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Also check out
MIFF
Survival Guide 2004,
and
MIFF 2004 SCOUTING
REPORT, Part 1 |
MIFF 2004 SCOUTING REPORT: Part 1
By Joel Johnson
The Maine International Film Festival (MIFF) has become a regular part of
life for my wife and I since the festival first started in 1998. It has been
a unique opportunity to experience many different places, do different
things, and live in other times—all vicariously, of course. It has also
offered the opportunity to meet and understand the creative process of some
of the world’s most talented filmmakers. The challenge posed by nearly every
film festival (and this one is growing into a pretty diverse film festival)
is being able to make sure that one sees the best that the festival has to
offer. Each festival goer may have very different ideas as to what he or she
feels constitutes “the best.” This festival has given an Audience Award to
the top vote getter amongst the festival’s films, and nearly every eligible
film has had someone to champion its being the audience favorite. This is
the first installment in a scouting report to this year’s MIFF. This is not
intended to be a step-by-step guide as to which films to see or even how to
reach the decision as to which films to see. It is a rundown on the events
and some background material on the films to be shown at this year’s
festival. There is a lot that is not known about some of the films since
some are the product of shoe-string truly independent filmmakers who are
just starting out and not by established filmmakers for whom a relatively
inexpensive movie may have a budget of several million dollars. I have
divided the festival program into groups of films. This first installment
will address films that focus on music, on Maine/Maine filmmakers, on films
that show the work of actress Verna Bloom, and on films that display the
talent of this year’s Mid-Life Achievement Award winner Ed Harris.
Hopefully, you will be able to attend at least some of this year’s festival.
However, if you can’t or even if you can, you may want to check out your
Wolf Moon Press team writing reports…notes…distress signals from very dark
places as we overdose (again) on cinema. Enjoy!
MIFF Honors Ed Harris
The 2004 Maine International Film Festival (MIFF) will honor Ed Harris with
its Mid-Life Achievement Award. He has appeared in more than fifty films on
both the big and small screens in an acting career that has lasted thirty
years. He is a very versatile actor who has played lovers, madmen, heroes,
astronauts, ordinary people, villains, men of war, buffoons, and folks just
trying to get by. Consistently, he has delivered very real and memorable
human characters regardless of whether he played the film’s lead or a
smaller supporting part. He has been nominated for Academy Awards for
Apollo 13 (1995), for The Truman Show (1998), for Pollock
(2000), and for The Hours (2002). He has been nominated for several
other acting awards and won a Golden Globe and the National Board of Review
Award for supporting actor for his performance in The Truman Show.
Five of Mr. Harris’s films will be shown during this year’s festival.
Pollock, a film that Mr. Harris directed and produced in addition to playing
the acclaimed artist Jackson Pollock, is one of two mature or perhaps
mid-life films. Pollock is a remarkable achievement in that rarely
has an actor so successfully directed while performing such a demanding role
as in this film. The film shows Pollock’s rise to prominence, his critical
and volatile relationship with Lee Krasner (Best Supporting Actress
Oscar-winner Marcia Gay Harden), and the demons that plagued him. Appearing
with Pollock may be the most anticipated film of the festival: a
twenty-minute segment from the unfinished Empire Falls. Based on
Maine author Richard Russo’s novel and filmed primarily in the Maine
communities Waterville and Skowhegan, this will no doubt attract great
interest from both film fans and the many local residents who worked on the
film. While statements from members of the production team have been
glowing, this will be an early opportunity for members of the public to get
a look at what everyone involved worked so hard on. Agnieszka Holland’s
The Third Miracle (1999) features
another outstanding contemporary performance from Mr. Harris. He portrays
Father Frank Shore, a jaded priest, sent to examine the sainthood claim on
behalf of a devout woman who emigrated from Europe to the United States
following World War II. This thought-provoking film was very much
underappreciated. Mr. Harris will be presented with the Mid-Life Achievement
Award at this screening.
The tribute includes three films directed by significant voices in
independent film featuring an Ed Harris who was just establishing himself as
an actor recognized by filmgoers. Victor Nunez, best known for Ulee’s
Gold (1997) which played at last year’s MIFF in tribute to Peter Fonda,
has produced quality regional cinema based in Florida since the 1970s. In
Nunez’s adaptation of a John D. MacDonald’s novel, Harris plays the lead, a
newspaperman tempted by A Flash of Green
(1984), opposite Blair Brown and Richard Jordan. The second early Ed Harris
film was directed by Louis Malle. Malle, one of the French New Wave
directors, made several outstanding English-language films in the latter
part of his career. One of these films was Alamo
Bay (1985), which featured Harris as a Vietnam veteran
threatened with the loss of his livelihood to immigrant Vietnamese
fisherman. He finds himself fighting not only the Vietnamese but also his
girlfriend (Amy Madigan). The third film was Walker
(1987) by director Alex Cox, perhaps best known for Sid and Nancy
(1986) and Repo Man (1984). Cox cast Harris as nineteenth-century
American adventurer and soldier of fortune William Walker, who goes to
Nicaragua to lead a coup d’état and set up a government at the behest of
Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle). Walker is a product of its time and the
1980s were a time of another American intervention in Nicaragua as the
Reagan administration supported (illegally in the Iran-Contra scandal) the
Contra insurgency against the Sandinista government. The similarities
between these two American interventions in Nicaragua were pointedly drawn,
and Cox’s sensibilities were quite clear. The film begins as a
straightforward historical portrayal of William Walker only to change into
an anachronistic satire. While A Flash of Green and Alamo Bay
were only modestly successful, critics and filmgoers alike were definitely
not enamored with Walker. The negative reaction the film received is
probably one reason why there is no usable print, and the film will only be
able to be shown in projected video. It will be interesting to see if the
nearly twenty years and the war in the Middle East make any difference in
the appreciation of the film. A self-described expert on William Walker,
writing a commentary on the International Movie Database (www.IMDb.com),
noted that with repeated viewings the film’s strengths stood out and that
Harris was excellent as the “Gray-eyed Man of Destiny.”
Verna Bloom Tribute
Actress Verna Bloom appeared before MIFF audiences in 2002 and 2003 to
discuss Peter Fonda’s film The Hired Hand (1971). She had played
Fonda’s estranged wife for whom he seeks to work as a hired hand after he
has wandered about the West engaged in activities of dubious legality. This
year the festival honors her career by showing her in three different films.
She appears in Clint Eastwood’s High
Plains Drifter (1973), his own follow-up to the man-with-no-name
character he played in Sergio Leone’s “Spaghetti Westerns.” She plays one of
the townspeople who are coping with the mysterious and dangerous Stranger
(Eastwood) that they need and yet can’t control.
In Martin Scorsese’s The Last
Temptation of Christ (1988), Ms. Bloom plays Mary, the mother of
Jesus. She is a supporting character as the dramatic action is centered on
Jesus (Willem Dafoe), Judas (Harvey Keitel), and Mary Magdalene (Barbara
Hershey). This film, based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, was
controversial when it was released and still is because it addresses Jesus’
duality of being both wholly human and wholly divine. This is a uniquely
Christian concept that radically departs from all other religions that
maintain a boundary between God in heaven and humanity here on earth.
However, interpreting exactly what being both wholly divine and wholly human
means has been divisive and the source of many heresy charges. Scorsese’s
film is not directly derived from Biblical accounts as was Mel Gibson’s
recent The Passion of the Christ. The Last Temptation of Christ
is a reimagined telling of the story of Jesus. Both, however, show how Jesus
suffered to fulfill His destiny.
But perhaps the best opportunity to see her center stage will be in Haskell
Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969). She
plays a young mother from Appalachia who migrates to Chicago during the
1960s. There she meets television news cameraman John Cassellis (Robert
Forster). Her struggle to provide for her family is one of two parallel
story strands in the film. The second strand is Cassellis trying to
reconcile his work as a news cameraman. Distinguishing the lines between
news and entertainment and between recording suffering and actually doing
something about it are as pertinent today as they were thirty-five years ago
when the film was released. The two strands intertwine as 1968’s traumatic
Democratic Convention takes place in Chicago. Medium Cool was not
considered a commercial success. It was a serious film addressing complex
political and ethical issues burdened by an X-rating (It now bears an
R-rating, like its Oscar-winning contemporary Midnight Cowboy that
was also released with an X-rating), so the film received little support
from its distributor, Paramount Pictures. Despite these problems, the film
received favorable reviews, a Director’s Guild nomination for Haskell
Wexler, and is now designated for film preservation through the National
Film Registry. I think this film may be one of the festival’s hidden
treasures.
A rare treat for festival goers this year will be the staged reading of Beth
Eisen’s comedy script Surviving Hemingway. Staged readings provide an
opportunity to appreciate a critical part of the creative process of
filmmaking—the writing—and bring actors, writers, and the audience together.
The Nantucket International Film Festival has made staged readings a major
focus of their festival. Ms. Bloom has agreed to be one of the reading
actors. This process will give members of the audience a taste of the film
that may come to life on a screen near you sometime in the future.
Supporting Maine Filmmaking
(The Maine Sidebar)
The word Maine in the Maine International Film Festival has stood not
only for the location of the festival and where the films were going to be
shown but also for where filmmakers came from and for where films were set.
This year continues that tradition with the first Saturday of the festival
filled with events nurturing and saluting Maine filmmakers. The events begin
at 11 a.m. with the Screenwriting
Symposium and the presentation of the
Maine Screenwriting Award.
Last year’s symposium featured a lively panel including author and
screenwriter Richard Russo and longtime Martin Scorsese collaborator Jay
Cocks. The symposium will be followed at 12:30 p.m. by the
27th Annual
Maine Student Film and Video Festival, displaying the budding
filmmaking talents of Mainers from grade school through high school.
The Maine Filmmakers Forum runs
between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. allowing nine different filmmakers to
present and discuss their short films. The discussions and the films that
will be shown are all wild cards, and this means that the quality can vary
widely. No doubt, there will be a few discoveries that will be very
gratifying. The Celebration of Maine Filmmakers Reception will follow at
5:00 p.m.
These events, however, are not the end of the festival’s support for Maine
filmmakers and films that tell Maine stories. There are several films that
have either been produced by Maine filmmakers or tell Maine stories or fit
both categories littered throughout the alphabetic listing of the films in
the program. I have grouped them together creating what I call the Maine
Sidebar. I must confess that I have included Vermont films in this listing
because the settings are similar and the environment in which to develop as
a filmmaker is similar.
Vermont filmmaker Nora Jacobson wrote and directed
Nothing Like Dreaming (2004).
The film follows the unlikely friendship between an alienated teenaged girl
trying to find herself and an inveterate scavenger trying to find something
and/or someone. Their collaboration leads to the creation of a “fire organ,”
an instrument that produces pure tones by sending flames up a metal tube.
Jacobson’s film has just started the festival circuit appearing in the Lake
Placid Film Festival. After MIFF, the film will appear at the Woods Hole
Film Festival in late July. The upshot of this is that there’s little
information available from people who have seen the film. However, Ms.
Jacobson’s 1999 film Letters to My Mother’s Early Lovers captured the
MIFF Audience Award. In Nothing Like Dreaming, George Woodard, who
starred in Letters to My Mother’s Early Lovers, plays Sonny Gale, the
artistic ne’er-do-well. The teenaged Emma Erickson is played by Morgan
Bicknell, who is making her first film appearance. Fans of Ms. Jacobson’s
earlier film will want to check out her latest work.
Ziad Hamzeh follows up his modest kick boxing drama Shadow Glories
(2001) set in Lewiston, Maine, with a documentary
The Letter (2003) about Lewiston’s racial and cultural
tensions following the influx of more than 1000 Muslim Somalis into the
primarily white Franco-American community of about 40,000. The film’s title
comes from an open letter from the Mayor of Lewiston to the Somali
community, asking them to discourage further relocation of immigrant Somalis
to Lewiston. Soon Lewiston was the subject of news stories about a Somali
invasion and hostility to immigrants. White supremacist groups flocked to
the community to openly recruit new members. Although the director had never
done documentary filmmaking before, he had unique language facility that
enabled him to gain the trust of all sides and, eschewing the traditional
narrator, let the participants and the events speak for themselves, creating
a sense of escalating tension. Hamzeh has recorded Maine’s struggle to
adjust to diversity. The film has garnered several favorable reviews. The
issues it raises continue to be pertinent.
Veteran MIFF attendees may have seen the sneak preview of scenes of this
made-in-Maine feature in 2000. The finished shot-on-video
Baby, It’s Cold Outside (2004)
finally arrives at MIFF this year. This comedy is based on the high price
love demands from poor Holly Hawkes, a hotel manager in Florida, who marries
a Christmas wreath maker and moves to frigid and snowy northern Maine to
live with her husband. The fish-out-of-water concept has successfully
powered many a screen comedy, and here the Floridian is first exposed to
snow and sub-zero temperatures. Several familiar Maine filmmakers and actors
were involved in making this film. The director Polly Bennell (or at least a
director by that name) previously made a couple of documentary shorts for
the Film Board of Canada in the mid-80s. This is one of those films that is
a vague shadow on the radar screens of those who track films for fun and
profit. These are, of course, just the types of films that appear regularly
at regional film festivals. It is difficult to establish expectations since
so often little is known about those involved either in front of or behind
the camera. Local fans definitely have an edge in judging the merits of
viewing such a film. Sometimes, however, this is where a film or a filmmaker
is discovered on the road to prominence.
Similar comments could also be made about director Jim Cole’s
Day of the Scorpion (2004). Jim is
a young filmmaker who should be familiar to many MIFF regulars. He presented
his film The Girl Who Would Be Russian (2001) at the 2001 MIFF. His
current film is named for his lead character’s Scorpio astrology sign.
Teddy, a bright college student, finds himself trapped in a downward spiral
of drugs, violence, and betrayal. It will be interesting to see the progress
that’s been made since The Girl Who Would Be Russian. The earlier
film had been an overly ambitious film that covered multiple storylines,
including some unlikely premises and placed a very heavy burden on amateur
actors to sell the film. The current film seems to share lofty ambitions
with its predecessor, but it remains to be seen whether it will be more
successful in engaging the audience.
The late Maine novelist and poet Ruth Moore (1903-1989) is the subject of a
28 minute film entitled
Ruth Moore: I Have Seen Horizons (2002). She grew up on a Maine
coastal island and her writing told of lives lived on Maine’s rocky coast.
One of her novels, Spoonhandle, was made into the film Deep Waters
(1948). If you thought that Empire Falls or Peyton Place
(1957) were the first big Hollywood productions to film in Maine, you should
know that Dana Andrews, Jean Peters, Cesar Romero, and a young Dean
Stockwell were here filming in Vinalhaven, Rockland, and Belfast years
earlier. Her work continues to be read, touching people’s lives years after
her death and decades after her books were written. Maine writers Sanford
Phippen and Gary Lawless help to explain her life and work.
My so-called Maine Sidebar also includes a handful of documentaries that
tell very specific Maine stories. If the films and filmmakers I noted
earlier make very faint impressions on the film radar screen, these are
totally under-the-radar. The festival goer will simply have to decide if
these subjects seem interesting and hope that the filmmakers can deliver an
interesting and informative film. Colby College French majors have
interviewed the surviving immigrant Quebecois and their descendants who were
part of a large Franco-American community in Waterville. The resulting film
Les Francos de Waterville (2004), ninety minutes culled by
director Arthur Greenspan from over sixty hours of footage, describes the
community they formed and the discrimination they encountered. The artistic
legacy of Maine’s Indians is the focus of a forty-seven minute documentary
Song of the Drum: The Petroglyphs of Maine (2004) by Ray
Gerber. The film shows rock carvings primarily by the Passamaquoddy tribe.
David Brook’s The Eccentric Artist Tour 2003 takes us along on
a bus tour to the studios and rural environments of central Maine artists
Joe Ascrizzi, Bo Atkinson, Jane Burke, Alan Crichton, James Fangbone, Nancy
Jacob, David McLaughlin, Doug Nye, Abby Shahn, Wally Warren, and Kris Wills.
It obviously reveals me as living a benighted life—probably too much time
spent in darkened theaters—but I can’t place any of the names with any
specific art forms though some of the names sound vaguely familiar. (It’s
probably more likely, however, that whatever sense of name recognition I
feel is totally unrelated to any artwork.) If these artists are familiar to
you or you just like to learn about art and, especially, eccentric artists,
this may definitely be the film for you.
MIFF Music Sidebar
Music plays a significant role in most films. The Maine International
Film Festival has established a tradition of focusing on music, not
just as something from which to establish mood or time period but as the
subject for a film. In recognition of this continuing tradition, I have
decided to group those films together that either focus on music as a
documentary subject or make music a central part of a dramatic film. This
amounts to my own version of a Music Sidebar as groupings of films at
festivals are called.
This will also mark the third consecutive year the festival has included a
jazz concert in which the performers and their performance can be enjoyed
for their own sake without the intermediating medium of film. The Katy
Roberts Quintet (pianist Katy Roberts, trumpeter Rassul Siddik, saxophonist
Salim Washington, bassist Radu Olahu Ben Judah, and drummer Joe Link) will
be performing on Friday evening July 16th at the Waterville Opera House.
This group is familiar with making music for the movies. There are three
short films in the festival that feature music by members of the Katy
Roberts Quintet. Art Brut features the music of Rassul Siddik,
Katy Roberts, and others. Romain Boussac’s film shows “primitive art” in
various forms throughout the French countryside. A shorter film Metro
by Boussac follows a jazz saxophonist calling the tune for a pair of
prospective lovers. S. Talibah Kennedy’s When Spirits Dance
shows us the jazz scene in Roxbury, Massachusetts including Salim Washington
from Katy Roberts Quintet. The feature film Karmen Geï
includes musical contributions by Rassul Siddik.
Karmen Geï (2001) is a high-energy, musical version of the
“Carmen” story of love and betrayal set in Senegal. This is one of the few
films in this year’s festival that I have already seen as I was able to see
it at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival. Djeïnaba Diop Gaï plays
the strong-willed, free-spirited beauty who leaves a wake of both men and
women under her erotic spell. She delivers a powerful, athletic performance.
Despite Djeïnaba Diop Gaï’s strong performance, the film is uneven in
telling its story. Magaye Niang, Karmen’s tortured lover policeman Lamine
Diop, seems a more likely candidate for the Don Knotts role in a Senegalese
version of Mayberry RFD, than as a man who would ever have even momentarily
interested the goddesslike Karmen.
Screenwriter Jay Cocks returns to the Maine International Film Festival
introducing the film De-Lovely, a musical biopic about the
legendary composer Cole Porter (Kevin Kline), for which he wrote the script.
The film features several contemporary pop music artists (Alanis Morissette,
Diana Krall, Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, etc) delivering classic Porter
songs. It also tells about the story of his homosexuality and his marital
arrangement with his wife Linda (Ashley Judd). This is an intriguing film,
and the opportunity to hear the engaging and informative Mr. Cocks talk
about it should make it one of the more attractive films in the festival. Of
course, unlike many films in the festival, this one definitely will be
available at a theater near you in the not-too-distant future. As I write
this, the film’s limited release opening is three days away and several
critics have already weighed in. The critical response, so far, is about
equally mixed between detractors and those offering lavish praise.
Few baby—now mature—boomers who considered themselves devotees of rock circa
1970 will be able to resist Festival Express (2003). This film
consists of behind-the-scenes footage and concert footage from a rock
festival train trip across Canada from Toronto to Calgary. The result is a
sort of Woodstock-on-rails. The film features Janis Joplin, The Grateful
Dead, The Band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Sha Na Na among others. The
filmmakers have also spliced in contemporary interviews with some of the
survivors of the free-for-all happenings.
Perhaps the most intriguing music film is Jandek on Corwood
(2003). I have seen the film’s trailer, hit the website, checked it out on
the International Movie Database, and read both MIFF’s blurb and published
reviews. Despite the research, I am really not sure exactly what this film
is about. Jandek is a reclusive and prolific musician who has steadily
released albums of his own unique music on his own label for about
twenty-five years. One reviewer stated that the music would either be
experienced as the most haunting music ever heard or the most annoying. The
filmmakers have decided to let the enigma stay enigmatic by deliberately
avoiding showing Jandek in the film. I’m not sure if the film is more about
the mysterious musician or about those who have tried to develop their own
solutions to the mystery.
Another unique film is Shadow Pleasures (2004), which is an
amalgamation of Michael Ondaatje’s writings, Bhaktimala music, and dance.
Several of Ondaatje’s writings serve as inspiration for interpretation for
these other performance mediums. This seems like an experimental film. I
don’t know how you feel about novel experiences or whether you like being a
guinea pig, but being able to answer affirmatively to those things will
likely have a major bearing on how well you may like this film.
You may not be sure what you are getting yourself into with some of these
films, but This Is Me (2001) delivers a story that shows our
basic humanity underneath it all. Sonia Herman Dolz is a Dutch filmmaker who
has traveled to Spain to make a documentary about transformista
(transvestite) performers in Barcelona. She discovers the “family” that
these performers have created for themselves. She then records the end of an
era, as these performers must cope with the prospect of losing the venue
that has been the center of their lives both on and off stage for decades.
Edith Piaf is a music legend, the French equivalent of Elvis as a cultural
phenomenon (though her music predates rock’n’roll), triumphing over
demeaning origins to become the highest paid performer in the world and then
to die still young at age forty-seven. Even without understanding a single
lyric in her songs, the passion in her voice was undeniable. Edith
Piaf: Her Story, Her Songs (2003) is a tribute to her, combining
French jazz singer Raquel Bitton’s rendition of twenty of her songs, each
chosen to illustrate a segment of Piaf’s life, with archival footage and
interviews with Piaf contemporaries reminiscing about her. If you’ve just
heard snippets of the Little Sparrow’s powerful songs and have never known
much of the life behind the voice, this may be the perfect film to introduce
you to both her music and her life. The film is in English and French with
English subtitles.
Ruth Oxenberg’s Bluegrass Journey
(2003) shines a light on one of American music’s traditional forms that
has never gone away and yet is in the process of making a comeback. The film
charts the music’s origins and its resurgence following the Coen Brothers’
film O Brother, Where Art Thou, but most of the film consists of
performances from the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival and at annual Bluegrass
Music Association meetings. The film also shows the innovation of “Newgrass.”
If you find yourself toe-tapping whenever you hear this music—and who can
resist? —then this may be your best bet for a terrific musical treat.
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