…I watched the film I was most interested to see, Walking to Werner. It’s about young filmmaker Linas Phillips and his mission to walk 1200 miles from his home in Seattle to Herzog’s home in Los Angeles, an homage to Herzog’s infamous walk from Germany to France to see his dying friend Lotte Eisner. Unfortunately Herzog’s not home, but as they say, it’s all about the journey. He meets a lot of strange persons along the way, as you might imagine, and has his share of hardships and triumphs, freeways and scenic beach roads, ticks and poison oak. It’s an unabashedly sentimental and sweet and inspirational road movie, made by an adorably sweet young man, who is just as adorable and sweet in person. It was very enjoyable to watch, if a bit long, but will certainly inspire you to get off your ass and do something, anything, that you want to do, no matter how ridiculous.

Perhaps it says something about my tastes or my interests that all of the films I’ve seen so far at Silverdocs offer extreme views of womanhood. Last night’s highlight was The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief, a fascinating film about male “Host Clubs” in Japan. There are apparently hundreds of these clubs all over Japan, and the concept is brilliant: men are the product here, women the consumers, and what the men are selling, they say, are “dreams”. Romantic dreams, to be specific. What the women are paying for isn’t sex, but attention. Flirting, touching, snuggling, romantic gestures. The host’s job is to get the girls to fall in love and therefore become repeat customers. They have it down to a science. Women are very “demanding” they say. They need a lot of superficial compliments. But the most fascinating observation they make is that once they reel the women in with compliments, they switch to scolding. And that’s when the women fall in love. We see a host asking a girl why she does such meaningless things, why she lives her life so frivolously, and the girl is completely rapt. And afterward gushes to the camera about how much she loves him. It is a truth that I as a woman was very uncomfortable witnessing. The entire film was uncomfortable to watch, probably moreso for women than for the men in the audience, who seemed to find much of it to be hilarious. I didn’t see many women laughing.

Much easier for women to watch is the story of Leila Khaled: Hijacker. Her world couldn’t have been more different than that of the love-starved women in Osaka. Khaled, who hijacked 3 planes in the 1960s and 70s, had no need for something like a host club, she was too busy being a freedom fighter (terrorist?) for the Palestinian cause and actually altering her beautiful face to avoid capture. And after she was captured, she was insulted when reporters asked her if she had a boyfriend, asked her if she were in love. These things were irrelevant to her. She is now married with children, and encouraged the female director of the film to make babies, but is still every bit the unrepentant soldier. Or terrorist, depending on your view. That’s one of the questions the film poses: what’s the difference between being a terrorist and a freedom fighter? Is the difference simply whether you win or lose?

Meanwhile there’s Only Belle, which is about a female serial killer who emigrated from Sweden in the late 1800s and may have killed more than 50 people (mostly men) in Indiana as part of insurance scams. They found the skeletons of 40 of her victims buried on the grounds of her farm, and eventually just stopped digging–so there may be countless more. She killed several husbands, as well as several of her adopted children, and became a very rich woman after collecting their life insurance policies. And like Khaled, she got away with it all. Like the love theives in Japan’s host clubs, she sold romantic dreams to lonely men, only they paid for it with their lives as well as their money. It was an incredibly creepy film–especially the visit to the site of Belle’s farm, where the family that now lives there keeps finding bones in the ground around the house and the youngest child speaks to several ghosts. The film was a bit heavy-handed with the creepiness, though, which threatened to make it almost cartoonish.

Tonight I’ll be seeing a much more male film–B.I.K.E., about a certain bike subculture in New York City, and tomorrow the film I have been most waiting to see: Walking to Werner. More soon.

For the film Muskrat Lovely, which is indeed like a real-life Christopher Guest mockumentary:

Last year at Silverdocs there was a wireless connection set up in the Cinema Lounge and that’s where I blogged from. This year I’m still blogging from the Cinema Lounge but the connection this time is a citywide free wi-fi for Silver Spring. I didn’t know my hometown had already made that leap. So greetings from the free Silver Spring wi-fi-enabled Silverdocs Cinema Lounge.
I met Chuck at the screening of What Remains, a film that had me near-tears throughout, mostly just for the portrayal of a good fucking life. It’s about photographer Sally Mann, who lives on a farm in Virginia with the love of her life, taking pictures of her gorgeous kids, gorgeous land…oh and dead decaying bodies. But it’s a portrait of a life lived so fulfillingly that all I could think was geez I have done something wrong in life, why don’t we all live like this?
I also caught La Persona de Leo N., a really lovely little film about a transsexual in Venice, Italy, undergoing his sex change operation. Next I’m off to Muskrat Lovely, the film about the Miss Outdoors Pageant in the Chesapeake area of Maryland which is rumored to be like a real-life Best in Show. I’ll let you know…

I was unable to extricate myself from supersoaking my nephew on the front lawn long enough to make it to Silverdocs opening night. Or rather, I decided not to go. The movie was Boffo! Tinseltown’s Bombs and Blockbusters, which had little appeal to me because I anticipated it would feel like sitting through one of my intro film classes. Much as last year’s opening night film about the history of midnight movies. Opening night films are rarely the best films in a fest; rather they are usually the one with the broadest possible appeal. There are many films I’m looking forward to here, but this wasn’t one of them.

But here’s my view from when I showed up to pick up my pass an hour after the movie started.

I was most disappointed to have to miss Walking to Werner at IFFBoston, but am happy to see it’s on the schedule at Silverdocs, so I’ll get a second chance. There are quite a few docs in the lineup that were also at IFFBoston, which shows how impressive the Boston fest has become. In addition to Werner, American Blackout, Fuck, and The Trials of Darryl Hunt all played at IFFBoston. And somehow I managed to miss every single one. Here are some of the others I’m looking forward to: The Great Happiness Space, about a strange brothel in Japan where the clients are women and the service they pay for from their male prostitutes is attention and “love” behavior, not sex. Also looking forward to Only Belle, a terrifying-sounding film about a female serial killer I never heard of (just look at that frickin’ image via the link..*shudder*), Chairman George, about a Greek-Canadian statistican who sings in perfect Mandarin Chinese and who follows his dream by taking off to China to try to perform at the Olympics, Railroad All-Stars, about a soccer team of prostitutes in Guatemala City, Paper Dolls, about four Philipino transvestites who move to Israel and start a drag show, Blood of the Yingahou District, about HIV-infected children in China, a place not usually associated with the disease, and Muskrat Lovely, about the “Miss Outdoors Pageant” in my beloved home state of Maryland.

Also looking forward to lots of great parties and food, if this year is anything like last year’s festival…

Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2006 18:28:23 -0400
From: Public Relations

Subject: Re: SILVERDOCS 2006 Media Accreditation

You are now accredited as press to attend the SILVERDOCS: AFI/ Discovery
Channel Documentary Festival and can pick up your badge upon registration.
All tickets for special events are subject to availability and you will be
notified ASAP regarding your request.

Best,

Rebekah Welsh
PR Coordinator
SILVERDOCS: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival
publicrelations@silverdocs.com
301-495-6704

Hi. I have zero will to blog these days but thought I’d pop back in to share with you a video that my wonderful friend Seasull made for me at the Comedians of Comedy show at the Paradise. You see, I convinced him and Tangerine to go, then I backed out because … something suddenly came up. So they went to see MY show which featured MY man Zach Galifianakis, a show they would never have gone to without my instigating the whole thing. But despite the fact that I ditched them, Seasull was thoughtful enough (or drunk enough) to push his way to the front of the signing table to get my man Zach to record this special greeting for me. Unfortunately you can’t hear a word of it, but he says something along the lines of “Hi Cynthia, thank you for the awkward conversation, and we really didn’t like you.” This is of course in reference to my awkward, starry-eyed conversation with him and Brian Posehn at Silverdocs.

See my man on video here.

Aside from all this, Seasull and Tangerine said the show was great, so you should check it out when it rolls through your town. Especially if you are looking for a man, as I hear it was a total sausagefest.

I know I promised a final Silverdocs wrapup a few days ago but I have had trouble working up the enthusiasm to rewrite it after losing the whole thing through a crack in cyberspace. So I will just post a few points here.

• Shorts. I like shorts. Possibly better than features. Because the short format is so useless commercially, it means there are no constraints on the artist and they are free to be as creative/weird/different as they want to be. So you’re far more likely to see something exciting and innovative when watching shorts than when watching features. That said, my favorite short at Silverdocs was Jay Rosenblatt’s Phantom Limb. Have you seen a Jay Rosenblatt film? They are not easy to see, but if you can, see some. Especially The Smell of Burning Ants. But his new one, Phantom Limb, is just as disturbing and emotionally wrenching as his others. There is one scene that I will remember for the rest of my life. The film is a meditation on the guilt he has felt his whole life over the death of his young brother when he was a child. Their parents never talked about it, and he thought it was his fault because he used to tease his brother. The film is very heavy and oppressive…until the sheep-shearing scene. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a sheep sheared (I haven’t) but the sheep is sitting on its hind legs, held between the shearer’s legs as he bends over it and runs the clippers over it. The sheep struggles now and then. In the film, it is one extended take, in slow-motion, of the man shearing the sheep, as a woman in voiceover reads a long list of the stages of grief. It sounds simple, and it is, but I was sobbing by the time the scene was over. Sobbing. The shearing is certainly something the sheep doesn’t want done, but in this context, in slow-motion, with the grief stages being read in voiceover, it gives the impression of someone flailing and struggling with grief while someone holds them, caresses them, forcibly sloughs off their pain and baggage, revealing the pink and tender skin beneath. And the sheep finally totters off, naked and vulnerable, like someone who has been through a particularly gut-wrenching therapy session, newly sensitive to everything around him.

• My pick for best of the fest would be the same as the jury’s pick: Darwin’s Nightmare. It is an incredibly upsetting film that exposes the way Europe (and Russia, but there didn’t seem to be any Americans) exploits Tanzania for its fish. Perch, to be exact. Tanzania on the one hand is glad that the foreigners want their fish–it’s brought jobs to the area. But the Tanzanians are still starving, they can’t afford the very fish they catch and sell to the foreigners, and the film gets into all of the intricate ways the fishing industry is exploiting and destroying the area. It is a political film that focuses on the small, intimate details more than the big ones: the young boys savagely fighting each other for a handful of rice, in a town overrun by rich Europeans taking fish from their waters. The mother who is grateful for her job of airing out decaying fish carcasses (while standing in a pool of mud and maggots). The prostitutes visited by European and Russian pilots. The prostitute who was killed by one of them. The children in the alleys sniffing glue made from melted fish packaging. It goes on and on and on.

• A few tips from a panel called “Working the Festival Circuit”. First, and this was actually one tip I knew from working with the Boston Jewish Film Festival: don’t make a film that is 50 minutes to an hour long. It is an awkward length and is difficult to program at festivals. Make a short film or a feature. That said, festivals do often show some hour-long films, but it better be good if it’s going to be that length. A short film can be run in a shorts package or before a feature, but an hour-long film is not going to be run before a feature and is too long to be part of a shorts package. Something to consider. Another interesting point that came out of the panel was some concern among filmmakers that festival programmers get all their films from other festivals and rarely accept films that are blindly submitted, therefore when they send in their $50 submission fee, they are really only subsidizing the festival. This is a legitimate concern that was sort of dodged by the festival people on the panel. I spoke with a festival director later in the week, and he admitted that filmmakers should be concerned. But he added that every programmer would love to get a great film in the mail, submitted blindly. It just doesn’t happen often. This is an interesting issue to me because it is currently a controversial issue in the poetry world as well, where some poets are criticizing poetry contests that they say are “fixed”–you send in your submission fee but usually the prize goes to friends of the judges or well-known poets. There’s a whole website devoted to it.

• It seemed I gravitated toward foreign films at the festival, and among those there seemed to be a theme of divisions/walls/barriers. First there was Podul Peste Tisa, a Romanian film about a bridge between Romania and the Ukraine that was demolished by retreating Germans at the end of WWII and was never repaired, separating families for as much as 50 years. Some yell across the river to each other as their only form of communication. The film follows the saga of attempts to rebuild the bridge–so much red tape that the bridge, now built, is still closed and no one is allowed to cross. Another film about divisions/walls was Good Times, about the wall built by Israel in Abu Dis, a Palestinian village near Jerusalem. Again this is a political film that focuses on the minutiae: the old muslim women struggling to climb over the first incarnation of the wall which was short and crumbling, the Israeli soldiers haphazardly enforcing the barrier, at times joking with the crossing Palestinians, the shop owners who depend on business from people of both sides crossing the border, and, finally, the silence and desolation after a new 8-foot wall with no breaks is built to replace the old crumbling one.

• Grizzly Man. I have surprisingly little to say about this one. I was very excited to see him in person, but I was not bowled over by the film. Treadwell is clearly insane, but I was a bit irritated with Herzog’s treatment of him. Herzog acted as if he knew the man inside and out, kept comparing him to Klaus Kinski on the set of Aguirre the Wrath of God, claimed Treadwell was related to Aguirre–it was as if Herzog was claiming ownership, or paternity, and lamenting his child’s silly attitude about nature, an attitude that got him killed, and if he only were as smart as Herzog he would have survived. But in reality, Treadwell did survive for 13 years with the Grizzlies. That fact is not felt in the film. And he did know exactly how dangerous it was, he said it many times, he told loved ones that if he never returned, it was what he wanted. He had mental problems and couldn’t handle the world of people, and if he wanted to die with the Grizzlies, who is Herzog to say that’s wrong? Or worse, to claim that he didn’t understand the danger of his situation? Herzog’s pursuit of Treadwell and his claims to understand him better than anyone else (his exact words), to have a special bond with him, are much like Treadwell’s claims to know and understand the Grizzly better than anyone else. And both are equally naive, I think. Both overly romanticize their subjects. Treadwell studies and tracks the Grizzly, Herzog studies and tracks what Tarkovsky called the “holy fool”. The film is more like a letter to Treadwell than a work of art, a bit didactic and over the top, and not the mysterious work of art that Herzog’s older documentaries like Land of Silence and Darkness are. Maybe as artists age they don’t have time any more for subtlety.

That’s all I can muster for now, but I’m sure I’ll have Silverdocs spasms here and there in the near future.

Patton Oswalt has a blog. A real live frequently-updated personal blog. He’s the guy on the Comedians of Comedy tour with Brian Posehn and Zach Galifianakis (and also a regular on King of Queens). I learned of the blog when watching the film about them at Silverdocs, where in one scene Brian and Patton are poking around a comic book store in Portland, Ore., and Zach (who was not supposed to be in town yet) suddenly walks by. They ask him how he found them, and Zach says “I read Patton’s blog.”

Later today I will have my final Silverdocs wrap-up post, assuming the Internet Gods don’t fuck me over again and eat my post.