Critic's Notebook

Gazing West with 'Sweetgrass'

There will probably never be a theatrical release for a film by James Benning, the Southern California-based filmmaker who recently made one of his frequent Bay Area visits for a four-night series of works presented by San Francisco Cinematheque. Benning’s landscape-focused movies often consist of very long stationary shots (sometimes as long as ten minutes each) sans commentary, interviews, explanatory text, or any sound save live found ones. They’re extraordinary, if a little too “pure” for the average moviegoer—even most arthouse habitues.

Amazingly, however, the marital filmmaking team of Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor have managed not only to score theatrical distribution but also make something of a splash with Sweetgrass, a new documentary opening this weekend that is almost as hypnotically austere in style and content as the films in Benning’s oeuvre.

topics: bay area, directors, documentary, environmental films, women filmmakers, world cinema

Report

Thoughts on the aughts: best/worst trends of the year and decade

A decade as odd as this one, with George Bush and Barack Obama as its bookends, deserves to be examined. While the U.S. moved from rebuilding decimated skyscrapers to the rebuilding of an entire economy, film moved from the multiplex to the mailbox to the cell phone. But did the pictures really get small? We tried to find out by surveying Bay Area film-industry professionals as well as everyday fans on the trends that moved them. We found love for animation and hate for the ascendancy of the first-person narrator-star in documentary films. We saw pleas for more collaboration and less ego. We encountered disdain for CGI and hope for independent exhibitors and filmmakers. The comments below were selected from many we received; needless to say, we couldn’t publish everything. If you feel we missed anything in particular, we encourage you to issue a few opinions of your own in the "comments" box at story’s end.

topics: activism, actors, animation, bay area, cinephiles, critics, critics year end polls, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary film, drama, environmental films, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, tv, world cinema, youth

Platform

Joe Berlinger on the impact of "Crude"

From upstate New York to Arkansas to the Bay Area and far beyond it, Joe Berlinger’s films, many with co-director Bruce Sinofsky, have been fascinating, cinema verite-style entertainments. Though they’ve investigated crimes big and small, paved the way for new reads of verdicts and, surprisingly enough in the case of the two Paradise Lost films, built movements, the films have never been prosecutorial in style or didactic in nature. They are primarily curious about relationships, misdeeds and the bizarre trappings of very specific subcultures. They don’t default to talking heads, statistics, graphics or the essay format, yet they’ve solved some of the gnarliest puzzles imaginable. Berlinger’s latest, Crude, could be seen as departure, given its antagonist is Chevron, and it does include a seated interview or two. But its power comes from its measured to approach to all sides. Its primary target is a surprise—in that it implicates American culture as a whole for remaining ignorant of moral crimes being committed elsewhere. As Berlinger prepared for a trip west, to speak on a panel curated by San Francisco Film Society Saturday, September 26, at the Lumiere (more on Slippery Slopes: A Forum About Crude and the Investigative Functions of Film, below), SF360 spoke with him about the drama before, during and after the creation of Crude.

topics: activism, directors, distribution, diy, documentary, environmental films, independent film, latin american cinema

Platform

Franny Armstrong's S.O.S. to the world

Franny Armstrong is a force of nature. Boundlessly energetic and impassioned about something most people only joke about—saving humankind—Armstrong gained a strong following at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where she’s screened two films. Her latest, The Age of Stupid, tackles the effects of climate change, and offers a plea to all who will listen: Change your ways. The plea goes public in a massive way this coming Monday, when The Age of Stupid makes its debut to the world, screening from a tent in New York, to 115,000 people in 400 movie theaters across the country. The evening features 40 live minutes with Kofi Annan, Gillian Anderson, Mary Robinson, Armstrong herself, the star of the film Pete Postlethwaite, and other leading thinkers, celebrities and political figures from around the world. Audiences will hear from scientists working in the Himalayas and Indonesian rainforest via live satellite link and from a group of children speaking from the very room in Copenhagen in which all our futures will be decided at the UN climate summit in December. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke will wrap up the evening with a short acoustic performance. Armstrong allowed us to conduct an interview with her via internet chat.

topics: activism, bay area, directors, diy, environmental films, music, political film, public, san francisco international film festival, women filmmakers, world cinema

In Production

"Opal" lures Dina Ciraulo back in time

Dina Ciraulo’s debut feature reconsiders the curious case of nature writer Opal Whiteley, who burst to prominence—and controversy—in the 1920s. Setting a narrative in an earlier time, of course, complicates matters from a budget and logistics standpoint. “It’s one of those things that everyone tells you not to do,” Ciraulo admits, with a wry chuckle. “I was just so motivated by the story that I didn’t feel inhibited by the notion of doing a period piece. I was thinking of doing something on Super 8, I wanted to do something really low-budget—kind of like a punk rock period piece—and I was inspired by the work of Guy Maddin. I didn’t think about all the ways that a period film could be difficult, because I wasn’t trying to do a Merchant-Ivory, every-last-detail-in-its-place type of film. I wanted to suggest period without having to exhaustively recreate it.”

topics: african american cinema, bay area, directors, diy, environmental films, experimental film, funding

Report

Swedish muckrakers enlist local help

The Swedish filmmakers of the hot-button documentary Bananas! have retained Los Angeles attorney Lincoln Bandlow of Lathrop and Gage, a specialist in First Amendment cases, to defend them in a defamation suit brought by Dole Food Company, according to the filmmaker’s Oakland attorney Richard J. Lee, of Lee and Lawless. Director-producer Frederik Gertten and producer Margarete Jangard’s film, which screened twice in June in the Los Angeles Film Festival, documents a lawsuit filed in that city by Nicaraguan banana plantation workers accusing the multinational food company of hiding the risks of Nemagon, a pesticide known as DBCP that causes sterility in humans. Dole’s contention is that the film defames the company.

topics: bay area, documentary, environmental films, independent film, legal issues, political film

Found

SFIFF52: Planet Armstrong

Franny Armstrong is a fast talker. That is, if the breathless clip at which she answered questions after Sunday’s San Francisco International Film Festival screening of her climate-change film, The Age of Stupid, is any indication. Then again, the British documentarian (McLibel, Drowned Out) has some pressing information to convey. And as her film makes plain, and as she engagingly reiterated during the Q&A—where she used audience questions as starting points for rattled-off anecdotes, wry asides, and pleas for the involvement of everyone sitting in the theater—there isn’t much time left.

topics: british cinema, documentary, environmental films, filmmakers, independent film, san francisco international film festival