Black Film & Video Vlog

2009-11-12T19:40:00.001+03:00

Tribeca All Access Call For Submissions

Tribeca All Access (TAA) is a year round networking and career development program of the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) that supports the work of filmmakers from traditionally under-represented communities within the industry by providing access to industry representatives looking for new projects in development. Approximately 20 qualified directors and screenwriters will be selected to participate in one-on-one meetings with key industry players in addition to networking and learning from dedicated panels and comprehensive workshops during the Tribeca Film Festival. Program alumni receive year-round support through TAA OnTrack, which includes educational panels and workshops; TFI hosted presentation screenings; promotional support for completed films; and the use of digital filmmaking and editing equipment.

Tribeca All Access is open to both mid-career and emerging narrative and documentary filmmakers. Applicants are required to apply with a completed feature-length screenplay, documentary proposal, or documentary work-in-progress and must have at least one screenwriter or director attached who qualifies. Projects may be of any subject matter, genre, or budget range suited for independent or major studio production.

The program is now a recognized talent pool within the industry and an unrivaled opportunity to advance your filmmaking career.

Apply Now! Deadline is Monday, December 14, 2009.

Visit www.tribecafilminstitute.org/taa/ for complete details and upcoming events.

2009-01-31T15:40:00.000+03:00

2009-01-25T17:50:00.000+03:00

January 25, 2009

Film

Examining Race and a Future Beyond It

By DENNIS LIM for the New York Times.

“MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY,” an independent feature by the first-time writer-director Barry Jenkins, opens the morning after a one-night stand. Micah and Jo, who don’t yet know each other’s names, are young and black, and for want of a more descriptive term you might call them hipsters. In San Francisco, where the African-American population is less than 7 percent and where “black indie kids” (to use Mr. Jenkins’s term) are scarce, that gives their hookup added significance — at least for Micah. As he puts it to Jo, “You ever realize just how few of us there really are?”

For Mr. Jenkins, who is African-American, the question resounds within the context not just of Bay Area indie culture but also of American indie filmmaking, which is not exactly a bastion of diversity.

Like so many movies about 20-something urbanites, “Medicine for Melancholy,” which had its premiere at South by Southwest last year and opens in New York on Friday, concerns the search for self-definition. But it stands apart for its forthright attention to the push-pull of inclusion and exclusion that comes with being a minority member of a subculture.

Mr. Jenkins, 29, drew on his own experience as a recent transplant to San Francisco. Born and raised in Miami, he studied filmmaking at Florida State University, then worked at Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions in Los Angeles. But he grew disillusioned with the industry, and he quit his job to travel the country. He met a woman from San Francisco and moved there to be with her. The end of that relationship, and the period of introspection that followed, led him to make “Medicine for Melancholy” (which is up for three Spirit Awards this year, including best first feature).

“As a person of color from the South, San Francisco was the first city that really made me feel like an other,” Mr. Jenkins said over breakfast in Brooklyn recently. Because he was in an interracial romance when he got there, he added, “I was almost buffered.”

“When that relationship was off,” he said, “it was like I was seeing the city for the first time.”

“Medicine for Melancholy” follows Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo (Tracey Heggins) for a 24-hour period as they feel out each other’s quirks and hang-ups. Mr. Jenkins credits “Friday Night,” the 2002 French film about a brief encounter by one of his favorite directors, Claire Denis, as an inspiration. As a literal date movie, trained on an attractive couple playing out a talky mating ritual as they wander a photogenic city, “Medicine” also recalls Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset.”

The characters keep circling back to questions of race and assimilation, but the film is less an identity-politics polemic than a credible portrait of a young man wrestling with those issues — a situation Mr. Jenkins found himself in not long ago.

He acknowledged that it was odd to experience a racial epiphany in, of all places, liberal San Francisco. But this is also a city where the African-American population is proportionally less than half of what it was in 1970 (the most visible emblem of the black exodus being the razing and redevelopment of the Fillmore district).

Mr. Jenkins’s ambivalence about San Francisco comes across in his film’s visual pallet . The digital-video images, so desaturated they border on monochromatic, have a romantic softness, and San Francisco looks even lovelier than it tends to in more expensive movies. But Mr. Jenkins also liked the idea of “reflecting the theme of a city with the color taken out.”

In making a film so attuned to its physical and psychic environment, Mr. Jenkins joins the ranks of regionalist indie directors whose movies are anchored in a powerful sense of place. “Medicine for Melancholy” does for San Francisco what Kelly Reichardt has done for the rural Pacific Northwest (in “Old Joy”), Lance Hammer for the Mississippi Delta (“Ballast”), Robinson Devor for the Seattle area (“Police Beat”) and Ramin Bahrani for the unseen pockets of New York City (“Chop Shop”).

“It’s absolutely rooted in its milieu, but it’s by no means a parochial film,” said Graham Leggat, the executive director of the San Francisco Film Society. Referring to Mr. Jenkins’s somewhat critical portrait of the city, he said: “It’s not a problematic film for San Francisco. It’s a film made in the spirit of how the city would like to think of itself, as a progressive place where people are fairly oppositional.”

Mr. Leggat noted that while the Bay Area has long been home to a robust enclave of documentary and experimental filmmakers, “there’s not really a vigorous narrative-filmmaking middle class.” The film society has expanded its activities to include production assistance and is committing funds to spur the growth of local filmmaking. But for now, Mr. Leggat said, “there’s not a critical mass of folks who can make a livelihood just working in the business.”

Mr. Jenkins can attest to that. He saves on rent by living with the parents of his cinematographer, James Laxton, an old friend. Through the production of the film he worked as a shipment supervisor at Banana Republic. He made “Medicine” with a bare-bones crew, on a budget that is, even by D.I.Y. standards, small change. (His official answer when people press him for numbers: “Probably less than the cost of your car.”)

Mr. Jenkins wrote the film nearly two years ago — “before Obamania took off,” he said — and race has since moved to the forefront of the national conversation. But instead of toying with vague notions of a “postracial” America, “Medicine” wonders what it would mean to look beyond race, when race still looms large in matters of cultural identity and social justice.

“Micah comes across as pro-black, and Jo’s is more of a post-race point of view,” Mr. Jenkins said. “When I started the film I was teetering between these two viewpoints. It’s like I was splitting my personality in two.”

Making the movie has helped clarify his thinking. “For me the film ended up being even more about class than race,” he said. “Micah talks about the city pushing black people out, but it’s really about pushing poor people out.” With a wry smile, he added: “I used to be obsessed with race. I’m more obsessed with class now.”

2009-01-24T23:58:00.001+03:00

MAN IN POLYESTER SUIT
written & directed by Ed DuRante

2009-01-23T02:09:00.002+03:00

BLACK DYNAMITE

New film sends up '70s `blaxploitation' classics

January 22, 2009

by Peter Howell

PARK CITY, Utah–Can you dig it?

On the day when the U.S. made history by inaugurating its first African-American president, it was a surreal experience at the Sundance Film Festival to watch Black Dynamite, a movie that gleefully rocks every black stereotype imaginable.

That's the whole point of it. Black Dynamite, which sold for $2 million (U.S.) to Sony Pictures following its huge reception here and which is due in theatres this summer, is in its own perverse way every bit as empowering as Barack Obama's rise to glory. A sequel is already planned.

Directed by Scott Sanders, it lovingly riffs on the "blaxploitation" movie genre of the 1970s; low-budget actioners where black anti-heroes with names like John Shaft and Foxy Brown busted crime in the ghetto, all while flipping the bird to "whitey" and "The Man."

It's more than just a straight send-up. No one winks at the camera, except in one scene when a boom mike strays into the picture.

Black Dynamite is a celebration of how much fun blaxploitation movies were, just as Austin Powers makes light of James Bond. You have to feel good about yourself if you're willing to mock yourself.

It opens with a fake ad for malt liquor called Anaconda ("When you pop the top, the panties drop") and goes on to bust every pimp-strolling move you've ever seen.

The title figure actually goes by the name Black Dynamite, played with fearsome authority and expert comic timing by Michael Jai White, who is also the co-screenwriter with Sanders and Byron Minns.

Black Dynamite, former CIA agent, is a complicated man no one understands – except every woman he casts his soulful eyes upon.

BD carries a gun longer than Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum, and that's not all he's packing. He can make sweet love to three women at once and do martial arts moves that impress even Fiendish Dr. Wu (Roger Yuan), one of many villains he crosses.

He leaves a trail of bodies in his wake, but that's life, brotha: "Sometimes to do the right thing, you've got to do the ugly thing."

BD is on the trail of the suckas who killed his younger brother. He also uncovers a plot to shrink the genitals of black men, to make them feel subservient to the white man once again. But that's never gonna happen in the era of Obama and Black Dynamite, is it? Damn right.

2009-01-11T02:18:00.002+03:00

January 11, 2009

New York Times

Black Directors Look Beyond Their Niche

By GENE SEYMOUR

IT’S been 10 years since Spike Lee, entrepreneur, provocateur and role model for aspiring directors of color, declared in The New York Times that it was an era of unprecedented possibility for African-American filmmakers. At the tail end of the 1990s there was plenty of evidence backing Mr. Lee’s optimism.

Beginning in 1991, a year that had impressive debuts from disparate black directors like John Singleton (“Boyz N the Hood”), Carl Franklin (“One False Move”) and Julie Dash (“Daughters of the Dust”), it seemed as though each successive year yielded promising starts from African-American talents: Albert and Allen Hughes ( “Menace 2 Society,” 1993), Darnell Martin (“I Like it Like That,” 1994), F. Gary Gray (“Friday,” 1995), Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou,” 1997) and Malcolm D. Lee (“The Best Man,” 1999).Varying degrees of critical acclaim and, most important, financial success came in the wake of these films, solidifying Hollywood’s consciousness of a lucrative African-American audience for films while promising a sweeping, solid and diversified presence of African-American talent in cinema for years to come.

But at the close of yet another decade, the promise still awaits fulfillment. Though some of the aforementioned directors have met or exceeded most of the critical expectations shown in their debuts, they have had mixed-to-sporadic success in getting their subsequent projects into theaters.

“All those people have done stunning, brilliant work,” said Warrington Hudlin, a producer (“House Party”) and co-founder of the Black Filmmaker Foundation. “But the appetite for and expectations of what sells for black filmmakers remains very narrow. It’s always been about what sells, which is as true for mainstream movies as it is for African-American movies.”

You could now literally count on one hand (using two fingers) the number of black directors who can get their projects made and distributed at a steady rate. One is Mr. Lee, whose 19th theatrical feature, the World War II story “Miracle at St. Anna” was released last fall, while the other is Tyler Perry, the Atlanta-based, one-man multimedia conglomerate whose latest blend of low comedy and moral uplift, “Madea Goes to Jail,” is set for release on Feb. 20.

Momentum for African-American cinema, it would seem, has been curtailed or at least stalled in part by studio executives’ preconceptions that black films are “niche product” with limited appeal. Yet at the same time black directors and producers still express optimism that they not only can continue to cultivate their black audiences but also can reach out further and wider to the mainstream, especially when contemplating Will Smith’s all-but-unchallenged supremacy as a box-office draw throughout the world as well as the impact of Barack Obama’s impending presidency.

Ms. Martin’s career trajectory in some ways reflects the erratic fortunes of the African-American filmmaker. Her smart, sexy romantic comedy, “I Like It Like That” won the 1994 New York Film Critics Circle award for best first film. And “Cadillac Records,” her musical history of Chess Records, the rhythm-and-blues label, was released last month to respectable reviews and box-office returns. But the intervening years were dominated by television work and one very frustrating film experience, “Prison Song,” which never went past the audience-testing stage in 2001.

Ms. Martin places much of the blame for her sporadic career in the feature-film business on the conflicts she had over the promotion of “I Like It Like That.” “They insisted on making me the poster child for the film, the ‘female Spike Lee,’ and I said, ‘Look, I don’t mind that. I’m proud to be a black woman director, and I want that out there.’ But we’d gotten some great reviews, and I felt that was what they should be leading with. If it had been a white director, they would have emphasized the reviews, but instead they were trying to get people to see it only because I was black.

“So I fought pretty hard over that. Actually it was more like a head-on collision. And I was told, ‘If you continue like this, you will never work again.’ And I thought, ‘That’s O.K., I paid off my student loans, what’re they going to take away from me?’ So I was getting known for being someone you couldn’t control.”

She also held on to a stubborn selectivity. “I was offered a lot of things that were about women of color, but I didn’t know yet how to make those things good. It was easier for me, at the time, to make things like, say, the pilot for ‘Oz,’ where the harder things were those that seemed like a more obvious fit, like ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God,’ ” she said, referring to her 2005 made-for-TV adaptation of the Zora Neale Hurston novel. “Loved the book, but it had been a challenge for me to make this inner story work.”

The one movie she was involved in during the 14-year break — “Prison Song,” a “hip-hop opera” with the rapper Q-Tip in 2001 — ended badly too, once again, in her view, a victim of pigeonholing.

Its fate was sealed, Ms. Martin recalls, when it was tested for audiences at the Magic Johnson Theaters in Los Angeles, which draws predominantly black audiences. “I told the studio, ‘If you test it there, it will go no further because it is an art film.’ Sure enough, the audiences didn’t get it; the movie never made it to wider distribution.”

The years of exile from the feature-film world, however, have had their benefits. The television work, Ms. Martin said, sharpened her directing chops and helped her mature. Life itself intervened too, helping her play the industry game. “Being a mother, I know now there are ways you can fight for things and get your way without being so overt about it.”

Life intervened as well for Gina Prince-Bythewood, who first achieved fame in 2000 with the romantic comedy “Love & Basketball” but did not direct another movie until 2008, “The Secret Life of Bees,” based on Sue Monk Kidd’s coming-of-age novel in which a white girl bonds with a trio of beekeeping African-American sisters in the 1960s.

“I had two boys, so that took some time, and then I helped produce my husband’s film,” she said, referring to the screenwriter Reggie Rock Bythewood’s 2003 film, “Biker Boyz.” “And I developed two different projects that didn’t go through, one of which was the adaptation of the Wally Lamb book, ‘I Know This Much Is True,’ and that was a shock when that didn’t come about.”

But some self-imposed pressures also weighed on Ms. Prince-Bythewood. Though the critical acclaim and box-office success of “Love & Basketball” brought many scripts her way, “you still felt that as a black director, you had to prove yourself even harder, no matter what people were saying about this great renaissance of black film.”

She is slightly more optimistic now in the afterglow of the success of “The Secret Life of Bees,” Which earned nearly $40 million. Except for Tyler Perry’s last, “The Family That Preys,” no film directed by an African-American has performed better at the box office in the past year.

“I’m getting scripts, probably not as many as you think,” she said. “But I’m now focused on writing and rewriting something that I was working on before ‘Secret Life of Bees’ came my way two years ago, and I know now that I can get my script read by everybody, and the doors will be opened wider.”

For that Ms. Prince-Bythewood can thank the true African-American powerbroker in the film world, one more powerful than Mr. Perry or Mr. Lee: a onetime rap-music performer and television sitcom star named Will Smith. He, along with his wife, the actress Jada-Pinkett Smith, and his African-American producing partner, James Lassiter, produced “The Secret Life of Bees.”

“Will Smith has already made a huge difference, and he’s really just begun,” said Bob Berney, a movie production and marketing analyst who once headed Picturehouse, the now-defunct independent film distributor (and consultant for “Cadillac Records”). “He now has the clout to green-light whatever he wants to make, and he has the power to pick and choose whomever he wants to direct.”

Though the success of movies like “The Secret Life of Bees” perpetually makes black filmmakers more hopeful about their prospects, African-American films still have barriers to break. “The biggest,” Mr. Berney said, “is outside the U.S. where the perception remains within the industry that the international audience for African-American product is close to zero. And yet when you consider the global popularity of hip-hop culture and by extension, black culture, you have to wonder whether this perception comes from outmoded thinking from international buyers who aren’t in tune with today’s audience.”

There are also those who wonder whether the paradigm for success for African-Americans in film has changed to the point where the very notion of “black-oriented product” needs revising.

“Twenty, even 10 years ago, the only way you could see actors like Denzel Washington or Cuba Gooding or even Will Smith was in an African-American movie,” said Zola Mashariki, senior vice-president for production at Fox Searchlight, which distributed “The Secret Life of Bees.” “Now you find that almost every mainstream movie has a black presence, whether in a big-budget action movie or even a comedy geared towards mass audiences.

“So to some extent, that’s a foregone conclusion. What this means for movies whose core target audience is black is that we have to give them something that they’re not getting in the mainstream, which are stories that reflect back their own direct experience, and I think that’s something Tyler Perry has done. This doesn’t mean you’re not hoping for some crossover success. You always want that. But you don’t want that core audience to feel left out, that the movie’s not speaking to their own lives.”

The “Obama factor” could have an impact too.

“I don’t think it means there’s necessarily going to be this flood of black films,” Ms. Prince-Bythewood said. “But I think it will help retrain audiences to be more open to different kinds of black experience. The fact that the most prominent family in America over the next four years will be a black family will help broaden the perception among nonblack audiences that they’re just like them in many cases. And this can only help in terms of crossover, which is something that needs to happen to take African-American film to the next step.”

Yet Ms. Prince-Bythewood and other black directors still temper such utopian thoughts. In hard times like these, struggling to transcend conventional boundaries can be a color-blind struggle. “You could get caught up by racism in Hollywood and everywhere else,” said Lee Daniels, a producer of “Monster’s Ball” and whose adaptation of Sapphire’s novel, “Push,” about the struggles of a Harlem teenager for self-respect, will have its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this month. “But it’s as difficult for me as it is for white independent filmmakers to get stuff made. So it’s not about black or white, and the minute you wrap yourself up in these concepts, you’ve put yourself out of the running. I just look for material that’s truthful, and I have to believe that if I can identify with it, the audience will too.”

2009-01-09T01:32:00.000+03:00

I AM SEAN BELL, black boys speak from Stacey Muhammad on Vimeo.

2007-01-16T01:58:00.000+03:00

January 14, 2007

A Return to Rage, Played Out in Black and White

By CELIA McGEE

HISTORY seemed summoned to one of its spotlight moments on March 24, 1964, when Amiri Baraka’s “Dutchman” had its premiere at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York. He was little known outside the studied bohemian precincts of the Greenwich Village poetry scene; but this short, brutal play about the fatal confrontation between a black man and a white woman on a subway made him famous, respected and despised. Edward Albee was among the three producers. It won an Obie. He was called “King of the East Village” by The New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine. At the time, though, he hadn’t yet changed his name to Amiri Baraka from LeRoi Jones.

The actress Cicely Tyson was in the audience on opening night. “I remember her yelling, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ ” said Mr. Baraka’s former wife, the poet and writer Hettie Jones.

Howard Taubman, wrote in The New York Times: “If this is the way the Negroes really feel about the white world around them, there’s more rancor buried in the breasts of colored conformists than anyone can imagine. If this is the way even one Negro feels, there is ample cause for guilt as well as alarm, and for a hastening of change.”

Now the Cherry Lane is preparing once again to showcase a new production of this play, directed by Bill Duke and starring Dulé Hill (familiar from his television work in “The West Wing” and “Psych”) and Jennifer Mudge. Yet mounting “Dutchman” today is not without hurdles: the play runs the risk of seeming artistically out of date and musty in its views, and Mr. Baraka’s writings during his Black Nationalist period, which were at times racist and anti-Semitic, may once more come in for scrutiny.

“Dutchman” was a pivotal play not only at a particular juncture in 20th-century American culture but also in Mr. Baraka’s increasingly politicized career. The original run coincided with the escalation of the civil rights movement. The play’s sudden emergence on the scene helped expose ambiguities in American race relations that would shortly erupt in angry upheavals in cities nationwide, while establishing Mr. Baraka, to both good and occasionally harmful and intolerant effect, in African-American writing.

Today some critics view him as a marginal figure. “I don’t think his literary standing is very high,” said the cultural critic Stanley Crouch. “For the last at least 40 years he’s been more interested in writing propaganda than in writing literature. As a young man he seemed to be a unique talent, and there was an open sky before him. But then he was overwhelmed by the Black Nationalism of the day, then evolved into a Marxist, which he still is.

“If he had gone in a different direction, LeRoi Jones could have been more like Saul Bellow, but with his own style and perspective. If a writer goes into politics, he should maintain his independence. He should perceive what the human complexities behind events are.”

To Glenda Carpio, an assistant professor of African and African-American studies and English and American literature at Harvard, “Dutchman” is a historical if significant curiosity. “I teach a course on contemporary African-American literature,” she said, “and I start with Baraka. People are trying to figure out what his legacy is. A playwright like Suzan-Lori Parks comes out of him, as a negative response to what he’s done. He’s dated in many, many ways — the sensualist blackness ‘Dutchman’ performs, the misogyny a lot of his stuff has — but there’s also dialogue that is just outside of time.”

As the third installment in the Cherry Lane’s Heritage Series (revivals of works that had their debuts there), “Dutchman” arrives trailing controversies past and present. Mr. Baraka’s 9/11 poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” which suggested foreknowledge of the attack on the part of Israel, among others, cost him his position as poet laureate of New Jersey in 2003. Close behind was his strongly worded opposition to Cory Booker, Newark’s new mayor, whom Mr. Baraka’s son, Ras, an at-large council member, also opposed. (Ras Baraka lost his Municipal Council seat in June.)

But Angelina Fiordellisi, the theater’s artistic director, welcomes the baggage. “New Yorkers love controversy,” she said. “It could really enhance the play.”

Seated at the book-stacked round table on the winterized reading porch of his home in Newark, a house he and his second wife, the poet Amina Baraka, moved into in 1970, Mr. Baraka, 72, argued that the play was not only relevant but also topical. Around the Cherry Lane the talk is of Sean Bell, the young man killed in a hail of 50 police bullets outside a Queens nightclub on Nov. 25.

“Any black person that doesn’t wince from hearing that,” Mr. Baraka said, “is completely alienated from his black persona, or is already dead.”

Though he has long since forsaken the militant nationalism and Black Arts aesthetic he turned to following the 1965 murder of Malcolm X, when he also staged “Dutchman” in Harlem, he remains largely unreconstructed in his political views. “The civil rights movement,” he said, “has just provided more opportunities for prostitution.”

James King, the Cherry Lane’s managing director, is a generation younger than Mr. Baraka. Yet he agrees that the play will speak to “the idea that there’s still an undercurrent of tension to race relations.”

“So many of us who, especially as black males, have succeeded in getting ahead in our fields have made adjustments in certain ways, including how we appear, how we sound, how we learn to ‘play the game,’ ” he continued.

Mr. Duke said he was transforming the theater into a “total environment” for the play. It was 1969, Mr. Baraka said, when “I first encountered Bill Duke, when my play ‘Slave Ship’ was done at BAM. We did a similar thing — the whole theater became the ship.”

He diverges more from Mr. Duke when it comes to the interpretation of Lula, the seductive white beauty whose mere presence onstage with Clay, an intellectual young black man, was considered shocking at the time. Mr. Duke sees her as having been in a relationship with someone Clay reminds her of.

That relationship “has broken everything in her, it’s irreparable,” Mr. Duke said. “She thought if she loved him enough it would be all right. It’s primal. But she’s dealing with the vomit of slavery, the Middle Passage, the slave block and the auction and lynchings,” and events “where they roasted us on spits.”

Mr. Baraka, on the other hand, still tends toward his old vision. “I saw her as a metaphor for America,” he said. “She represented temptation and seduction, but also death, if not of the flesh then of the spirit.”

A number of Newark schools have asked about bringing their students to “Dutchman.”

“There’s so much apathy among youth today about what the arts can achieve that it will be interesting to see whether a play that fueled the belief that art can make a difference will wake them up,” Ms. Carpio said.

As for Mr. Baraka, he said it was important to him that young audiences experience the play. He brought up one particular memory of his own youth, which he also addressed in “The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones.” “I went on a school trip to the Bronx Zoo when I was in about eighth grade,” he said. “I really loved the elephant house. But when I asked the keeper why it smelled so bad, he said, ‘I’m used to it — I live in Harlem.’ Here I’m in my 70s, and I still remember.”

Mr. Baraka said that analyses and conspiracy theories he found online were what led to his poem about the World Trade Center attacks, and its most notorious line, “Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers/To stay home that day?”

He insisted that these reflect not anti-Semitism but a condemnation of Zionism, along with all other forms of “authoritarian” nationalism. “To accuse me of being anti-Semitic,” he said, referring primarily to statements about the poem issued by the Anti-Defamation League, “is the same way some Negroes will use the race card. Israel is a foreign state and it warned the U.S. about the attacks. Why wouldn’t it warn its own citizens? Look at the nationalities of the World Trade Center tenants who died, and do the math.”

Only months before he wrote the poem, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A photograph of the induction ceremony hangs prominently above his bookshelves.

To Ms. Fiordellisi, the stature Mr. Baraka attained in that picture is undiminished, and she endorses both the verses and any foreshadowing of their ideas found in “Dutchman.” “The poem is very powerful,” she said.

Mr. Baraka looked up at the photograph. “There are a couple of black folks in that picture,” he said. “Only a couple.”

But readers haven’t heard the last of Mr. Baraka. Largely out of print in recent years, he just published “Tales of the Out and Gone,” a new collection of short stories reaching back to the ’70s. His publisher is Akashic Books, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, headed by Johnny Temple, the bassist for the rock band Girls Against Boys. Extra chairs had to be added for a Barnes & Noble audience in Manhattan — a mix of ages, ethnicities and sex — that showed up for a reading early last month. (Mr. Baraka, however, ended up stranded in traffic on the far side of the Lincoln Tunnel on the way to the event at the Astor Place store, and it has been rescheduled for Tuesday.) Several titles are coming from other publishers, Mr. Baraka said.

Mr. Baraka said he still writes in his upstairs office every day. He is most eager to revamp a musical about the black underworld boss Bumpy Johnson that he wrote with Max Roach, the jazz drummer and composer. “Now that’d be something — a gangster musical,” Mr. Baraka said. “A black gangster musical.”

2007-01-25T20:57:00.000+03:00

Oscars reflect newfound diversity

Frequently dubbed as too-white, Academy Awards feature most diverse group of nominees ever

By Chris Kaltenbach
Sun Movie Critic

January 24 2007

An African-American actor nominated for his portrayal of a Ugandan madman. A best-picture category that includes a movie filmed in Berber, Arabic, Spanish and Japanese (and another shot almost exclusively in Japanese). A Mexican director whose work could win seven awards.

After frequently being dubbed too-white and too-clubby, the Oscars this year enthusiastically embraced diversity: The list of nominees for the 79th Academy Awards, announced yesterday, is the most diverse in its history. Favorites in three of the four acting categories are African-American. Three of the year's most nominated films are the work of Mexican directors. Of the 20 acting nominations, eight were given to actors who are either black, Asian or who hail from Spanish-speaking countries. And, in another form of diversity, three of the five nominees in the best-actress category - including the favorites - are over 50.

"Having almost half the acting nominations go to minority-group members is clearly a sign of change, and an enormously welcome one," says David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics. "There have always been huge amounts of talent in these communities, but most of it was automatically passed over for far too many years."

The news yesterday morning that the most nominated film - Bill Condon's musical Dreamgirls, with eight - did not make the cut for either best picture or best director, created a flurry of buzz. But Dreamgirls' failure was quickly overshadowed by the success of other films from groups traditionally ignored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which has been handing out Oscars since 1929.

Mexican writer-director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel, a film of global interconnectedness where a tragedy in one part of the world leads to similar tragedies in another, was the second most-nominated film, with seven, including best picture. Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland), Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness), Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls), Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond) and Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls) all received acting nominations. So did Mexico's Adriana Barraza and Japan's Rinko Kikuchi (both for Babel), as well as Spain's Penelope Cruz (Volver).

Even Clint Eastwood got into the act; his Letters From Iwo Jima, which tells the story of the pivotal World War II battle not only from the Japanese point of view, but in Japanese, was among the best picture nominees. Also in the running are Martin Scorsese's drama of honor and intrigue among the Boston mob, The Departed; the dysfunctional family comedy Little Miss Sunshine (whose 10-year-old star, Abigail Breslin, is up for supporting actress); and Stephen Frears' look at Elizabeth II, struggling to understand her subjects' emotional reaction to the death of Princess Diana in The Queen.

Inarritu, Eastwood, Scorsese and Frears all were nominated for best director, along with Paul Greengrass for United 93, a chilling dramatization of the flight that crashed into a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001.

Hard to believe it was only four years ago that Halle Berry (Monster's Ball) was grabbing headlines for being the first African-American to win the best actress Oscar. She and Denzel Washington (Training Day), who was named best actor that same year, brought the total number of Oscars given to African-Americans since the first statues were awarded in 1929 to eight. The number rose to 10 two years ago, when Jamie Foxx (Ray) was named best actor and Morgan Freeman (Million Dollar Baby) won for best supporting actor.

Come Oscar night Feb. 25, that number could easily leap to 13. Whitaker is the early favorite to win for best actor, thanks to his charismatically terrifying turn as Ugandan strongman Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. The other actor nominees are Leonardo DiCaprio as a South African mercenary with a developing conscience in Blood Diamond; Ryan Gosling as an inspirational but drug-addicted teacher in Half Nelson; Peter O'Toole as a lecherous stage actor lusting after a teenager in Venus; and Will Smith as a struggling single father in The Pursuit of Happyness.

In the supporting categories, two actors from Dreamgirls - Murphy and Hudson - are near-prohibitive favorites. Both actors, along with Whitaker, were awarded Golden Globes earlier this month by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an often-reliable bellwether of Oscar gold.

"It looks like the academy is rethinking the way it looks at performances," says Donald Bogle, author of Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood. "For a long time, the Oscars have been lily-white. Now, not only do we get African-American nominees, but we get the other nominees as well."

Paul Heyde, archivist for the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University, praised yesterday's nominations as "continuing to build on the success that African-American actors have been achieving over the past several years. I'm glad to see the academy recognizing their achievement."

The academy also embraced actresses of a certain age, at least partially dispelling the notion that good movie parts do not exist for women over 40. Helen Mirren, 61, is favored for her portrayal of Elizabeth II in The Queen. Her competition includes Judi Dench, 72, as a conniving schoolteacher in Notes on a Scandal, and Meryl Streep, 57, as a fashion editor from Hades in The Devil Wears Prada. The other nominees are relative youngsters: 32-year-old Penelope Cruz, as an abused woman helped along by her dead mother in Volver, and Kate Winslet, 31, as an impetuously frisky wife and mother in Little Children.

This year's nominations list also has a distinctly south-of-the-border flavor. In addition to the best picture and best director nods for Inarritu's Babel, the film was singled out for its editing, musical score and original screenplay. It also earned supporting actress nominations for two members of its international cast: Barraza, as an immigrant Mexican nanny torn between loyalty to her boss and her family, and Kikuchi as a deaf Japanese teenager who mistakenly sees her blossoming sexuality as a way to finally communicate with the rest of the world.

The work of two other Mexican writer-directors also figures prominently in this year's competition. Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth received six nominations, including best foreign language film, while Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men earned three. Though neither earned directing nods, both were nominated for their screenplays.

"This is an unimaginable experience for me," del Toro said in a press release. "It is specially beautiful to share this moment with my dear friends Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. This is an unprecedented representation of Spanish-language filmmakers and actors."

chris.kaltenbach@baltsun.com

2007-02-06T06:59:00.000+03:00

Africa, at the Cineplex

Film Fatigue

MANOHLA DARGIS

American children used to connect with their deprived African counterparts mostly by cleaning their plates. Today, those same children have a dizzying variety of ways of reaching out to the continent and its inhabitants: they can shop at the Gap, mind Bono, listen to Kanye West, read Dave Eggers and watch an Oscar-nominated film or two, like “Blood Diamond” or “The Last King of Scotland,” and, while flipping through their favorite magazine, contemplate the AIDS awareness ad campaign in which celebrities like Richard Gere and Gwyneth Paltrow, faces daubed with paint, declare “I am African.”

Well, really, aren’t we all? The new African awareness isn’t just deeply, appreciably earnest; it’s personal, too. Angelina Jolie, the head of the new class of celebrity missionaries, not only adopted an Ethiopian girl, but has also poured money into Namibian maternity wards. The same goes for Oprah Winfrey, who founded a girls’ school in South Africa, and the rapper Jay-Z, who last year traveled the world, including parts of Africa, for “The Diary of Jay-Z: Water for Life,” a documentary. The diary was the product of a rather unusual collaboration, as signaled on a Web page for the United Nations: “The United Nations, MTV and Jay-Z team up to raise attention of the world water crisis.”

If you didn’t know about the documentary or the United Nations-initiated Water for Life campaign, you are probably not alone. The humanitarian crises in Africa are overwhelming, but they’re also now such a familiar fixture in our 24/7 news-and-entertainment spin cycle that it can be hard to keep up. Yet if the bad news out of Africa never seems to end, neither do the pop-cultural responses.

IN 1984, that response to African tragedy seemed purely seasonal, exemplified by the hit single on behalf of Ethiopian famine relief, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” For the last few years or so, every week seems to bring another documentary, another song, another ad campaign, another press conference, another celebrity sighting.

And why not? As George Clooney, a supple manipulator of the media, explained after embarking on a high-profile effort to bring attention to the Darfur region of Sudan, “If you’re going to be famous and have cameras follow you around, you might as well go where the cameras will do some good.” Last April, Mr. Clooney and his father, Nick, visited refugee camps in the Sudan, and the son subsequently joined Senators Sam Brownback and Barack Obama at a news conference where he passionately urged that greater international attention be paid to the crisis. It was a tough sell, even for the Sexiest Man Alive, who at one point also admitted that it was hard to capture people’s attention because, as he put it, “We have tragedy fatigue on television.”

I know what he means. It’s hard enough to keep track of the globe-trotting Ms. Jolie, who has done more good in the world than most of the housebound pundits who poke fun at her. My problem is that I have almost bottomed out when it comes to films about Africa. Not the real deal, like the films of the great Senegalese-born auteur Ousmane Sembène, whose 1966 drama “Black Girl” is a classic of postcolonial cinema, and whose 2004 film, “Moolaadé,” manages to tackle the issue of female genital mutilation and critique patriarchic Islam in one entertaining package (really). My problem, rather, is all those films filled with suffering, struggling black Africans who, for the most part, seem to be on camera to make me feel bad.

These faces, weeping and smiling by turns, show up in fiction and documentary films, in big-budget Hollywood fare like “Blood Diamond” and more modest studio offerings like “The Last King of Scotland.” In the old Tarzan days, of course, Johnny Weissmuller yodeled across a back-lot jungle while black extras ran amok in feathered headdress borrowed from the cowboys-and-Indians department. In that Hollywood, Africa was an extension of the studio lot (often it was the studio lot), the setting for thrilling adventures, big-game safaris and the occasional bloody conflict with native peoples. Mostly, though, Africa was the exotic backdrop for white characters, who paid about as much attention to its black populace as they did to the black populace back home.

These days, black African characters in American-produced films generally serve more than a decorative function; some of them actually speak lines and share serious screen time with the white stars. Now and again, as in “Hotel Rwanda” and “Sometimes in April,” two films from 2004 and 2005 about the Rwandan genocide, the stars themselves are actually black, if not African, and their characters help drive the narrative. In the case of the HBO film “Sometimes in April,” the director is also black, the Haitian-born Raoul Peck. In both “April” and “Hotel Rwanda,” the white characters are peripheral, just as they were during the genocide; in each, the victims and the victimizers are black, but so, too, are the heroes.

New films tend to be smarter about race if not necessarily its representation. One of the truths about the movies is that, no matter how high-minded a director or how earnest his intentions, what he puts in front of his camera usually talks louder and more honestly than anything he himself might say. The director and the screenwriter may be on the same resolute page, with nicely composed speeches about Africa, the West and how something, finally, must be done. But the black faces on the screen — the babies with the swollen bellies and pipe-cleaner limbs, and the legless men crawling alongside them — tend to tell a different story, one of hopelessness and despair that all too often feels as immutable as the earth.

This sense of immutability, that the violence and the hunger are persistent, almost eternal and natural, infects too many films about Africa. There is a long tradition of victim documentaries, films about the wretched of the earth from Welsh and Appalachian mining towns, South African shantytowns and New York City homeless shelters. By turns touristic and voyeuristic, these films habitually follow a reassuringly familiar trajectory. They evade unpleasant truths about history, power and ideology in favor of heroic stories about individual resistance and triumph that wouldn’t be out of place in a studio potboiler. As any Hollywood producer knows, real life can be a total bummer, which is why a Lost Boy of Sudan newly transplanted to America makes a better commercial bet than one who didn’t make it out of Africa.

Most American films about Africa mean well, at least those without Bruce Willis, and even openly commercial studio fare like “Blood Diamond” wears its bleeding, thudding heart on its sleeve. But what, exactly, are we meant to do with all their images, I wonder? Like “The Constant Gardener” and “Catch a Fire,” two other thrillers set in Africa, “Blood Diamond” was designed to make money, not instigate change. Watching Leonardo DiCaprio share the screen with genuine handless black Africans or Ralph Fiennes’s gardener learn a lesson in postcolonial realpolitik while I munch my popcorn doesn’t rouse me to action; it stirs horror, pity, sometimes repulsion, sentiments that linger uneasily until the action starts up again to sweep away that empathy with another explosion, gunfight or rousing chase.

It is exhausting having your conscience pricked so regularly. It may also be counterproductive to the stated aims of the people who make these films. It’s an article of faith that social-issue movies are worthwhile, important, even brave, as people in Hollywood like to insist. But it is naïve to think that these films, including a fair share of the documentaries, are being made on behalf of Africa and its people; they are made for us. They provide us a night’s entertainment and perhaps, for a couple of hours, they may make us think outside the multiplex box. They serve as balm for our media-saturated, fatigued hearts and minds. Like one of those Gap (Product) RED cashmere sweaters, they temporarily wrap us in their fuzzy goodness, shielding us from the chilling world outside.

2007-02-14T17:08:00.000+03:00

Is it just me?
I think it's a pretty telling sign that the first
film produced by Our Stories Films, the company launched by BET
founder Robert Johnson's RLJ Cos. and The Weinstein Co. and headed by
President and CEO Tracey Edmonds to produce black movies, will be
directed by
this guy:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0666806/

2007-02-17T01:26:00.000+03:00

Out of Africa

BY BRUCE BENNETT
February 16, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/48848

As co-directors and founders of the African Diaspora Film Festival, a 17-day annual exhibition of films held in New York every November, Diarah N'Daw-Spech and Reinaldo Barroso-Spech spend a substantial portion of the year on the road scouting films to program. Since inaugurating the ADFF in 1993, they have shown material selected from Cannes, the Toronto Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the BFI London Film Festival, and a score of others.

"We usually start the year with Sundance," Ms. N'Daw-Spech said.

Okay, so how did Sundance go this year? "It was a nightmare," she joked. "I saw a lot of excellent films there. I was very impressed."

The difference between Sundance the experience and Sundance the marketplace is an essential distinction for a husband and wife team that has, in less than 15 years, built the ADFF into the biggest and most influential film festival of its kind.

This weekend, BAMcinématek will host the fifth edition of "The Best of the African Diaspora Film Festival," an annual series of screenings highlighting the best-received ADFF entries shown at last year's festival. The current "Best of the ADFF" streamlines 87 entries from 30 countries into a greatest hits package of 21 films. The common link they share is that they, in the words of the festival's mission statement, "redesign the black cinema experience and strengthen the role of African and African-descent directors in contemporary world cinema."

There are perhaps 30 film festivals in America built around black filmmakers, but, Ms. N'Daw-Spech said, "This notion of ‘African-American' doesn't acknowledge the work of black people from other places." Her own roots lie in France and the West African nation of Mali. Mr. Barroso-Spech was born in Cuba to Haitian and Jamaican parents. "Because we're both American and foreign-born," Ms. N'Daw-Spech said, "there was a need to communicate, to say ‘Hey, there's not one way to be black, there's not one black experience.'"

But back to Sundance. "It's an interesting scene," Mr. Barroso-Spech said. "There were a couple of African films this year, but they were completely overlooked. They have no play in the festival, yet still the filmmakers', the producers', even the agents' expectations are so high that they have no interest in a comparatively small black film festival — until nothing happens."

Despite the occasional success story, the majority of filmmakers who screen at Sundance and other high-profile marketplace festivals return home with little more to show for their trip than a gift bag. In the thin-air and high-stakes film market, it seems as if the distinction between displaying one's creative wares in the brightest light and displaying them in the best light gets forgotten. At specifically themeand content-driven smaller festivals like the ADFF, a film's actual merits, rather than its presumed lack of commercial possibilities, can come back into focus.

In the close to 15 years the ADFF has been in existence, it's become more than what Ms. N'Daw-Spech modestly described as, "a niche festival." ADFF screenings have spawned sales and distribution deals for films that were ignored at Sundance and the prominent cinema confabs. And with a nearly full season of New York-based film festivals all competing for the best in international cinema, the ADFF has had to grow to survive.

As local film festivals like Tribeca, New Directors, and the New York Film Festival increasingly shift their programming gaze abroad to emerging or reinvigorated national cinemas outside the mainstream, the ADFF has found itself competing directly for films of merit.

"Dry Season," a revenge fable based in present-day Chad that screens in the current "Best of," claimed the Jury prize at the Venice Film Festival last year. "Everybody in NYC wanted to show that film," Ms. N'Daw-Spech said. "The only way we could get it was to buy it."

Responding to demand from other film festivals facing confused access routes to works that are literally scattered all over the globe, the ADFF now purchases and distributes many of the films it exhibits. "If people have interest in these films, then why not create the structure to make them easy and available?" Ms. N'Daw-Spech said. "Filmmakers wanted us to represent them here. We had a film from Venezuela with English subtitles, and the director told us, ‘Why don't you hold onto it. I don't need a print with English subtitles.' Other festivals would get in touch with us to see how to acquire films we'd shown, so we gradually created a distribution company."

She summed up the festival's and distribution arm's curatorial onus as an attempt to "select films that have production value and have a story that's well told — films that open a window to a different world that people aren't usually exposed to or don't get a chance to know about."

But that general, though vivid, description barely hints at the wide range of material that cooks down into the annual BAM survey. Not surprisingly, the crucial word is diversity. "We consciously shape the festival around narratives versus documentaries, English versus foreign-language films, U.S. versus Latin American and Europe," Ms. N'Daw-Spech said.

This year's documentary focus is on the African musical influence in South America. "Maria Bethania: Music Is Perfume" is a boundlessly affectionate portrait of a singer as famous in her native Brazil as her fellow Tropicale music pioneer peer, Gilberto Gil. "Sons of Benkos" and "Hands of God" document the ecstatic contemporary evolution of African rhythms in Colombia and Peru, respectively.

In addition to "Dry Season" narrative entries in BAM's "Best of" program include British-Nigerian filmmakers Ngozi Onwurah and Sharon Foster's "Shoot the Messenger" and American Tim Alexander's "Diary of a Tired Black Man," two films that challenge notions of black identity and the nature of political correctness in the black community.

On the heels of this year's Oscar buzz for Clint Eastwood's "foreign language" film "Letters From Iwo Jima" and Sundance's recognition in 2004 of "Maria Full of Grace" and this year of prize-winner "Padre Nuestro" — two Spanish-language films made by Anglophone directors — Ms. N'Daw-Spech makes a case for artistic globalization at work in the entertainment world. "It's like America wants it all," she said, before detailing her admiration for the filmmaking in "Padre Nuestro."

"You see all these international entries that are made by American filmmakers abroad. Where do emerging international filmmakers get a chance to have their voices heard?" It would appear that through the African Diaspora Film Festival, its distribution arm, and outreach efforts, where they go is Brooklyn.

Through February 21 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).

February 16, 2007 Edition > Section: Arts and Letters

2007-02-17T21:37:00.000+03:00

Today, February 17th is
Huey P. Newton's
Birthday

Huey Percy Newton was born in Monroe Louisiana on February 17, 1942 to Walter and Amelia Newton. His namesake was Huey P. Long, the former Louisiana governor and senator who had instituted various social reforms beneficial to blacks. Despite Long’s attempts at overturning the prejudicial landscape of post reconstruction South, Louisiana remained an oppressive place for blacks. As a result, two years after Huey was born the elder Newton moved his family to Oakland, California in search of a job and better living conditions. As he grew older, Huey found it hard to resist the attraction of Oakland’s seductive street life. He spent much time playing the dozens, shooting dice, and pitching pennies, as well as committing small-time crimes like stealing from parking meters.

Though the family’s move had been prompted by the search for a better life than Louisiana could offer, Oakland did not provide any respite from racism, and Huey was very aware of its rampancy. In school, white staff and students would often call blacks “niggers” and Huey was constantly in trouble because of his refusal to submit to their racist attitudes. In Newton’s autobiography entitled Revolutionary Suicide he wrote that “during those long years in the Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process they nearly killed my urge to inquire.”

Though he was arrested numerous times before he graduated high school, Newton was able to attend Merritt College, eventually earning an Associate of Arts Degree. He also attended San Francisco Law School and Oakland City College, the latter where he became interested in politics and motivated to stop the oppressive conditions of America, particularly for blacks. It was here where Newton joined with Bobby Seale to form the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966, a group based on the armed self-defense of blacks, which included patrolling the Oakland City Police and demanding justice and resources for blacks.

Like his Party, Newton himself was not without controversy, and in 1967 he was charged with the murder of a policeman. Though the charges were eventually dropped and a new trial called for, he did spend 3 years in prison, during which an extensive “Free Huey” campaign was raged for his release. He would spend time exiled in Cuba before his eventual acquittal at subsequent trials. His social consciousness remained active and in 1973, Newton published his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, and returned to school at the University of California, where in 1980 he published his dissertation, War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression In America. Despite his intellectual productivity, he continued to have run-ins with the law, being charged with, among other things, the murder of a prostitute and embezzling funds from the Party itself. The Black Panther Party had also deteriorated due to FBI infiltration and internal disputes. On August 22, 1989, Huey Newton was shot dead in Oakland, supposedly over a drug dispute.

2007-02-18T16:57:00.000+03:00

http://www.365daysofmarchingmovie.com/

2007-02-21T20:13:00.000+03:00

WELL (FAT) SUITED

Eddie Murphy is back to form in his latest multiple-character joke fest

By Armond White

Norbit

Directed by Brian Robbins

As Eddie Murphy gets carried along on the tidal wave of hype for the ghastly Dreamgirls, it’s a sanity-saving relief to have Norbit open and demonstrate what Murphy is good at. This broad comedy features Murphy in three roles: Norbit, the bewildered and bespectacled orphan who grows up into a mild-mannered adult; Rasputia, the steatapygeous shrew or (fat-assed) who intimidates Norbit into marriage; Mr. Wong, the Chinese restaurateur who adopts Norbit and becomes his adult mentor. If Murphy hadn’t already perfected doing multi-character turns in his Nutty Professor movies, Norbit would be enough to confirm his status as the most brilliant comic actor in America. (Murphy plays characters, unlike Sacha Baron Cohen’s one-note Borat which has been extravagantly compared to Peter Sellers. Murphy’s virtuosity surpasses both.)

It’s not the ethnic and gender stunts that prove Murphy’s ingenuity. He has learned (perhaps from Jerry Lewis’ example) to place his gift for mimickry in an appealing context. Norbit takes place in a fairytale setting, an All-American burg called Boiling Springs that combines the small-town settings of It’s a Wonderful Life, Back to the Future and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (the name Norbit is no doubt derived from Eddie Bracken’s Norbert) for a spoof on American gentility which Murphy then integrates with explosive caricatures. It’s a democratizing impulse, less hostile than the Wayans Brothers’ satire Little Man but not far from that underappreciated film’s skepticism about American complaisance. Both Norbit and Little Man express how black comics self-consciously relate to ideas of normalcy. Here, Murphy’s gender/ethnic split embraces a sense of freakishness because Norbit, Rasputia and Mr. Wong are all, also, on a realistic continuum. We laugh at their types since we, in fact, recognize their types.

Because Norbit is essentially an occasion for Murphy to exercise his talents and drives, the plot about Norbit reuniting with his childhood sweetheart Kate (the endearing Thandi Newton) against the objections of his wife and her bruising, behemoth brothers, the Latimores (Terry Crews, Clifton Powell, Lester “Rasta” Speight), is only routine. It’s significant that Murphy has moved past the family quandary of The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps (where he was at his most brilliant) into an area of sly social commentary. When Mr. Wong querulously says “Blacks and Jews love Chinese food. Go figure!” it tweaks the anomalies of American habit at which ethnic comics are rightly bemused.

Murphy responds to post-Dave Chappelle self-insult comedy with a better, more experienced sense of self-awareness (that is, self respect). Norbit is the meek part of Murphy, yet he wears a perfectly spherical Afro (like the teens in TV’s “What’s Happening”) that is like a halo of blackness—a nostalgic affection for his own youth. And don’t get angry at Norbit’s attempt to off his ogre-wife; its precedents recall Walter Mitty performing the Martha Rayes scenes of Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. Not misogynist, just a funny function of a frustrated id. Rasputia herself is an outsized image of the frustrations that fuel obesity and black female stereotypes that turn into (often comical) rage. Dig the name, Rasputia. It’s a satirical ghetto moniker that brilliantly suggests a blinkered awareness of the non-black world; a joke worthy of Murphy’s terrific animated TV series “The PJs.”

Director Brian Robbins showed his knack for outrageous/sweet humor in Ready to Rumble. A perfect illustration of his buoyant sketch-style is the water amusement park sequence where Rasputia appears in a bikini and mounts a water slide. Robbins builds-up to a finale so amusingly preposterous than no big finish can be big enough. Impossible mission accomplished.

2007-03-01T16:38:00.000+03:00

Films With Black Stars Seek to
Break International Barriers

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 27 — When Jennifer Hudson, Beyoncé Knowles, Anika Noni Rose and company blasted their way through three “Dreamgirls” songs on Sunday’s Academy Awards broadcast, they also had a message for the millions watching around the world:
It wouldn’t hurt to buy a movie ticket.

“Dreamgirls” is a solid hit in the United States, with more than $100 million in domestic box office sales, and its backers at DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures have been tiptoeing into the international marketplace. They hope that a couple of Oscars and a globe-spanning broadcast of the trio’s performance will help overcome any foreign resistance to the musical genre and — more ticklishly — to a nearly all-black cast.

Only recently have movies begun to crack one of Hollywood’s most troubling and least openly discussed problems: an international “color line” behind which films relying on black stars often do not perform well. The box office prowess of “Dreamgirls” overseas will help signal whether this newfound success is fleeting or more lasting.

“I always call international the new South, ” said Reginald Hudlin, the director of “House Party” and “The Ladies Man” and now the entertainment president of BET Networks, where he oversees television and feature film operations. “In the old days, they told you black films don’t travel down South. Now they say it’s not going to travel overseas.”

Most Hollywood executives, producers and analysts interviewed for this article delicately maintained that the resistance to black performers abroad had had less to do with bigotry than with the international audience’s lack of experience with the humor or urban situations that figure in many of their films. Some in the industry, though, were more blunt.

“The international marketplace is still fairly racist,” said James Ulmer, proprietor of the Ulmer Scale, which compiles input from about 100 international film professionals in a periodic rating of stars’ “bankability.” In Mr. Ulmer’s rating, Will Smith, the highest-ranked black star, placed No. 12 over all last year, behind Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey and others, notwithstanding industry chatter that has often tagged Mr. Smith as the biggest star today.

This state of affairs may be changing. According to figures compiled by the box office reporting service Boxofficemojo.com, a series of 2005 films that staked their success squarely on black leads showed a strength in foreign theaters that has been seen rarely since Eddie Murphy had a period of global appeal after “Beverly Hills Cop” (1984).

“Inside Man” and “Déjà Vu,” both starring Denzel Washington, had more than half of their ticket sales abroad, while “Big Momma’s House 2,” starring Martin Lawrence, approached that level despite conventional industry wisdom that says comedies with actors of color don’t travel well.
Films with these actors have usually been soft at the international box office, though Mr. Washington did well when paired with Mr. Hanks in “Philadelphia,” as did Mr. Lawrence when acting with Mr. Smith in the “Bad Boys” films. Mr. Smith’s “Hitch,” released in 2005, did well overseas, collecting more than half of its $368 million in ticket sales abroad and capping his reputation as a star whose appeal transcends race in some of the most difficult markets. In fact, Mr. Smith’s earlier success had pointed the way for contemporary black stars when “Bad Boys” unexpectedly became an international hit.

“The studio was deathly afraid that an action movie with two African-American movie stars would never travel the world,” said Teddy Zee, who was an executive at Sony’s Columbia unit when it made “Bad Boys” and was later among the producers of Mr. Smith’s “Hitch” and “The Pursuit of Happyness.” “Efforts to sell it off failed. Columbia was stuck with international. But it did so well.”

Today Hollywood no longer considers international marketing an afterthought. Executives who deal with international markets said that major studios had quietly fostered an openness in Europe and Asia by investing heavily in the promotion of a small number of black stars, particularly Mr. Smith and Mr. Washington, who often play roles that might easily have been cast with a Brad Pitt or a Russell Crowe.

Mr. Washington and his “Déjà Vu” co-star Paula Patton, for instance, traveled abroad and did extensive promotional work by satellite and with visiting reporters as part of a Walt Disney Company-sponsored push that appears likely to yield as much as $115 million in international ticket sales, or around 64 percent of the film’s expected worldwide total, said Mark Zoradi, president of the Walt Disney motion pictures group.

The shifting economics of the movie business are the main reason for this change. International sources now account for more than half of studios’ revenue. According to figures compiled by Kagan Research, American companies last year got 52 percent of about $48.2 billion in revenue from foreign sources, a share that has been expanding in recent years after hovering in the 40 percent range.

After five weeks in several international markets, “Dreamgirls” has taken in only about $28 million abroad, or roughly 22 percent of its total ticket sales, according to reported figures. But the film recently opened at No. 1 in a key market, Japan, displacing Mr. Smith’s “Pursuit of Happyness” (from Sony Pictures Entertainment) and putting two films with black stars atop the box office in a largely monoracial country that had has not always been easy for African-American performers.

According to Rob Moore, Paramount’s president for worldwide marketing, distribution and home entertainment, “Dreamgirls” appears likely to wind up with about $60 million in foreign ticket sales, or roughly 38 percent of its expected total, compared with about 44 percent for “Chicago,” a similarly high-profile musical released four years ago with a mostly white cast.

Historically, Mr. Moore said, an African-American cast has tended “to accentuate whatever weaknesses” a picture had in a foreign market. Thus a territory that was tough for comedy was even tougher for a comedy with black stars. To promote “Dreamgirls,” he said, the studio had its principals travel to countries where musicals do well, including Japan.

According to Don T. Nakanishi, director of the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, Mr. Smith’s persistent presence abroad, combined with the prominence of Condoleezza Rice, Colin L. Powell and a handful of other prominent black Americans, has worked genuine change in Japan.

“They’re developing a more nuanced view of America and an appreciation of multiracial societies,” Professor Nakanishi said.

Still, many black stars have continued to see their work slighted abroad, and that inability to conquer such markets can be the difference between landing a coveted role or not. In the past two years, according to the Boxofficemojo figures, “Hustle & Flow,” starring Terrence Howard, did only about 6 percent of its box-office business abroad; “Are We There Yet?,” with Ice Cube, did about 16 percent; and “Last Holiday,” with Queen Latifah, did 11 percent, despite its setting in a European mountain resort.

“For an international audience, when it looks like an urban movie with an African-American star in the lead, they just turn it off, and I find that incredibly discouraging,” said Chris McGurk, the chief executive of Overture Films. Mr. McGurk was vice chairman of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Company when it released the two “Barbershop” films, starring Ice Cube, to big business with both black and white audiences at home. They earned virtually nothing abroad.

In Mr. Hudlin’s view, the international record of films with black leads would be better if companies extended more backing to stars beyond the top two or three. “Look at the success of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, all those black artists,” he said. “They do great globally. But when it comes to film and TV, there’s this huge barrier. I don’t believe it. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

2007-03-08T06:33:00.000+03:00

DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

Playing off of Southern stereotypes does little more than aggravate

By Armond White

Black Snake Moan

Directed by Craig Brewer

No doubt writer/director Craig Brewer, whose debut feature was Hustle and Flow, means well. His taste for low-down ribaldry gives him access to a sympathetic observation of thwarted lives that are a genuine but usually ignored part of American experience. He’s a Tarantino with his feet on Southern ground instead of his head up the ass of Hollywood/Hong Kong junk. But Brewer’s intentions are misdirected in Black Snake Moan’s tale of Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson), a black Georgia bean farmer whose wife dumps him for his younger brother. Lazarus’ frustrations have already wearied him when he takes-in a victimized white girl, Rae (Christina Ricci) and tries curing her nymphomania. (“God seen fit to put you in my path, and I aim to cure you of your sickness.”)

Brewer’s gimmick is so outrageous it ought to be comedy—perhaps a modern version of the Elia Kazan-Tennesee Williams’ Baby Doll but fearlessly igniting interracial fireworks. Yet Brewer stops short of racial outrage; not because there’s none left in today’s multiracial America, he simply denies that it ever existed. Despite much teasing, Lazarus and Rae’s relationship remains chaste. Lazarus chains Rae to his radiator so she can’t escape his down-home teaching—a combo of Pygmalion and Somerset Maugham’s Rain. When Rae tries to escape, and the short chain snaps her back, the movie suggests a porno-religious Road Runner cartoon—customized for cynics who underestimate the social dynamics of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

It’s depressing that Brewer dares salacious irony and then backs down. Black Snake Moan’s posters, styled after the sensationalized artwork of old paperback novels by Kyle Onstott and Frank Yerby, are livelier than anything the movie actually offers. Brewer speciously evokes the blues, opening with doc footage of Son House explaining that the blues “exists between the male and female … when one deceives the othern through the love.” But Lazarus and Rae’s relationship is closer to Bill Bojangles Robinson and Shirley Temple—if Shirley Temple gyrated in a Luther Campbell video. Brewer’s use of raunchy, S&M archetypes sputters out, especially with the casting of I’ll-do-anything performers like Jackson and Ricci whose unprincipled careers deny all transgressive possibilities.

Jackson never does anything that’ll make racists uncomfortable. The only black male stereotype he’s avoided is the Mandingo stud—for the fortunate reason that he’s the least erotic black actor in movies. Always stopping short of the ultimate miscegenation fear, Jackson’s participation in Brewer’s scheme cannot exorcize the demons of American racism. And Ricci has already played slut too many times; she drops her T-shirt but raises no one’s eyebrow. She also gets Brewer’s worst dialogue: When Rae reforms, she sings “This Little Light of Mine” and puzzles, “I can’t remember where I learned that song?”—a sign that Brewer’s entire conceit (ignoring/falsifying Southern religious heritage) is disingenuous. (The worst insult may be Jackson’s improvising the classic folk song “Stagolee” with a vacancy of rhythm and soul: “I said, ‘Hey muthafucka do you know who I am?’/He said, ‘Naw, n---a I don’t give a damn.’”)

Brewer is a wannabe poet of the Southern underclass. He has a pop sensibility that even Ira Sachs lacked in The Delta and 40 Shades of Blue (and his heart is in the tiny subplot featuring Justin Timberlake as Rae’s military-dropout boyfriend—a poignantly played role that deserves the interracial camaraderie and soulfulness of a Timberlake CD). But Brewer plays with porn tropes that unhelpfully turn racism into a fetish. He uses the same themes of suffering, dysfunction and redemption as Demme’s Beloved and Walter Hill’s Crossroads, yet misses the vital sense of a community’s spiritual ambition. His characters lack the Toni Morrison/August Wilson sense of historical connection.

Black Snake Moan is so full of bad ideas and misrepresented ethnicity that people who are ignorant of black Southern culture, or feel nothing for it, will misread the film’s blunders as daring provocation.

2007-03-17T18:16:00.000+03:00

March 16, 2007

MOVIE REVIEW |
'I THINK I LOVE MY WIFE'

By A. O. SCOTT

In “I Think I Love My Wife” Chris Rock, who also directed and wrote the script (with his frequent collaborator Louis C. K.), plays Richard Cooper, an investment banker whose life is as bland as his name. Richard, in his voice-over narration, is the first to admit that his situation is enviable in many ways: He has a lovely wife named Brenda (Gina Torres), two cute small children, a spiffy house in the suburbs and a flourishing career at a reputable Manhattan firm.

The problem, as you may be able to intuit from this checklist of bourgeois amenities, is that he’s bored. He has reached a point at which existence settles into a series of pleasant routines and minor frustrations. In Richard’s case one of these frustrations — the sexual cooling of his marriage — becomes the source of some potentially major trouble.

“My marriage is frozen solid,” he declares. He means to say that it’s strong, but the metaphor sneaks up and traps him in an uncomfortable admission. To make matters worse, he delivers this diagnosis to Nikki Tru (Kerry Washington), a human blowtorch — even without the cigarettes, she’d still be smoking — aimed at the facade of Richard’s comfortable, complacent life.

Nikki, the ex-girlfriend of an old friend, shows up at Richard’s office one afternoon, supposedly seeking a letter of recommendation. By caprice or design she ensnares him in a long, volatile flirtation, a relationship that, while not technically adulterous, is nonetheless tinged with furtiveness and guilty exhilaration.

If the premise sounds familiar, that is in part because “I Think I Love My Wife” is a remake, at once free-handed and faithful, of “Chloe in the Afternoon” (1972), the sixth and last of Eric Rohmer’s “Moral Tales.” Mr. Rock’s affection for this source is evident in his careful restaging of some of its shots and scenes, even though Mr. Rohmer’s wry, ironical temperament could not be further from Mr. Rock’s candid, confrontational stand-up style.

In attempting to synthesize the later French New Wave of the late 1960s and early ’70s with the upscale African-American romantic comedies that flourished in Hollywood in the late 1990s, Mr. Rock has not only done his best work as a director and screenwriter but has also made an unusually insightful and funny mainstream American movie about the predicaments of modern marriage.

2007-03-18T15:23:00.000+03:00

March 18, 2007

THE SHAPE OF CINEMA,
TRANSFORMED AT THE
CLICK OF A MOUSE

A. O. SCOTT

FOR some time now, it has been possible to imagine a moment when you — yes, You, the Person of the Year, the ultimate arbiter of cultural relevance — will be able to watch whatever you want whenever you want in the setting of your choice. The handful of Web sites that now offer streaming or downloadable feature films, along with wider video on demand through the cable box or satellite dish, offer a glimpse of what is to come.

Perhaps the most intriguing promise these sites hold, at least for those whose interest in film extends beyond the new, the recent and the aggressively hyped, is of a kind of virtual cinematheque. The retrieval and preservation of film history has been a project of many decades, accelerated and democratized by the rise of the DVD, which has put integral, aesthetically credible versions of hundreds of old films in easy reach of the multitudes.

Not that the effort has been systematic or complete: there are still hundreds more titles awaiting transfer to digital media. But the Internet, even if it currently lags behind the DVD market in terms of what is available, extends the promise of comprehensiveness and universal accessibility. It is now possible to imagine — to expect — that before too long the entire surviving history of movies will be open for browsing and sampling at the click of a mouse for a few PayPal dollars.

This aspect of the online viewing experience is not, in itself, especially revolutionary. It makes established home viewing habits a bit easier to indulge. What seems potentially more consequential is the rise of video on demand as a form of first-run distribution, a way not only for old movies to be saved, but also for new ones to be discovered. “Straight to video” is now more or less synonymous with “bottom of the barrel.” But the cost of prints and ads, along the small size of the audience for art and foreign films, has made straight to video, whether online or on disc, a more attractive option for the serious as well as the sleazy.

More and more movies that gain a bit of exposure on the festival circuit — where they are written about, primarily, in Web-based publications and blogs — will find their public not at the multiplex or the art house, but at your house.

This, at any rate, is the possibility held out by sites like GreenCine, Jaman, EZTakes and others like them, and also by Google Video, through which you can purchase or “rent” a wide variety of films. If you look at Google’s extensive documentary menu, you may be struck not only by the diversity of subject matter, but also by the variety of running times. One thing online distribution seems to accomplish is the erosion of the tyranny of the feature. It is nearly impossible for a film that runs less than 70 minutes to be booked into a theater by itself, or for, say, a 67- or 17-minute movie to be given a block of television time. But on-demand screen time is more flexible and may thus reward filmmakers for brevity or at least economy of expression.

But the filmmakers whose work circulates primarily through the various Web and on-demand applications will be entering a marketplace that is already glutted. The number of theatrically released films to open in Manhattan — that is, the movies that merit a review in The New York Times — has nearly doubled since the start of the decade, to around 600 a year. Add the films that play only at festivals, and the number reaches the thousands; include straight-to-video movies, on the Internet or DVD, and you have the potential of tens of thousands of movies competing for the burdened attention of the viewers.

How will they be sorted out? How will you know which ones you might want to see? I don’t ask this question defensively, as a cultural gatekeeper fretting over my waning authority — enough about you! some of us are trying to make a living here — but out of genuine curiosity. It has become something of a truism that Web culture is driven not by traditional, top-down forms of tastemaking like the judgments of professional critics or the strategies of corporate marketers, but rather by the lateral operations of social networks. Niches and coteries form organically, as like-minded people bond in cyberspace over shared enthusiasms.

And this, in turn, encourages a do-it-yourself approach to production and distribution. Just as a band, at least in principle, no longer needs a record label to be heard, so can a filmmaker forego the meddlesome mediation of a studio. Shoot your picture in your living room with your friends, edit it on your laptop, and I’ll watch it on mine, in my living room, with my friends.

Or something like that. Surely there can never be too many movies. Or, to put it another way, there will always be too many movies, more than anyone can keep track of. That more will be made, and that more will have a chance to be seen, is hardly cause for complaint. But by now we should have learned to regard utopian — or apocalyptic — predictions about the impact of the Internet with a measure of skepticism. The technology has yet to be developed that can increase the number of hours in the day, which means that, somehow, we will still need to choose among the thousands of movies at our instantaneous disposal.

What will guide those choices? Will the social networks that drive taste on the Web discover new and neglected works? Will they manage to circumvent both relentless marketing and criticial myopia? If the short history of the Internet teaches anything, it’s that any decisive, early answer is sure to be wrong.

I doubt that, at least in the foreseeable future, a filmmaker with a choice will refuse theatrical distribution in favor of the Web, or that a Web-distributed feature will match the gross of even a modest art-house release. But at the same time it seems likely that a hot new filmmaker will be soon discovered on a download site and given a shot at old-fashioned Hollywood success, a chance to make movies for the big screen. In any case, we’ll have to keep watching.

2007-03-27T05:49:00.000+03:00

Will I ever eat lunch in this town again?

Mr X, an Oscar-winning producer, attacks the industry he relies on as he tells the story of his hit movie that wasn’t undefined

Ostensibly, I produce movies for a living. The most recent movie I had a hand in producing won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Pretty heady stuff, to be sure. The reality, though, is slightly less fulfilling. We shot that film two years ago and, since then, I’ve produced nothing. Zilch. Not a frame of film, a byte of sound, a kernel of popcorn.

How, you may ask, does one survive in the film business without actually making any movies? Or, more relevantly, what the hell have I been doing for the past two years? Good question. Here’s the answer, which is really a guide for those of you looking either to become a producer or waste your time completely. The two are often indistinguishable.

This is how it starts: I read hundreds of scripts, articles and books, watch countless films for remake possibilities, listen to tons of ideas – and most of them are crap. It’s like a beauty pageant where everyone has either a monobrow or two noses. When you are reading a script, only one thing truly matters, which I learnt from my old boss Harvey Weinstein: is it a movie? Not is it a good idea, or is it well written, or is there some big star attached. Is it a movie?

Two years ago, I read a script from a first-time screenwriter with several novels under his belt that left me giddy. The characters were real, the structure was sound and the story was captivating. That’s not to say it didn’t have some issues; no script comes out perfectly formed. It would be the genetic equivalent of a baby emerging with Brad Pitt’s face. But it was pretty close.

It was about a patrolman on the border between California and Mexico. He had done time in Iraq and was now serving his country in a different way. The reality of his life, though, was grim and fairly hopeless. No matter how many illegal activities he and his cohorts stop, countless criminals slip through the cracks. It’s a numbers game, and the odds favour the bad guys.

So here you have a good man in an increasingly desperate situation. He’s trying to keep his wife and young daughter intact, provide for them, but he knows he’ll never get to where he needs to be. Faced with this bleak reality, he is approached by some Mexican criminals with an offer: let a particular vehicle pass through and he’ll be paid handsomely. It’s a victimless crime – no drugs or terrorists, merely high-priced foreign call girls who can’t easily enter a post9/11 America.

He decides to look the other way and take the money, which enables him to support his family for a year. Unfortunately, he’s asked soon afterwards to let another car through, then another and another. The Mexicans have him, and they dictate the rules of the game, including threatening his family if he doesn’t continue to comply.

It read like a classic thriller with characters you really cared for, plus the added bonus of being extremely topical. Stories about border corruption were splashed across the covers of every newspaper, and the writer had clearly done his research. I thought to myself, yes, Harvey, it’s a movie!

I bought it. The movie had all the earmarks of a critical and commercial success, with a great role fora leadingman. Already feeling a fat producer’s fee burning a hole in my pocket, I called my travel agent and asked her to look into renting a villa for two weeks in St Barts in the West Indies.

Then it all went wrong. I sent the script out to several agents, who had many of their top director clients read it. I found myself fielding calls from many of my heroes, film-makers I’d dreamt of working with, along with several exciting up-and-comers. I finally decided on someone in the middle: he’d just directed a very well received film whose lead actor was nominated for an Academy Award. Actors would line up to work with him, I was assured, and every studio was dying to make his next film.

The first thing he did was get the writer to rewrite the script, tipping it slightly into more “character drama” territory. Not satisfied, he then rewrote it himself, shoving it completely out of “commercial thriller” territory. I called my travel agent, asking if a week in a hotel in Miami wasn’t a more practical idea.

Six months had passed. We sent the new draft out to all the top actors, and the responses felt like what models must hear every day – too dark, too small, too thin. One well-known actor, possibly the most humourless man I’ve ever met – which, in my business, is saying a lot – loved the script but was “looking to branch out into comedy”. I wasn’t quite sure which branch, and I certainly didn’t want to find out.

The director got a very well respected actor to read it, and the actor loved it, with one caveat: he wanted a rewrite done, with his input. They huddled together for weeks and emerged with a script that was basically a 90-minute monologue about a guy who works at the border. At least, I think he worked at the border.

Burying my concerns, I sent the “package” out to all the major studios. The silence was deafening. One by one, various executives read it and, one by one, they passed. There was a nibble here and there, but it was usually by someone in the mail-room with – sadly – no authority to greenlight a $30 million movie. (But they obviously had immaculate taste.)

After months of waiting and pleading, I found a studio that was willing to finance it – for roughly the budget of a documentary short.

A year had passed since I bought the script.

It was time to regroup. After much Sturm und Drang – mostly on my part – the director and I parted ways. I decided on a different approach. I went back to the original script and tried, once again, to court a big-name actor. Surely someone would see in it what I first did.

Miraculously, it worked. After several months of near-meetings and almost-conver-sations, I finally sat down with a recent Oscar winner who was perfect for the part. He loved it, he said, one of the best scripts he’d ever read. I sat and listened, waiting for the other shoe to drop – he’d want the character to be deaf, he’d want the story to take place in Kazakhstan, he’d want a competent producer. But all I got was a yes, he was in, and let’s go get ourselves a director.

Now I had a movie star. The directors started calling again, and I even heard from one I’d originally passed on because he wanted to add chase scenes and explosions – just stick ‘em in anywhere, he’d said, that’s what audiences really wanted nowadays. Now we had a 30-minute conversation where he pretended to forget his earlier thoughts and proclaimed the script was “perfect as it is”.

This was shaping up to be quite a movie, and the star promised me this would be his next film, even mentioning it on a talk show while promoting another movie.

Two weeks in St. Bart’s: $15,000.

There was a buzz around town, which always happens when a star commits to a project, and I returned to the ring for the easy part – going back to the studios with my shiny, new, glorious package. Only I quickly discovered that the package wasn’t so glorious after all.

The star was (and, in fact, still is) African-American. His wife would be as well, and the “other woman” in the movie would be played by a Latino actress. For some reason everyone was calling my movie an “urban film” (code for a movie for black people).

The part had been written for a white guy, but this was a fantastic actor, and people of all colours and ethnicities work on the border. Even so, my casting choice would prove to be a huge problem; apparently, there are many countries in the world where movies starring African-Americans other than Will Smith need not apply.

Nobody in town would finance the movie, because it had literally no appeal overseas. My weak protests – wouldn’t people go if it were actually a good movie? – were met with laughter. What does a “good movie” have to do with anything?

It had now been a year and a half since I last stepped foot on a set.

People in the industry were beginning to wonder – what was I working on? Calls were going unreturned. I developed the unmistakable stench of desperation. My wife started leaving the mortgage payment notices (and her shopping receipts) on my bedside table.

A producer friend once told me: “You’re either making a movie or you’re not. Everything else is just talk.” (He hasn’t worked in five years, but that’s another story.)

I clearly wasn’t making a movie. What I was doing was bleeding money. I had rung up a profoundly large credit card bill (wooing the various talents), ludicrously high legal fees (negotiating everyone’s deals) and astounding costs for therapy and medication (very poor health care system in America). This was in addition to actually buying the script, paying for rewrites and flying people back and forth for meetings.

Stuck in Purgatory, I’m currently faced with several decisions. Find a new actor? Hire a different director? Wait for the studio regimes to change and pray that someone responds to my script? Fire my travel agent? Get a good divorce lawyer?

It’s now been two years since I last produced a movie, and the script sits prominently on my desk, taunting me daily. Help me, it pleads, get me to the screen where I belong. Heed the signs, people tell me, this one just wasn’t meant to be. And still I carry on, for some unknown reason. Passion? Stubbornness? Desire? Stupidity? Who knows – it’s probably a combination of all of the above, but mainly the latter.

For these are the tools of my trade. I’m a producer.

2007-03-27T20:21:00.000+03:00

PREMIUM RELEASED ON DVD MARCH 27th!!!

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2007-04-12T14:31:00.000+03:00

OBAMA: The Magic Negro

The Illinois senator lends himself to white America's idealized, less-than-real black man.

By David Ehrenstein
L.A.-based DAVID EHRENSTEIN writes about Hollywood and politics.

March 19, 2007

AS EVERY CARBON-BASED life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. Since making his announcement, there has been no end of commentary about him in all quarters — musing over his charisma and the prospect he offers of being the first African American to be elected to the White House.

But it's clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the "Magic Negro."

The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. "He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist," reads the description on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro .

He's there to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.

As might be expected, this figure is chiefly cinematic — embodied by such noted performers as Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith and, most recently, Don Cheadle. And that's not to mention a certain basketball player whose very nickname is "Magic."

Poitier really poured on the "magic" in "Lilies of the Field" (for which he won a best actor Oscar) and "To Sir, With Love" (which, along with "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," made him a No. 1 box-office attraction). In these films, Poitier triumphs through yeoman service to his white benefactors. "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is particularly striking in this regard, as it posits miscegenation without evoking sex. (Talk about magic!)

The same can't quite be said of Freeman in "Driving Miss Daisy," "Seven" and the seemingly endless series of films in which he plays ersatz paterfamilias to a white woman bedeviled by a serial killer. But at least he survives, unlike Crothers in "The Shining," in which psychic premonitions inspire him to rescue a white family he barely knows and get killed for his trouble. This heart-tug trope is parodied in Gus Van Sant's "Elephant." The film's sole black student at a Columbine-like high school arrives in the midst of a slaughter, helps a girl escape and is immediately gunned down. See what helping the white man gets you?

And what does the white man get out of the bargain? That's a question asked by John Guare in "Six Degrees of Separation," his brilliant retelling of the true saga of David Hampton — a young, personable gay con man who in the 1980s passed himself off as the son of none other than the real Sidney Poitier. Though he started small, using the ruse to get into Studio 54, Hampton discovered that countless gullible, well-heeled New Yorkers, vulnerable to the Magic Negro myth, were only too eager to believe in his baroque fantasy. (One of the few who wasn't fooled was Andy Warhol, who was astonished his underlings believed Hampton's whoppers. Clearly Warhol had no need for the accouterment of interracial "goodwill.")

But the same can't be said of most white Americans, whose desire for a noble, healing Negro hasn't faded. That's where Obama comes in: as Poitier's "real" fake son.

The senator's famously stem-winding stump speeches have been drawing huge crowds to hear him talk of uniting rather than dividing. A praiseworthy goal. Consequently, even the mild criticisms thrown his way have been waved away, "magically." He used to smoke, but now he doesn't; he racked up a bunch of delinquent parking tickets, but he paid them all back with an apology. And hey, is looking good in a bathing suit a bad thing?

The only mud that momentarily stuck was criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama's alleged "inauthenticty," as compared to such sterling examples of "genuine" blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg. Speaking as an African American whose last name has led to his racial "credentials" being challenged — often several times a day — I know how pesky this sort of thing can be.

Obama's fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he's written in his two (count 'em) books, or even what he's actually said in those stem-winders. It's the way he's said it that counts the most. It's his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is "articulate." His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn't called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media).

Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.

2007-04-13T21:53:00.000+03:00

Roscoe Lee Browne - who received a Tony nomination for his work in August Wilson's Two Trains Running - passed away on April 11 in Los Angeles at the age of 81, according to the Associated Press.

Browne, who was born on May 2nd, 1925 in Woodbury, NJ, made his Broadway debut in 1960's The Cool World. He had also been featured in the inaugural season of the New York Shakespeare Festival, in which he performed in Julius Caesar. He also appeared on Broadway in General Seeger, Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Danton's Death, A Hand is on the Gate, and the Gershwin-scored 1983 musical My One and Only, in which he played Rt. Rev. J.D. Montgomery. He received a Tony nomination for his work as Holloway in 1992's Two Trains Running.

Before becoming an actor, he had taught literature and French at Lincoln University, and was an award-winning track star. As an actor, he was noted for his "rich voice and dignified bearing."

Film and TV work included "Will and Grace," "Law and Order," "The Shield," Babe: Pig in the City and Babe, Judas Kiss, The Mambo Kings, "Falcon Crest," "The Cosby Show" (for which he won an Emmy Award), "Soap," "All in the Family," and many more.

2007-05-15T05:57:00.000+03:00

Just a couple months after director Spike Lee lent his name to a contest at LiveMansion.com, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker is backing online TV venture Babelgum.com, even lending one of his own short films to the site.

At Cannes' MIP TV market last week, Lee joined Italian media magnate Silvio Scaglia at a showcase of Babelgum.com, a new peer-to-peer website that hopes to rival Joost in providing quality TV-style content on the web. Still in Beta mode, Babelgum is planning to launch sometime in the next couple months.

While the site has 1,000 to 2,000 hours of content, according to this CNN article, Lee's "Jesus Children of America," a short film about a Brooklyn teen who learns she was born HIV-positive, may be the only piece of video that comes from such a high-profile director.

In a video available on YouTube, the director of "Do the Right Thing" and "Inside Man" explains his reasoning for joining up with Babelgum. "It's a very important film and I wanted more people to see it," he says. "I think that technology has really brought democracy to an industry that's largely not been a democracy."

2007-05-18T00:02:00.000+03:00

State of Cinema, SFIFF50, April 29, 2007

By Peter Sellars

Hi, everyone! It's so great to see all these cool people in one room. Thank you. And it's really incredible to be invited to deliver a speech called "The State of Cinema." That's quite awesome.... To the San Francisco Film Festival, congratulations on 50 astounding years. [Applause.]

To deal with the state of cinema, I first want to deal with the state of the state. That would be California. And deal with the question of -- at this moment, where all over the world governments are the problem, not the solution -- how we need to create as artists another possibility for a new set of states to which we can belong, adhere, subscribe, and it does have something deeply to do with what we believe in, hope for, and care about.

To me, the very exciting moment of being alive at the beginning of the 21st century is that technology exists to create a basis for real democracy. And I really would like today to discuss the technology of democracy as it's unfolding around the planet. I would like to discuss the alternative globalization that is underway in cinema, and the amazing fact that we can actually now begin to hear from very far corners of the world -- their own histories in their own languages in their own images.

Nobody is the subject of an anthropological survey, and digital media now puts traditional epic oral storytelling into the mainstream of world literature, consciousness, and image flow. And that is just astonishing.

To begin with, just a couple of things. Obviously, the record on globalization is unattractive. And corporate-driven monocultures, which is what we are seeing all over the world, with Monsanto perfecting the Terminator seed and making everybody buy it -- I mean, it's an attack on the basis of life, an attack on fertility itself. The idea that you create a seed that does not reproduce. I don't know in human history a deeper attack on life. It makes the Nazi ideology seem somehow primitive because this idea that life itself can be owned, patented, and terminated at the will of a corporate control mechanism is, for me, unmatched in human history. That we lived in the generation that invented this and imposed it on the planet. Sixteen thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide since 2004 as the Monsanto Terminator seed is not only imposed on their farmlands but on their lives. What's being terminated is not just a seed; it's human hope -- it's human life force.

Before there's culture, there's agriculture. This question of what do we cultivate? Why does culture exist? It exists because a human being, like a seed, needs to be cultivated. That seed can prosper and flourish with the correct cultivation, or it falls by the wayside, or gets torn up or down, or never has a chance. Culture was invented knowing that every one of us as human beings needs to be cultivated. We are not just who we are. We are our friends. We are who we surround ourselves with. We are all of these profound, profound sources outside us that shape the real world. And we're on the planet to be transformed, not to be who we thought we were, but to be who we could never imagine.

Now, this question of globalization at the moment, this corporate-imposed control of the message, this monoculture, where there is one basmati rice and it's owned by one corporation instead of 500 basmati rice strains which have been developed by farmers all over India, for specific conditions, for specific soil, for specific weather, for specific altitude, for specific flavor. There are 500 basmati rices that you can taste; not just one. Diversity, cultural diversity, is at the heart of what democracy's about. It's not about one voice; it's about many voices. It is about how those voices work. Democracy was invented in the West by the ancient Greeks, where it lasted about 12 minutes.

I'd like to say just a couple of things about the way it worked, because the Greeks realized that democracy doesn't work by itself. It actually requires culture. And they mandated public art and the theater. Mandated it. Not, it was a possible leisure alternative. Actually if you voted in Athens, you had to attend the theater. It was mandated for every voting citizen because democracy, as we all know, is not a guarantee of anything much in itself. It's easy to buy, easy to force, and in 1933 in Germany, people voted for Hitler. And then repeatedly thereafter. It's not just that he moved in in tanks, it's that's what people actually wanted. That's what people chose.

So democracy by itself actually needs something to accompany it that creates an informed voter, that creates people who are exposed to another set of reality stories, possibilities. So the Athenians mandated the theater that was just outside the city, actually in a grove, at the end of an entire series of healing rituals, and crazy all-night drug hallucinogenic experiences. The theater was a giant ear, carved into the side of a mountain. It was primarily a listening space. Early architecture was not the architecture of vision -- of looking -- of what something looked like. It was about sound. And it was carved into the side of a hill, a listening space where 5,000 people could hear one person.

Athenian democracy was somewhat imperfect in that, well, only men could vote so if you were a woman, a child, a foreigner, or a slave -- too bad! Meanwhile, in the Greek theater, the title of every play: the name of a woman, a child, a foreigner, or a slave. Every play was about what could not be said in the Senate. Every play was about what was missing in the official discourse, and was the story of somebody who did not have permission to speak. And for that person, a 5,000-seat listening space had been carved into the side of a mountain, so that every voting person could begin to hear the story of this daughter who felt she had to kill her mother, or this mother who could not bring these children into the world and killed them rather than let them grow up in this world.

And the culture of how these stories were presented in music, poetry, and dance was not this culture of exploitation. In Oedipus Rex you're not allowed to show Oedipus tearing his eyes out, even though in our current commercial film culture obviously millions are spent in the special effects department on the exploding eyeball close-up. In Greek theater you were not allowed to show that. Because the point is not, What does an exploding eyeball look like? The point is, Why would you want someone tear out their own eyes?

In America, we're obsessed with special effects and we don't want to know about the causes. The Greeks were always about saying, "What are the causes? What causes this? Where does this come from? Why do people behave this way? What is driving these acts that are so painful for all of us?" And you can't just create legislation about this, this is deeper. This is between mothers and daughters. This isn't something that can be legislated. This is something we have to all deal with together.

Democracy is about keeping all of that information alive and present. And it's about understanding that there are no people and non-people. Obviously, in America -- and increasingly all over the world, in a two-sided operation -- there are legal and illegal human beings. And once somebody has been declared illegal, they have no rights of any kind, they're not human. They're subject to deportation. They're subject to every manner of abuse, as you know from the people picking our strawberries here in California.

What's inside that strawberry? Somebody who's not allowed to receive a minimum wage, who can't have a driver license to get to the field, who's living on the edge of the field in a plastic bag, and who will be deported as soon as the season is over. And if you don't think you can't taste that in your strawberry, if you can't taste the history of injustice, and pesticides and chemical fertilizer in that strawberry, that karma comes right through the fruit we're eating. That karma comes right through your underwear that was made in Honduras or Bangladesh. The closest things to your body are bringing that karma directly into your life. It's intimate.

Americans are taught to think we're at a distance from this, and in fact, it is your underwear and it is the strawberry. There is no distance. It's the closest thing to your life.

This globalization has resulted in, of course, a new kind of slavery, slavery which is different from previous slavery on the planet. We have 27 million slaves at the moment. In Mali, you can get these beautiful beads for about $35. They're beautiful. They're from the '20s, a beautiful period in African bead history. When you bought a slave in the United States in the 1840s, a young African American -- a 20-year-old African American, a 19-year-old who would work for you for the rest of his life -- cost, with adjustment for today's prices about as much as a Buick: $40,000, something like that.

So, it's an investment. You save up, you invest, and you take care of that person because that person is expensive and an investment. The new slavery has something very special: disposable people. Like, right now in Mali, where "Bamako" was made -- and please do not miss that film; it's one of the great films in the festival this year -- in "Bamako," I can purchase a 19-year-old African young man for $35 for the rest of his life.

The new slavery is that people all over the world are desperate in ways they have never been desperate ever before. That's why people are here one more time in those strawberry fields against every odd lined up against them; people are just desperate. People will work for anything. Women will sell themselves for anything. All over the world. Right now. And the new face of globalization is terrifying, and it's built on a little human misery and human disposability, because you just get another one. You work somebody to death, and then just get another one. It's cheaper than feeding the first one. And usually, at the moment, in the current forms of slavery, most people are worked to death in one or two years. Then they're just replaced by someone equally desperate.

This culture is pretty serious. A culture where there are people and non-people. If we're talking about the humanities, I think our job as artists is to say what is human, what is not human, who is human and how is everybody human. Forgive me for again going back to Germany in 1933, but obviously we've been through it here in California -- the law against the overcrowding of the schools: Oh, we just don't have enough money! Oh, we're in economic difficulties, and therefore these Jewish kids, these Gypsy kids, and these kids from homeless families have to be removed from the schools!

As you know from the immigration law from 1996, there are deportations. And I'm grateful to the San Francisco Chronicle, by the way, for yesterday putting a human face on deportation on the front page, but at the moment the law from '96 is, among other things, a double jeopardy. If you came to America in 1957, you served a two-month sentence for alcohol-related things in 1958, you can be rearrested in 2006 in the middle of the night, full SWAT team breaking down the doors of your house, taking you away in handcuffs in your underwear and deported retroactively because you have one criminal thing on your record.

And, of course, where I come from in Los Angeles, where the gang mantra is, No justice, No peace. Of course, America constantly is trying to create peace all over the world, but skipping over the justice part. What does it mean, if you're, under the anti-gang ordinances, one of the 11,000 people on the LAPD gang list? You do not get to ask why you got on that list or how you got on that list. If you are on that list, it is a crime to carry a portable phone or a pager. It is a crime to be seen in public with one other person on that list. Walking your sister to school, the two of you are subject to a double sentence because you're within 500 feet of a school yard. Kids are being locked up facing 80-year sentences for jaywalking, spitting on the sidewalk. And, as you know, anyone convicted of graffiti in California, is not allowed ever to go to college.

The Golden Gulag, as Ruth Gilmore has called it, here in California, we're building more prisons than any civilization in history. We have now outdone Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. Since 1984. And we're about to build more prisons. The Bureau of Prisons is the largest department of the state, with 57,000 employees, it is the single largest department in the state of California. We are happy to spend $35,000 a year keeping a young Black man in a supermax isolation cell which deprives him of all human contact. Just the invention of these cells is pretty incredible, as a measure of our society. That we could even think this up. That you would deprive someone of all human contact.

These young men are kept in a cement box with no window, nothing but artificial light, and the meal is delivered three times a day on a computerized system. Twenty-three-and-a-half hours, you're in the box. For one half-hour the door opens and you walk down a narrow corridor, you go into a cement box twice the size, completely empty, and there's a screen on the top, and there's daylight up there, although you cannot see the sun directly. For one half-hour you're in that, and then, when the signal is given, you go back to your tomb.

Kids are in this for seven years now, eight years now, and of course a lot of people have just simply gone mad. A lot of suicides. The way you get to see a human being is by not returning your tray on time, and five people in armor and tazers come and beat you to a pulp and chain you to the toilet for three days. This is the state of California. We're about to extend this entire system. We know the deportations are going on full blast. On Pico Boulevard, the cops just stop. On Culver Boulevard, where I live, they just stop any car that looks beat up and pick on something. Now, because they're in cahoots with the new immigration laws, for something on your fender, or your headlight, or something, you can be deported within 24 hours. Of course, what that does to your family, what that does to everything else is incredible. And because of the way that the law is written, it is not subject to review by any judge. So, you can't get a lawyer.

So, state of the state. All of those groups who say, "Why were the German people silent?" And now I have to ask, "Why are the American people silent?" The German people were told that this other set of people were just not human beings, so it didn't matter what happened to them: "Pay no attention as these people just suddenly disappear. As this apartment is suddenly empty. As this job is suddenly available. They're illegal people; they do not have the right to be here. And they need to learn the value of work."

To watch all of this ideology be resurgent in this day is pretty heavy duty. I have to say, for me, I'm constantly searching as an artist for how we respond. One of my favorite stories and one of my favorite texts is -- I don't know how many people here know Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy." From the sixth century, late Roman Empire, when the Roman Empire was at the end of the line, one of the last Roman emperors was Theodoric, a Goth, and things were so corrupt and so disastrous, they said, "We need to at least lift the tone a little bit here. Let's hire a major philosopher to be chief of staff and let's get some integrity back into the administration." So they hired a man named Boethius, who was a great philosopher, who actually wrote beautiful six books on the philosophy of music, based on Pythagorean principles of harmony in the universe. And they invited this man to be chief of staff for one of the last Roman emperors. He, of course, like any of us would, says, "Oh, my goodness! They're asking me. They want a philosopher, they want a wise person. How beautiful." So he showed up at the office, and soon enough began to say, "Oh, you cannot take these people's homes away from them. That would not be fair. It's not just." And he starts to be very mean to have around the office because he can't get anything done. The guy has integrity. So, they eventually have had enough, and they frame him and put him away in a dungeon where he lives the last five years of his life in a subterranean chamber with all sensory deprivation. Like a supermax at Pelican Bay. After a while, it's just too annoying that he's still alive, so they go in with big clubs and they just beat him to death, and turned him into putty on the floor. And then they don't have to worry about him any more, because he saw too many things. In these five years, when he was buried alive -- I don't know how; on toilet paper or what -- he wrote a manuscript. A manuscript called "Consolation of Philosophy." The manuscript is the story of him sitting in his cell and then a woman walking through the walls of the cell and singing to him about the nature of justice. And they would sing songs to each other through the night in this subterranean cell. So, of course, I'm right now working on a new version of "Consolation of Philosophy" for the state of California.

My favorite part of the story is that, five centuries after this man was eliminated and silenced, "Consolation of Philosophy" was the most copied manuscript of the Middle Ages. At a time when there was no publishing industry, and if you wanted to have a text, you had to copy it out yourself by hand, it was the most copied text. And now, 15 centuries later, it is the only text written in the entire sixth century that you can get in paperback in an airport. I really love that! Which brings us to the digital age and the stories that no one thought you would ever be told. And the access that you never thought you would have to certain communities. And the communities that were actually going to live, be silenced and never heard from again by the rest of humanity are actually the stories now that we're all looking for, gravitating towards. And the stories that actually have the life force that we're so thirsty for. And that we're hungering after.

I want today to talk about a new brand of cinema. Maybe I'll just mention one thing on the way to that, which is practically speaking, just to describe to you for a moment, the New Crowned Hope project, and again thank the San Francisco Film Festival for programming "Daratt" and "Opera Jawa." I just want to describe for a moment because, of course, this is the time all of us are looking for alternatives. What are the alternatives? How do the alternatives work?

The alternatives work always, small. The alternatives work supported within small community networks, and out of those community networks, in particular because of the digital age, we can begin to work globally and across the planet. But just like you are going to make a deal with a farm to get your vegetables, and increasingly more and more people are actually realizing that the more hands-on you are in relation to everything coming into your life, the richer your life is, and actually the higher quality of it is.

We're in this period now where people are resisting mass industrial food and mass industrial cinema. And where the alternative becomes both more delicious, and more nutritious, and more satisfying morally, in that your moral sense is being satisfied. By "morally" I don't mean the religious right notion of people watching how you live. I mean just the sense of living well in the deepest sense of the term. And what it means now is that we're actually making a contribution to the planet, not adding to the damage. And a whole generation now is looking for a way to live with another footprint that actually is going to help and not add to the damage.

What's exciting now is it takes a little ingenuity, it takes a little looking, it takes a little connection on the Internet, it takes a few things, but in fact most people are actually making this move. More and more and more and more. San Francisco, of course, is one of the hotbeds of people saying, "We are looking for something else," and not stopping until they find it.

Let me mention, the city of Vienna invited me to run a project for the 250th birthday of Mozart, essentially ten million euros, which is an astonishing budget, unheard of for culture here. And what can you do with that? My deal with the city of Vienna was, "The first thing, we will not play one note of Mozart." And Mozart was soooo relieved! What we're going to do is look at what Mozart was working on in the last year of his life. Unlike the image of Mozart in "Amadeus," which is like some dopey frat boy or something, just this cheesebag. In fact, Mozart was one of the most politically engaged artists in history. He was part of the Masonic movement in Europe, which was the movement that was imagining the Europe beyond autocracy. A Europe without kings. And, of course, the key movers in that movement are commemorated on the U.S. one-dollar bill, which has the complete staging for Mozart's Magic Flute, because Mozart's fellow Masons were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington. These were citizens, intellectuals, who said, "There has to be a way in which we can create a representative society. A democracy, not an autocracy. And let's debate those issues." Mozart was already writing his first music for the Masonic movement at the age of 19. He wrote more than 25 pieces for Masonic ceremonies. This group was primarily responsible for the American Revolution and then, more painfully, in 1789, the French Revolution, which, when they tried it in Europe, turned very bloody, and where justice did not necessarily prevail, but a kind of reverse terror set in. Which meant that the intellectuals in Europe had to say, "Well, wait a minute. What are we doing? We ended up bringing down these kings, but what are we putting in its place? And don't we have to step back and think more deeply about that?" And they didn't have a Thomas Jefferson to say, "All people are created equal" and to suggest a larger sense of the pursuit of happiness. Mozart went through a very interesting transformation. In Don Giovanni he wrote a sound track for the French Revolution. You see the upper classes raping the lower classes -- literally and figuratively -- and you see it end in the flames of hell. You see everybody who is left alive saying, "Jesus, what was that? I am really scared." That's how it ends. Because we are unprepared to go further. Then an interesting thing happens. Because Mozart has been so clear with his political affiliations in both Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, he's effectively shut down and not given any more commissions. The musicologists say, "Now, wait a minute, none of this is in Mozart's letters." and of course you have to explain that at this time in Vienna, anybody writing anything in a letter that resembled the language of the French Revolution was automatically held for questioning and frequently not released. And so exactly none of this could be put in a letter. Mozart could no longer get work in Vienna and he went on the road and he became an economic migrant going from town to town, hoping to get a commission and send money back to his family in Vienna. Sound familiar? He spent a year of his life that way, and for even Mozart it was emotionally devastating, what it means to have to leave your home and go looking for work and hoping to send money back to your family. For one year Mozart was silent. Even Mozart could not write a note of music while he went from city to city looking for work. That's the emotional devastation of that experience. He came back to Vienna at the beginning of 1791 empty-handed. And then his music took on a new phase. The last year of his life, a new complexion. Gone is the military music, the anger, the fury of Don Giovanni, the bitter irony. He begins to write something new. In January of 1791 -- a very cold January -- he writes a song called "Longing for Spring." "Longing for Spring" has a really long political history, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, in China. It's, of course, an image used by artists hoping for a political thaw.

In Chinese art it's exemplified in poetry and ink painting by portraits of the plum blossom. The plum blossom is the first blossom to come out. It blooms in February at enormous personal cost. Surrounded by ice and snow, it arrives early to say, "This evil winter will not last forever." And, usually, it's destroyed by March. Eventually, June arrives and the world is transformed in a way that was unimaginable in all that ice and snow. Mozart's song "Longing for Spring," this plum blossom [addresses] why the plum blossom was important for Chinese art and poetry. This image of somebody saying, "This will change. This will not last forever." Mozart writes The Magic Flute. Magic and transformation. Trials by fire and water of a young generation. That in your country the bus system doesn't work, the health system doesn't work, the banking system doesn't work. What does work? Magic! If we ask ourselves in our own lives, "What are the most amazing things that happened in our lives, the things that couldn't have been predicted?" Could you have predicted Nelson Mandela would be president of South Africa? No. And that's what art is about. It's preparing people for the unlikely. Preparing people for what looked impossible, and actually is achievable. For this incredible reversal of night becoming day, of winter becoming spring, where the world actually is reversed. It looked impossible, but it is possible. So, art is about preparing people for the unlikely, not the likely. Mozart's last opera, La Clemenza di Tito, is truth and reconiciliation Mandela-style. It's about the late Roman Emperor Titus. Act One, he's assassinated by terrorists, and they set fire to the capital. Act One curtains with the capital in flames. Act Two, he miraculously survives, says, "Find me the people who did this." There's a giant search for the terrorists. Dragnet. They're eventually rounded up, brought in front of him. And he does three things. One, he deals with their issues. Two, he invites them to join the government. Because, until they have representation and responsibility, no one will be safe. Three, he figures out, Is there a way that forgiveness could be possible? That's Mozart's last opera. Barenboim invited me to stage it in the late '80s. I said, "Absolutely not. It's so utopian, it's not even dramatic." And then Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa and formed a government with the people who tried to kill him. Invited people of every stripe to join that government and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which the victims and the perpetrators faced each other and told their stories and searched towards a path of reconciliation and maybe forgiveness. Suddenly, Mozart's last opera became overwhelmingly powerful in what it means that, in the 21st century, our generation are the children of Mandela, where a new type of leadership is required all over the world, in these cycles of civil war, in these cycles of genocide. And finally, Mozart's last work, the Requiem. What will the ceremonies for the dead be in our generation, when new mass graves are uncovered every week? What is the song? What is the ceremony? What is the gesture we make in our lifetime for the dead and for the living? That permit both to go forward in peace. That recognize those who are killed, needlessly, facelessly. And then create the conditions for the perpetrators to come forward. What are those ceremonies?

So for New Crowned Hope, I invited artists from all over the world, particularly artists from areas of conflict: Cambodia, Paraguay, Congo. Where, in the bus, the person sitting across from you tortured your sister in the camps, and there's nothing you can do. There will be no justice process. What do you do? How do you respond? Only arts and only culture create the possibility to turn the page of history, and give people a new piece of paper on which to start writing again a new society. And at the same time have the spiritual, emotional and historical weight to acknowledge what has gone before. And to process it, and not just be in denial, and not just suppress the rage. So we commissioned seven films, six features, working together with Simon Field and Keith Griffith. Simon was the head of the Rotterdam Film Festival and we, of course, wanted to work with Rithy Phan from Cambodia, whose "S21," which is one of the most incredible films -- have people all seen that film? Oh, may I just ask you to please go see Rithy Phan, the Cambodian documentary maker. Incredible work. Two films ago was an incredible film about Alcatel putting in the phone lines in Cambodia. French company very happy they got the contract. Of course, as they're digging all across Cambodia, it's corpses, putting in the phone lines.

His "S21" film is, I think, one of the greatest films and one of the greatest documents in human history. "S21" was an image you can't get over. It's a high school in Phnom Penh that was made into a killing factory, which... there is already an image. Probably 14,000 people were killed in this building. They just kept rounding people up and pushing them into the building. The building is now empty and it's a kind of holocaust museum at the moment, but in Cambodia there's no money for a holocaust museum, so it's just very simple. You can walk in and there are a couple of little signs.

Rithy Phan was one of a small group of artists, I think fewer than ten people survived who went through that building. They were mostly artists, because they were painting people's portraits and doing things that were helpful. Rithy Phan did something quite incredible. He made a film in which he found four of the former guards and four survivors. The documentary film takes all of them, invites them back into the building, which is now empty. He asked the guards to re-enact what they did every day in this empty building, for the four survivors. I don't know another document in history that then has what comes next.

The survivors ask the guards, "What were you thinking? How could you do this?" Those answers are overwhelming. In all of human history, it's one of the most overwhelming documents. "S21" -- it's an overwhelming film -- which gets us to something we don't normally feel we can do, which gets us to a type of bearing witness, a type of embodying history, recognizing history, processing history and craving a space for a future that only film can accomplish. And places us not at arm's length from history, but quite the opposite: right in the heart of it. And invites us to place ourselves in the place where you have to make the hardest decisions of your life.

As Americans, actually, we are in that place right now. It's just that the commercial culture around us conspires to never make you think that that's really where we are. That the decisions that are in front of us every day have this type of weight. And that the body count and the devastation. On our watch, world poverty has tripled. Tripled. Fifteen hundred years from now, they'll be saying, "What were those people thinking? Did they not notice? How could they not know? How could they not see? How could they not deal. It's unthinkable. What were they looking at? What were they talking about? What was so important for them?" One hundred years from now no one could imagine what it is we spent our time doing while presiding over plagues and starvation, the like of which the planet has never seen. And, as you know, with our friend Mr. Wolfowitz at the World Bank, our structural adjustment programs, which actually will not permit African countries to hire more doctors or more nurses or more teachers. They're in the midst of an AIDS epidemic and their financial agreements with us are, "You are not allowed to hire more doctors or more nurses." So our profit margin is maintained, they are not allowed to hire more doctors or more nurses in the middle of an AIDS epidemic.

New Crowned Hope. I like the sound of the words for this time in history. It sounded to me like great Jamaican beer. New Crowned Hope. I could see the label. In fact, Mozart's last gesture was this New Crowned Hope. After the French Revolution, of course, they shut down all the Masonic lodges in Vienna and the secret police shutting down everything, arresting a lot of people, [making] sweeps. A couple of highly placed citizens went to the emperor and said, "Look, things are bad enough here. You're making it look like a police state. At least for purposes of show, allow one of these lodges to reopen." And so one lodge was reopened.

For that opening, Mozart wrote a 20-minute cantata about world brotherhood. He conducted it for that opening, and that was his last public appearance, his last public performance. Two days later he was in the bed he would die in two weeks later. The name of that lodge was New Crowned Hope. So I wanted to make a festival that was about a new crowned hope in a new century. How do we move forward? Where does the hope come from? Where does the energy come from? Where does the vision come from?

Film is the greatest art form at the moment for penetrating deeply across the cultures, across the world, and it's the art form that has the lifeblood of the gestalt flowing through it right now. Film is making an incredible impact all over the world, so the key was to commission filmmakers and invite them to work as artists. I have to say that the other artists I was working with primarily were architects and chefs, because filmmakers, architects and chefs are usually considered the service industry, never allowed to quite do what they had in mind. You know, the best buildings are based on the best clients, but in fact the pressure from the client is hideous.

So we wanted to be a good client and invite filmmakers and architects and people creating food to work from a place of love, to work from the place of necessity, to work from a place of vision, to work from a place of something that's necessary. We went back and forth creating a list of the filmmakers. Of course, that was one of the most fun things. And then talking to a lot of filmmakers. It became clear that some people weren't available, some people didn't quite have something we need, some people had something in mind immediately, some people had something in mind over a little bit of time.

Garin Nugroho, the producer of "Opera Jawa"… How many people have seen that, so far? Oh, great! I just want to mention Garin Nugroho as an example of one of the powerful new filmmakers of this generation. Working in the largest Muslim country in the world, he's been courageously taking on issues that the Indonesian government would rather he stay away from. The San Francisco Film Festival showed one of my favorite films, "Of Love and Eggs." I hope people saw that here, a Muslim sex comedy. That's unthinkable, and only Garin would have the nerve to make it with 20 women in the cast all appearing in anything from a full chador to bikinis. And you're watching their choices and how they choose to appear and present themselves. And that is again not the generalities of politicians, but what art shows you are specific lives, specific choices, specific situations and how each of these women is dealing. One of the other overwhelming images of "Of Love and Eggs" is that Garin had the film narrated by a girl from Aceh province. As you know, Aceh province is constantly in the midst of a rather unpleasant forced takeover by the Indonesian government and there's been an independence movement going for 34 years there. Really, longer, but the current one. Garin, as the film gets underway, it's all narrated by her. She's a 12-year-old girl. She keeps trying to draw the top of a mosque. Nobody knows why. Across the film. She has a terrible speech impediment and it's because, of course, during one of the raids the Indonesian soldiers cut her tongue out and she doesn't know where her family is and she's living without them. Only Garin Nugroho would have a film narrated by a woman whose tongue was cut out, and say, "You still are able to hear what Aceh province is trying to say to you."

And, of course, he sets the film in the worst neighborhood in Jakarta. Terrible, bad. People living in a really horrible slum, and the film's all around the mosque inside the slum. It's hilariously funny. Garin makes the whole film, not with a hand-held camera shot in the grime of the streets, but makes in a studio and makes it like a '50s studio movie, everyone dressed fabulously and lit perfectly. So they have their dignity, they have their joy, they have their pleasure in their own humanity. Anyway, San Francisco Film Festival, thank you so much for showing that film in America because you're one of the very few people who did.

Garin is exactly the kind of filmmaker you want to commission. Garin has made "Opera Jawa," which is showing now here, again. Please don't miss it. It's astonishing. I think of it as one of the first films of the new 21st century. It's a new world and it's not only the political subject matter that Garin goes right into the heart of, but also Garin as an artist is creating a new language for film. He's invited ten Indonesian installation artists to create the sets for the film. So, the film doesn't look like any film you've ever seen.

Movie sets are usually quasi-realistic. This is way out there. And you're suddenly in this whole other zone of pure art in the midst of political repression. And the primary actors are the great Javanese classical dancers of this generation. You're seeing this incredible dance language connected to cinematic language, and suddenly cinema speaks a new language. For me, the joy of cinema at this moment, the beauty of the state of cinema at this moment is, cinema was invented by a certain set of people in a certain culture at a certain moment of history and we told our stories our way. Finally, the technology is such that a new set of people have taken on this technology and are now telling stories their way.

One of the most maddening things about our information system is that it's the Western correspondent standing in Tiananmen Square telling you something. But you're still not a Chinese person. You're still not placed deeply and seeing the world through Chinese eyes. And the way our correspondent system works, is you're always seeing the world through Western eyes -- wherever that person is standing -- and so you're not actually getting a different view of the world. The power of new aboriginal cinema is that you're actually seeing the world through the eyes of a young aboriginal woman. For the first time in human history. And you know what? The world looks different.

"Atanarjuat," the first film in the Inuit language, is an overwhelming breakthrough. It's like Homer's Odyssey suddenly joins world literature in our lifetimes. A new epic becomes part of the heritage of all culture in our lifetimes because of digital technology. We're suddenly being able to see the world not just from the Western correspondent's point of view. And, finally, from Africa, getting images that are not just images of crisis, because that's the only thing we see when we go there. "I'm standing here in the middle of crisis." Please don't miss Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Daratt, which was filmed and shot -- which we also commissioned -- as a truth and reconciliation film. It's filmed in Chad during the state of emergency, while the Sudanese army was invading from the South. And Haroun, who is a magnificent artist, did something so astonishing. In a city that was occupied by an invading army, he just turned the camera the other way and kept shooting. He did not let an invasion break his concentration or his seriousness of purpose.

We can make a connection to Africa that is not just "continent of crisis." And once you do that, it becomes "continent of hope," but "hope" in a real way. I would just say again, Cornell West talks about how optimists are people who have no idea what they're talking about. Whereas people who've actually been on the ground, in the situation, suffering, have earned the right to hope. And that's what separates hope from optimism. These are films of hope.

I hope some people were able to see at Yerba Buena Apichatpong's Syndromes and a Century. All of the New Crowned Hope films that we commissioned turned out to be, surprisingly to us, quite quiet films. "Daratt" is very quiet. It's very interesting, because we live in the age of the action film, the blockbuster, the film that comes at you like a tsunami. And all of these filmmakers have chosen something else, which is actually to give you your own space. Give you the space to think and feel. Give you a landscape within which to process, not just react. So we can get past our reactive state and move into a deeper space of feeling and reflection.

Apichatpong's working in Thailand. A very courageous gay filmmaker where it's illegal even to think you might be gay. His films take a very different approach to what cinema can be. People saw, perhaps, his "Tropical Malady," a film widely hated and widely loved. For me, it's one of the most important films because it's about shaman practice, spirit possession, and actually recognizing how it's at work in your body. And it uses film technology as a way to connect to traditional Thai spirit possession. You suddenly realize film has a whole other set of possibilities that D.W. Griffith never imagined.

The new film, "Syndromes and a Century," is quite astonishing because he quietly sets about making something about his parents, who were doctors in a small rural clinic when they met and they were having their courtship. Apichatpong makes the first half of the film in this little clinic in the village, and in the second half of the film in a huge modern hospital in Bangkok. What's amazing is that the second half of the film, all the dialogue and all the situations start repeating, and you go into this astonishing Buddhist timespace of reincarnation. This astonishing deja vu. This astonishing, "Something else is moving in the world, invisible." The film is very low key and at the same time totally shifts how you're experiencing everything in your life.

If you have a chance, see Tsai Ming-liang's "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone," and, of course, I should just say one more thing about Bahman Ghobadi -- who people know from his incredible "A Time for Drunken Horses," and what was billed as "Marooned in Iraq," but is really "Songs of My Mother's Homeland" -- making these films from Kurdistan that show Saddam's devastations and bizarrely, Bahman still ends up not being able to get a visa into America by Homeland Security even though George Bush could use him as a poster. Nonetheless, to have films of Kurdish language for a culture that has no country, no border. Four languages, split across Turkey, Iran, Syria. Bahman is creating the culture of hope.

I think you all saw "A Time for Drunken Horses," which was just devastating. And then Bahman realized you couldn't give that to the Kurdish people. You had to give them something that also had the life energy of keeping a culture alive. So his next film had hilarious comedy in it, and this just unbelievable life force. He made "Half Moon" for New Crowned Hope very moved by the fact that Mozart died thinking himself a failure. So he made that film about the Kurdish people, about what this generation will not live to see. And at this moment, what looks like it will never happen, and what it means to keep something alive for a couple of generations on.

This idea that cinema is part of turning the page. Cinema is part of a new possibility of hope. Cinema is part of gathering in small groups and reinforcing a sense of where we're coming from, but also where we're going. And what it means to hold the images in front of us to say, "We're not there yet, but it's where we're going, so let's not stop here. Let's keep going there." That idealism is actually what art was invented to do. To hold in front of you something that you aspire to.

We're coming through a period where that has not been fashionable. Where artists have thought, "OK, what we have to do is say how awful everything is." That has not led to such a good situation, and in fact it's what television does. And you can find it in the newspaper. So maybe art can do something else, which is not just say how awful everything is. Because you can pretty much figure that out already. It's what's on the other side of all of that. What lies on the other side of that mountain range? Which is where we're going. Thank you. [Applause.]