music?
Har’el: I don’t want to sound corny, but I always have Zach in mind. So I obviously went there and had the music in mind. Then we did the video and Zach has been the main person that I’ve worked with since I came to America from Israel, and I’m very inspired by his music and thought it would fit very well. What we did was kind of a process. He gave me a lot of splits of songs of his—parts of different instruments—so I could kind of use them. Why don’t you tell them what we did afterwards?
Zach Condon: We met up in New Mexico where I was staying for a few months and with a laptop and microphone laid out the rest of the soundtrack within a week actually. Part of it was recorded in my parents’ bedroom in Santa Fe. She definitely had songs in mind that I’d already written. The rest of it, once we got to New Mexico was a quick one-microphone, one-laptop setup, and that was that.
Har’el: There were two things, I think, that he wrote for it, and things were tweaked. It was a combination of things, but I think there’s a chemistry between his music and the mood that was there naturally.
Q: Did you ask people to dance?
Har’el: Oh, I asked them. I urged them to dance. We had a choreographer, she did an amazing job. It was a different process. The dance that we did with Benny, for instance, where the two girls bug him quite a lot, we constructed the dance, we worked with him. We asked him to do all of the things he does that other kids think are annoying, or that he does when he’s fighting with them, or at home and being too wild. We built the dance out of that and taught it to the other kids and tried to create something that was exploring what was going on with the kids. Then we rehearsed it for two days at the community center in Bombay Beach and proceeded to shoot it. That was a few months after the scene, so the scene was shot spontaneously. After that I would just come back and ask Pamela to find the damn clothes that they wore on the day. Then we would shoot it to look like it came out of that scene, but it wasn’t really shot on the same day.
Q: What’s happened with the football player?
Har’el: He got a full scholarship, and he’s leaving Bombay Beach in a week to go to college, and he’s the first kid in his family to go to college. So that was a good ending.
- by Rahul Chadha, April 27, 2011
Written by STF blogger Deena Ecker
These Amazing Shadows is a movie for, about and by people who love movies. The National Film Registry was created by Congress in 1989 for the purpose of protecting and preserving important American films, those considered culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. Directors Paul Marino and Kurt Norton take us through a journey with these films that weave the American story. The films preseved by the Registry are not just the big movies that appear on most lists. While Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane and The Godfather are on the list, these movies and others like them do not show us a complete picture of America. These Amazing Shadows takes us through the list in a way that demonstrates what culturally, historically and aesthetically significant means to the members of the National Film Preservation Board. Is The Rocky Horror Picture Show worthy of an Oscar? No. Is it a significant part of American culture? Yes. Will ducking and covering protect you from an atomic bomb? No. Are the films telling us it will an important piece of history? Yes. Censored films, films by women in the 1910’s, propaganda, commercials, newsreels: all these aspects of film are represented on the list and addressed in this captivating documentary. Following the screening, STF Artistic Director Thom Powers spoke with Director/Producers Kurt Norton and Paul Marino and National Film Preservation Board member Dan Streible. Click “Read more” below.
[Photo: from left, Kurt Norton and Paul Marino, courtesy of Simon Luethi]
STF: How did you get into the making of These Amazing Shadows?
Paul Marino: In December of 2007 I read about the National Film Registry in CineFiles. The statistic we mentioned in the film that 50% of films before 1950 and 80-90% of all silent films are gone struck me. I then called Kurt and that was the beginning.
Audience: The clips in the movie are pristine. How did you get them to look so good?
Kurt Norton: Our editor Alex Calleros sourced the materials mostly from DVDs. We were able to use the clips under the Fair Use laws. If it weren’t for the Fair Use the film would have been prohibitively expensive.
Audience: The films that are chosen each year are very eclectic. Is there ever any concern by the Board that there would be too many films from one director?
Marino: Yes and also too many of one actor. Librarian of Congress James Billington is very responsive to expanding the breadth of films to have the National Film Registry represent all of American cinema.
Norton: Frank Capra is the director with the most films on the list. That includes the Why We Fight series he made for the military in World War II. John Ford has nine on the list. Women directors are underrepresented on the list.
Dan Streible: There should be more women directors represented but there are already many women included.
Audience: How many films are on the Registry? How did you decide which ones to use?
Marino: There are 550 films on the Registry. It was our choice which ones we used. We wanted to have certain sections and make certain points and we used films that helped us with that.
Norton: There were certain important films we wanted to use. When we did the interviews we found people were talking about the same films again and again. We thought that Dr. Strangelove would be featured but people didn’t really talk about it too much.
Audience: Are there any films not on the list you would like to see put on?
Marino: Two for the Road with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney directed by Stanley Donen. It’s a great film about marriage.
Norton: The Times of Harvey Milk and The Guns of Navarone.
Audience: Dr. Strangelove is not an American film. Is the National Film Registry exclusively American? Did you compare it with the registries of other countries like France and Australia?
Marino: We wanted to focus on the National Film Registry and the danger the films were in, the ephemeral of film and the fragility of film.
Norton: Members of the board tell us that the rules state that the films have to be American but we looked at the rules and there is nothing that states that.
Streible: Legislation specifies American but there are debates about it. The nature of the funding makes us lean toward American films since the American people are paying for it. Just going back to The Times of Harvey Milk, every year the board recommends it but the Librarian has the final say and he always keeps it off.
You can follow These Amazing Shadows on Twitter at AmazingShadows.
[Q&A has been condensed and edited]
Related Film/Screening:
THESE AMAZING SHADOWS by Paul Mariano, Kurt Norton
- by Thom Powers, April 21, 2011
Written by STF blogger Cameron Carnegie
Like a photograph that accidentally captures something historical, the members of the Kartemquin Films collaborative who made The Chicago Maternity Center Story initially sought to bring to light the plight of women who would be affected by the 1974 closing of the maternity center. An affiliate of Northwestern University, the center offered a low cost, midwife-attended home-birth. But a deeper reality was that the center gave the women and their children a chance to live.
In the 1970s, minority women seemed to understand that having a baby in a Chicago hospital meant they were four times more likely to “die” in childbirth, and that their babies were two times as likely to die as their white counterparts. The film’s gentle voice-over delivers that bone-chilling reality with a calm detachment. The camera, unknown as a potential adversary at the time, communicates without mistake the hospital board members’ disregard for the fragile existence of the women.
None of the board members had the slightest concern for the women, who, without a $50 midwife option, had only a $600 local or $1200 private hospital delivery available to them. Advocating for themselves in front of the board, the women never mention the statistics. But as the film evolves it catches the moment—the exact heartbeat—when health became business first, and patient-care second.
The Chicago Maternity Center supporters starkly contrast the board members who are primarily men, old and white. In a lingering video snapshot, the administrators’ callousness leaps off the screen. Smirks and eye-rolling eventually come back to haunt board members lacking the media savvy to restrain their contempt. With every dismissive gesture captured, the disdain for the women is recorded. There, for posterity to view, administrators would learn their lesson—although too late for the center.
The Chicago Maternity Center Story is a black and white snapshot that today shows us that our healthcare system hasn’t come that far. That system is still driven by profit, and not our best interests.
This film illustrates the media-suppressed reality that giving birth at home is actually desirable. The environment has fewer germs and lacks many of the compromising variables and motives that exist in a hospital. The film includes footage of a young black woman giving birth at home with a midwife from the center in attendance. It shows a difficult birth (not for the faint hearted) that is actually rendered almost commonplace by the skill of the veteran midwife. The breech is merely a fact to be dealt with not a cause for panic. The young woman is lucid and calm once the birth of her healthy baby boy is over.
With the challenge of his birth overcome, the audience learns during Q&A he only lived 17 years in the neighborhood that wouldn’t qualify as upper-class. His mother, proud to have been a part of the film could only say, according to the filmmakers, “I was glad to have him as long as I did.”
Following the screening, STF moderated a Q&A with Kartemquin filmmakers Gordon Quinn and Suzanne Davenport, and film subject Laura Newman.
[Photo: Gordon Quinn, courtesy of Simon Luethi]
Question: What was your motive in making the film?
Gordon Quinn:We wanted to make films that would help change society. [Quinn went on to make the highly regarded “Hoop Dreams” documentary.]
Suzanne Davenport: I was at Columbia and Jenny Rohrer and I were going to made a film for coursework. Originally we hoped to make it to save the center. But by the time we were done – it took us one year to shoot and four to edit - it was closed. When I had my own baby unexpectedly at home, the words from the film’s midwife saying, “Just let the body do its work,” came to mind and I was suddenly at peace.
Q: What are your feelings watching the movie now?
Laura Newman: I lived in Chicago at the time and now I live in New York. Sometimes I feel like I’m going back to 1954 in this country with women’s reproductive rights. The maternity center had such a rich history. Then you saw the beginning of big medicine which meant the demise of the Women’s Maternity Center.
Related Film/Screening:
THE CHICAGO MATERNITY CENTER STORY by Jerry Blumenthal, Suzanne Davenport, Sharon Karp, Gordon Quinn, Jennifer Rohrer
- by Thom Powers, April 21, 2011
I write with shock and sadness over yesterday’s deaths of Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington in Libya. In February, Tim showed his short film DIARY at STF and gave a thoughtful discussion afterward. We met only a few times, so others can testify to his career better than me. But I knew Chris for many years and want to add a few thoughts.
The New York Times Lens blog has published a tribute that does a fine job of getting Chris’ attributes, the way he defied the cliches of war reporting as a person. He was level-headed, neither cynical nor indulgently romantic about his profession. He took a long view of history as the son of European immigrants who had memories of WWII. He was very good with words which you can hear in his NPR interview or read in his articles. Those pieces were often written for small publications or blogs, less for career advancement than for the urge to contribute as an eyewitness. Chris had earned the security of employment at Getty Images, but he took great pleasure in side projects like setting images to music for small performances.
He was my favorite dinner companion, possessing a rare perspective on what’s happening in the world, but also a good listener. He was quick-witted. He liked teaching. He took interest in other people’s work. One of his last Facebook messages was to congratulate colleagues who had won awards.
He didn’t have the self-destructive bent that characterizes some war reporters. He could plan ahead. We were plotting an event in Toronto this June to show his Tahrir Square photos. He was going to get married in August. Outsiders might consider his whole profession foolhardy. But I think he considered it a privilege, albeit a dangerous one. He told an interviewer, “you see humanity at its worst, but to me it’s balanced by the fact that you also see humanity at its best. I’ve seen such examples of courage and human generosity.”
The urge to make sense of his death risks its own cliches of grandiosity. If Chris had a choice of where to die, I’m sure he wouldn’t have picked Misurata - a place so remote that newspapers can’t even agree on its spelling. While it may be obscure to us, for others it’s home where hundreds of Libyans have been killed in recent weeks. Chris, Tim and their colleagues were attempting to tell that story. Perhaps we don’t like the story - it doesn’t contain the right heroes or feel destined for a happy ending. But, still, there are lives at stake of people who are as dear to their families as Chris was to me. Why wouldn’t that be a story worth telling?
If you pressed Chris about the danger of his job, he’d point out that no one gets to pick where he dies. Or when. So just hunker down, do your best work and try to leave something of lasting value. That’s what he did.
by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray
by Woody Allen
by Lisa Katzman
by Thom Zimny
by Leon Gast
by Carl Colby
by Ashley Sabin and David Redmon 
