99. White Material (Claire Denis)
Isabelle Huppert continues her long streak as France’s toughest and greatest actress in a seemingly effortless and unsettling portrayal of a coffee plantation owner in an unnamed colonized African country who is obsessed with finishing her harvest despite the unraveling and chaos of the social structure. This is the masterpiece of the French Festival. It’s a film rich with ambiguities and points of view, and vivid in the smallest details and in the landscapes of this soon to be forsaken land. This is the most frightening and insightful film I’ve seen of all the movies trying to come to grips with the chaos of post-colonial Africa.
98. Leaving (French – Catherine Corsini)
Explores in short, and often blackout scenes, moments of a wealthy wife and mother falling headlong into a passionately sexual love affair with a working class builder. It also explores the fine line between clever and stupid. Kristin Scott Thomas is as good as she can be in this melodrama – and we’re collectively proud of actresses willing to get naked at 50. Sergi Lopez, who usually plays villains, nicely underplays the lover, but is he really worth all this? Her final dissolution is preordained by a gunshot we hear at the start of the film. This precedes the story, which is then revealed in flashback. It’s a nice touch. But it really is just becomes a tale of a mentally ill women. There’s no real reason for the affair (unless she really likes a good hairy butt). What about her kids, her practice, her background, her relationship – anything? We see it all, and there are some fun and squirmy moments. But in the end it just doesn’t add up, and it’s strains credibility in a big way.
97. Two for the Wave
96. Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)
Dumont explores the fine line between martyrdom, fanaticism, faith, and delusion in this meditative (some will call slow paced) look at a young Christian fanatic who befriends a group of ‘terrorist’ Muslims. Throughout there’s a degree of sexual threat and violence so present in his films, as well as the very physical presence of nature, of weather, of the elements. It’s an edgy mix, yet most of the time we’re looking at the world through the vulnerable searching eyes and face of Julie Sokolowski as Céline/Hadewijch, the latter being a 13th century mystic who also sublimated courtship for a love to God, and who also took no vows as a nun. As Celine, the girl is sent from the convent for being too extreme in her devotion. She begins to naively explore the real world. Like the earlier poet and mystic Hadewijch – into whom she slowly seems to be transforming – Celine is also from a very wealthy family, a fact that sets up another set of questions and contrasts in this contemporary context. I love looking at the faces director Dumont offers up, and as always he sets up situations that call out for argument and conversation. The ending is sudden and unexpected, and you are left to question not only what might happen next, but to where exactly has the director led us.
95. Making Plans for Lena (French – Christophe Honoré)
Airless, complex, chattering, dysfunctional, and destructive – and I mean that in a good way. That is to say it’s what the director intends. The audience will measure its own family delusions, illusions, ideas of love, and ability to survive against these mostly unsympathetic characters. I liked it, but didn’t enjoy it. This is something the French do well. Featuring the Chiara Mastroianni, daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, who mostly got her father’s looks, which she uses bravely and unglamorously in this film written for her.
Also screening at BUFF was New England Institute of Art professor/musician/actor Tim Jackson’s feature documentary Radical Jesters, which Feder described as a look at “outsider, prankster artists… people who use humor and shocking tactics to put their point across.” They’re also called “culture jammers.”
Radical Jesters investigates the media hoaxing and culture jamming of artists such as Alan Abel, who convinced HBO that he had the smallest penis in the world; the Surveillance Camera Players, who put on full plays in front of public surveillance equipment; Boston-based art activist Milan Kohout; Improv Everywhere; artist Ron English, and comedian John Hargrave, among others.
Even the screening of Radical Jesters brought unexpected surprises. Before the film began, a “Mr. Cockburn” representing “Fox Searchlight Distribution” stood before the audience in a full suit to warn against the use of recording devices. When Mr. Cockburn finished his speech, he made his way up the side aisle and forcibly ejected a “patron” with a video camera. As the film began, there were several camera flashes from the back of the theater, adding to the crowd’s amusement.
Director/producer Jackson was on hand to answer questions after the screening, and two of the jammers profiled in his film joined him at the front of the theater.
Jackson explained his hope for the film: “I wanted to do something that would be interesting for art students so that they could see what sort of work was being done outside of galleries. I also wanted people to be amused and also a bit angry while at the same time raising questions about media credibility and public gullibility. The short profiles serve to keep people entertained, curious, and inquisitive in the hopes that they find out more on their own.”
Given the recent exhibition of artist Shepard Fairey’s work at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art, public interest in raising awareness via guerilla tactics is high, and it was high the day of the screening, when discussion heated up regarding when culture jamming becomes commercialized. Does the selling of hats and t-shirts change Fairey’s message? How does the culture jammer who unexpectedly finds commercial success/acceptance continue to define his or her own legitimacy as an artist against the establishment?
“A lot of it is becoming more mainstream as marketing agencies step up their own guerilla efforts,” observed Jackson. “I’m surprised by how few people in general are aware of interventionist practices, where you intervene on the streets, in the media, or in the general spectacle of things. The shorts that preceded my film dealt with graffiti and stenciling, and they’re definitely in the same vein. But those are also definitely illegal, while the practices I document are not necessarily so. They’re on the edge.”
As for future plans, Jackson has one front and center. “I’m making a documentary on the life of singer-songwriter Robin Lane. I wanted to do something about art and struggle and women. Robin and I worked together in the group Robin Lane and the Chartbusters. We were the 11th song ever aired on MTV back in 1981, and were at the top of the heap of the new wave punk scene. She’s working now with women trauma survivors doing songwriting. She’s very gifted, and that hasn’t gone away. There’s going to be a great soundtrack.”
In terms of how he will get this film made while teaching full-time Jackson said, “I’m just a do-it-yourself guy,” joking that his first career as a musician made little money and adding, “I worked as an actor for little to no money, I worked as a teacher in which you never make what you want to make, so I decided to try something in which I could actually lose money. You put them all together, that’s how you make a life.”
I did an interview with this mag. Here’s the Link.
Here’s the text
Also screening at BUFF was New England Institute of Art professor/musician/actor Tim Jackson’s feature documentary Radical Jesters, which Feder described as a look at “outsider, prankster artists… people who use humor and shocking tactics to put their point across.” They’re also called “culture jammers.”
Radical Jesters investigates the media hoaxing and culture jamming of artists such as Alan Abel, who convinced HBO that he had the smallest penis in the world; the Surveillance Camera Players, who put on full plays in front of public surveillance equipment; Boston-based art activist Milan Kohout; Improv Everywhere; artist Ron English, and comedian John Hargrave, among others.
Even the screening of Radical Jesters brought unexpected surprises. Before the film began, a “Mr. Cockburn” representing “Fox Searchlight Distribution” stood before the audience in a full suit to warn against the use of recording devices. When Mr. Cockburn finished his speech, he made his way up the side aisle and forcibly ejected a “patron” with a video camera. As the film began, there were several camera flashes from the back of the theater, adding to the crowd’s amusement.
Director/producer Jackson was on hand to answer questions after the screening, and two of the jammers profiled in his film joined him at the front of the theater.
Jackson explained his hope for the film: “I wanted to do something that would be interesting for art students so that they could see what sort of work was being done outside of galleries. I also wanted people to be amused and also a bit angry while at the same time raising questions about media credibility and public gullibility. The short profiles serve to keep people entertained, curious, and inquisitive in the hopes that they find out more on their own.”
Tyshawn Taylor’s trailer is on IMDB. Check it out.
The listing is here. They wrote a nice description.
Here’s a picture in front of the screen where it was shown.
As a treat I took almost the whole audience to lunch!! We went to an old diner where Alan regailed us with some of his many stories of antics past
Kristin & Ty (editors)
Me, Alan and Jeanne Abel at the Festival
You can right click to enlarge
Photo by Dennis Jackson
Radical Jesters is screening at the Northwest Folklife Festival Films in Seattle and I’ll be there.On May 5th
This from my hometown paper just as the film was about to have its first screening in Cambridge.
Film, Radical Jester's Press
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