TIM BURTON'S ALICE IN WONDERLAND

"Art isn't easy / every minor detail is a major decision / have to keep things in scale / have to hold to your vision."—Stephen Sondheim

"Vision" is one of those double-edged properties—much like a looking glass—that, at first, promises pleasure for reflecting back something new to the spectator, but which—as is often the case in our fickle and vain consumerist society—eventually offers reflections all too familiar and, thus, undesirable and (dare I say?) unattractive. It's way too easy to demand that Vincent Van Gogh paint us another "Starry Night" rather than face the reflection of our unbridled consumerist desire. In other words, it's far too easy to blame an artist for our dissatisfied appetites. And when it comes to cogent criticism, the effort required to distinguish one from the other is a plummet down the rabbit hole indeed.

Ironically enough, criticism based on consumerist dissatisfaction is just this side of criticism based on a nostalgic adherence to source materials—in this case Lewis Carroll's beloved Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass—and one might even consider these two poles of criticism to bear the polarized countenance of Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. So far, what I'm hearing in response to Tim Burton's inflection of the Alice story is the sibling tussle between those two perspectives; elbows to the ribs and all. Perhaps much of this tussle could have been avoided had Burton elected to entitle his project Alice in Underland?—which, as far as I'm concerned, would have worked much better, been more exact, and dissolved many an expectation, evening the playing field.

While Twitch teammate Jim Tudor acknowledges that Tim Burton is "one of the pre-eminent visual stylists in the world of filmmaking", he's quick to side with commercial interests to complain that Burton "has generally had nothing new to say since his earliest, most triumphant works" and that Burton's Alice is a "shockingly conventional tale—a Campbellian hero's journey." As a student of Joseph Campbell's who has watched his influence ebb and flow over the decades, it no longer surprises me when the monomyth is reduced to the "conventional" instead of being recognized appropriately as the source font of cultural inflection for millennia. Such unbridled ennui suffered by so many young critics—wanting something perpetually new from our beleaguered visionaries—seems to forget what Alice learned in Wonderland: "The hurrier I go, the behinder I get." That's a sage warning. In the race for new style, new product, new vision, do we forget to encourage the few visionaries we have? Mileage varies, of course, even when moving way too fast. And hip dismissal such as College Humor's caricature of "Tim Burton's Secret Formula" (via our friends at /Film)—undeniably truthful as far as the truth of caricature warrants and eliciting the expected guffaw—does little in my estimation other than to momentarily supplant genuine vision with kneejerk insight. Granted, kneejerk insight satisfies low attention spans than—here's the word again—deep reflection requires.

As a good friend once told me, "The silent mirror forfeits" and, therefore, in any narrative involving a looking glass, one hopes that the mirror will speak back and that self-reflection will engage how one imagines their identity and how they keep that imagined identity in scale. For me this has long been the presiding lesson of the Lewis Carroll stories: imagination and scale. And—contrary to all the complaints that Burton has drifted too far from the original material—I find he has in fact reinvigorated Carroll's most salient themes, especially through his visual design.

Keeping an imagined identity in scale is the selfsame challenge that presents itself when such beloved literary works as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are adapted—i.e., imagined—for the big screen. It is, afterall, a difficult transition from a little book to a big screen. Industrial compromise requires nibbling first on this and sipping next on that to even make it through the door. In my humble opinion, Tim Burton has imagined a wondrous world playful with scale and expressed it in such a way that it applies to the awkward process by which a young person discovers a confidence that fits (give and take some shrinkage) for them. His Alice in Wonderland is as much a "just-so" story as it is one about "muchness." For those who criticize that he has lost his touch, for crying out loud, go find another visionary and enjoy them for one or two films before your critical ennui sets in and—while you're at it—why not question why your ennui keeps rearing its weary head? For all his obvious failings of repetition (one could also see them as creative reiterations), Burton's works of art remain some of my most anticipated, and the Hollywood landscape would be rendered far more anemic should he be discouraged from expressing his vision because fans want him to make another Nightmare Before Christmas.

Since the silent 1903 filmic adaptation of Alice in Wonderland—currently available for viewing courtesy of BFI—adherence to John Tenniel's illustrations has been a near given and the rule by which adaptations have been evaluated. The popular imaginary has a dear affection for these visualizations, which—again—concern scale, not the least being physical growth. Should Alice be a little blonde-haired girl in a blue dress or can she be—as Burton sees her—a young woman in a blue dress? Reams have been written—and it is widely well-known—that Alice Liddell, Carroll's inspiration, actually had dark hair and a short fringe so from the get-go there has been a wrestling within the popular imaginary of not only how this girl should look like but who she really is. That, after all, is the informing question posed by our hookah-smoking caterpillar. And in Burton's version, the Dormouse's doubt darkens Alice's presence in Underland.

So setting aside all we want from Tim Burton, I'd like to take a look at what he's given us. Tim Burton's achievement in his vision of Alice in Wonderland is to situate self-inquiry against social expectation. His is one of those important tales that warn against the false marriage and that promise a young woman that she can become herself all on her own and without the hindrance of the male. Jim Tudor is quick to reduce this to "a typically anachronistic female movie heroine", which begs a gendered argument against all those typically anachronistic male movie heroes that fanboys never seem to question. I concur more with guest Twitch contributor Mike Sizemore's quite fair observation: "It's also refreshing to see a female lead have so much fun in an adventure while reminding Alice's target audience that doing six impossible things before breakfast is something to be held onto no matter how old you are."

More pertinently, I would argue that like most fairy tales, the Carroll books are not really children's literature and have always been darkly psychological books intended for adults and—as psychology is, in my estimation, organic and evolutionary, anchored in the body—it only stands to follow that the psychological strength of a story will adapt to the zeitgeist of the time. Now some people don't like this. They prefer that a story stay anchored in a certain time and will, let's say, complain that Burton has sexualized a children's story—and that's all very fine and good for unapologetic nostalgists—but, it doesn't strike me that this is what Burton wanted when he re-imagined the story of Alice and—true to his own vision—he has retold the story for our time, for better or worse (and, in this case, admittedly both). The fact that there is an ongoing adjustment throughout the film—a constant struggle to find the right size—speaks I think to the indeterminacy and insecurity of any given time, especially our own.

There are dangers of conflation in the script; but, these dangers have been around since the story first began to be imagined. Some of those conflations have inspired irritation for generations—most notably, the conflation of the Queen of Hearts with the Red Queen—but, such conflations become scriptural strategies that deal not only with the compression of narrative time but narrative image. Conflation and compression, incidentally, are merely different ways of being different sizes. If there is any conflation I object to in Burton's reconfiguration of the Alice tale, it's the worrisome blend of Alice with an armored Joan of Arc. I somewhat understand why Burton stretched this battle for independence towards an image of chivalric militancy against a dragon, even as I concur with Roger Ebert that audiences today require filmmakers to end otherwise involving narratives with "routine and boring action." Ebert asks: "Why does Alice in Wonderland have to end with an action sequence? Characters not rich enough? Story run out? Little minds, jazzed by sugar from the candy counter, might get too worked up without it? Or is it that executives, not trusting their artists and timid in the face of real stories, demand an action climax as insurance? Insurance of what? That the story will have a beginning and a middle but nothing so tedious as an ending?" In my estimation, that's cogent criticism. Fanboys, question your appetite for action and how it hinders vision.

For all these grumpy critics who don't like what Tim Burton has imagined with this story, perhaps they need to nibble on—or sip from—something that will shrink their large heads to a proper scale of imagination? Failures of imagination have more to do with being unable or unwilling to suspend disbelief: the most time-honored of spectatorial requirements. Merely buying a ticket doesn't do it. It isn't that a director is responsible for making a spectator suspend disbelief; that has to be allowed from the spectator himself. And if you're going to be hugging a book too hard or holding on to a desired visualization too intensely, you might not see the mordant and hallucinatory wonder laid out before you, which deserves due respect.

Finally, in terms of characterizations, Mia Wasikowska bears the pale countenance of a young girl turning into a young woman, perhaps forced to by the social demands being placed on her. Her paleness becomes a visual accent to the disturbed colors of Underland. Along with his concern that Alice desperately needs a Wonderland nap, Jim Tudor writes intriguingly about his concern that such pallor merely guises Burton's penchant for cinematic alter-egos. However, truth is, this is a visual element present since Tenniel's illustrations, which even Ebert admits were alarming. "Why," he wondered as a young boy, "did Alice have such deep, dark eye sockets?" Shall we levy a complaint against Lewis Carrol for writing such obvious pallid alter-egos as well? Or is it time to wonder what Alice's exhausted countenance suggests?

Johnny Depp—with customary flair—has become the Mad Hatter and invested a tone of self-doubt that complicates his portrayal with the anguish of someone who is aware of—but has no control over—encroaching madness. Once again I concur with Mike Sizemore: "Traumatized and suffering from split personalities, it's a nice touch that in his few coherent moments he seems aware that he's gone insane allowing Depp to briefly add a little humanity to the character." Contrary to Twitch teammate James Marsh's harsh assessment, this is the first time I've ever felt anything for the character of the Mad Hatter other than bemusement and that's totally due to Depp's pitch-perfect performance. Further, I like that Depp is not immediately recognizable under his costuming and makeup effects. He looks more like Elijah Wood than himself. I will concede, however, that the dance is silly and distracting, but then so is our zeitgeist.

Helena Bonham Carter's grotesque Red Queen hazards a one-note performance; but, then, this suits the character's megalomania. I didn't expect much range from such a petty tyrant. As Knave, Crispin Glover comes across cruel and irreal. The weakest performance, by far—and here I wholeheartedly disagree with James Marsh—was Anne Hathaway as the White Queen. Glenda, she ain't, though she flits around like she's supposed to be. Wrong story, Anne! The other actors, who are primarily voice actors—Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall and Christopher Lee—all do admirable jobs disguising their British celebrities in enlivened portrayals.

I do hold valid Jim Tudor's complaint regarding the eleventh hour shift to 3D; but, again, see this as a consequence of consumer appetites. Studios are struggling to keep moviegoers coming to the theaters and 3D remains an effective lure. I actually intend—in sheer deference to Kurt Halfyard—to watch Alice in Wonderland again, in 2D, more because I find that 3D glasses mute color and I want to see Burton's palette in full array.

In conclusion, I would say, "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!" In other words, beware critics, and see the film for yourself. It may not be your cup of tea, but at least you can say a chair was found for you at the tea party.

Cross-published on Twitch.

SFIAAFF28 2010—Michael Hawley's Documentary Preview

Of the five documentaries I previewed on DVD screener for this year's San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF), my favorite is one doc-purists might disavow. Indeed, when Variety reviewed Uruphong Raksasad's Agrarian Utopia last year they tagged it a narrative feature, while SFIAAFF is showing it under their Documentary Showcase banner. Whatever. Lyrical, advocative and exquisitely shot, this portrait of rice farmers in Northern Thailand shouldn't be missed.

Scenes of rice planting and harvesting are blended with activities like beehive foraging, mushroom cultivation and snake hunting—extracurricular necessities for these farmers who are essentially hired laborers drowning in debt. Raksasad, who is originally from this area, acts as his own cinematographer and what he captures is unforgettable—men hand-threshing rice stalks by the light of a kerosene lamp, time-lapsed electrical storms zooming over verdant paddies, the horseplay of children, the daunting task of training a water buffalo. His "characters" appear unconscious of the camera's presence, making us privy to intimate conversations that frequently revolve around fiscal struggles (and which frequently take place during the acts of cooking and eating). The film is bookended with political rallies that place the farmers' plight in the context of recent upheavals in Thai society. If I have one quibble with Raksasad's film, it's that women's voices are largely absent.

Two other worthwhile SFIAAFF docs fit a more traditional mold, and both concern a Japanese American male with life-changing ties to the U.S. military. Eight years in the army qualified Richard Aoki to become Field Marshall (and an early arms supplier) for the Black Panther Party. Who would have guessed that the iconic marching, drilling and chanting of the Panthers was orchestrated by a self-described "baddest Oriental to come out of West Oakland."

Directors Mike Cheng and Ben Wang filmed Aoki for the last five years of his life and spin a captivating narrative with archival materials, interviews and speeches. Born in San Leandro in 1938, Aoki spent part of his childhood in Topaz Relocation Camp, after which his family moved to Oakland. Following his army stint, he enrolled in Merritt College where he met Panther founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale (the latter appears extensively in this film, along with Panthers communications secretary Kathleen Cleaver). In addition to the Panthers, Aoki was involved in the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and more notoriously, the Third World Liberation Front, which instigated the largest student strike in U.C. Berkeley history. He would end up spending most of his life in academia, while remaining a staunch and greatly admired activist. Curiously, the film makes little mention of Aoki's life outside his activism.

In 2006, Lt. Ehren Watada became the first commissioned officer in the U.S. military to refuse deployment to Iraq. In her incredibly moving new film Lt. Watada, Oscar®-winning director Freida Lee Mock (Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision) looks at this brave, thoughtful young man and the journey his refusal to be "part of something deeply illegal and immoral" took him on. After graduating magna cum laude with a business degree in 2003, this non-pacifist Eagle Scout, mindful of 9/11, joined the army with a desire to protect his country. In 2006, however, after having researched our reasons for invading Iraq, he decided that deployment there would be a violation of his military oath. Watada offered to resign and twice offered to fight in Afghanistan. The army refused. They offered him a cushy, non-combative job in Iraq, which Watada refused. Mock's film expertly lays out what happened next, detailing three years of court martial limbo during which time Watada continued to speak out and dig his hole deeper. Lt. Watada is part of a SFIAAFF spotlight on Frieda Lee Mock, and after the festival's only screening of the film on March 14, the director will take part in an on-stage interview.

Another SFIAAFF documentary by an Oscar®-winning filmmaker is the North American Premiere of A Moment in Time by Ruby Yang (The Blood of Yingzhao District). Her film looks at the phenomenon of American Chinatown movie theaters—particularly here in San Francisco—and the role those theaters and the films they screened played in the Chinese community. From melodramas that made Chinatown matrons weep, to the kung-fu pics which established new models of Asian masculinity (and whose themes of loyalty and revenge carried over into Chinatown gang life), these films served as a link to the homeland and were a reflection of community not found in Hollywood films.

San Francisco's Chinatown has had as many as five theaters operating simultaneously and A Moment in Time profiles several, including the Grandview (which had its own film studio) and the Great Star (which if memory serves, is where I saw my first Jackie Chan flick, Operation Condor 2: The Armour of the Gods.) At times this doc overreaches by attempting to provide an entire history of Chinese cinema and consequently loses focus. There are also some strange digressions, like the young woman who praises her current boyfriend for the soy and oyster sauces in his cupboard, while bemoaning the ex who had ketchup and baked beans in his. But overall, it's a satisfying look at a bygone era. By 2000 there wasn't a single remaining Chinatown theater anywhere in the U.S. A Moment in Time will screen with Eric Lin's short, Music Palace, which looks at New York City's final Chinatown movie theater.

Sports documentaries are about as far outside my interest zone as you can get, but I checked out Brigitte Weich's Hana, dul, sed… for that rare glimpse of life in North Korea. The film's first half traces the ascendancy of its women's soccer team—culminating in a 2003 Asia Cup win—with profiles of four players and lots and lots of requisite training and game footage. (They get revved-up for a U.S. match by visiting the country's Anti-American Museum). After losing a 2004 Olympics qualifying match to Japan, all four women are forced into retirement. That's when the film gets interesting, as we watch them deal with life as ex-sports stars. While hardly a portrayal of "average" North Koreans (they get to keep their nice state-given Pyongyang apartments and get extra food rations as "Players of the People"), we get to know them and experience the world from their POV: the wide boulevards devoid of auto traffic, the palatial subway stations, a beauty parlor visit, an outing to the National Zoo with its caged dogs and kitty cats, couples rowboating on the Taedong River and a bounty of Socialist Realist poster art (most of it helpfully translated). This film is definitely worth a look.

There are many other documentaries in the festival, which you'll find spread across the Documentary Showcase, CAAM 30th Anniversary Showcase and Documentary Competition sections. One I'm planning to catch during the fest is Tehran Without Permission, a collage of life in Iran's capital city, shot entirely on a Nokia camera phone before last summer's civil unrest.

Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.

AKIRA KUROSAWA @ 100—SFFS

My thanks to Executive Director Graham Leggat and Creative Director Miguel Pendás of the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) for reminding me just how valuable a resource the SFFS History Project can be. Keyed into the centennial celebration of Akira Kurosawa's birthday, SFFS forwarded an article by Miguel Pendás recounting Kurosawa's October 1980 appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival for the screening of his Palme d'Or winning film Kagemusha. "Eight taiko drummers pounded out a welcome," Pendás recalled, "and Akira Kurosawa stepped up on the stage, tall, slim, elegant and, as always, hidden behind dark glasses. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, who had helped him finance his latest film, Kagemusha, joined him on stage. A full house at the Palace of Fine Arts theater rose to its feet and gave the threesome a lengthy standing ovation."

That same edition of the festival boasted an on-stage conversation between Albert Johnson and Kurosawa, assisted by Audie Bock. Bock's Japanese Film Directors was long held as the definitive book on the subject and she leant her translation skills towards Kurosawa's partial autobiography Something Like An Autobiography. That on-stage conversation is available as a 25-minute audio podcast at the History Project's Close-ups sidebar.

In 1986, SFFS inaugurated the Akira Kurosawa Award for excellence in directing. The SFFS History Project offers not only Kurosawa's on-stage appearance receiving the award by way of a 27-minute audio podcast, but also a three-minute video clip of Kurosawa's 1986 press conference where the deputy mayor presented him with a key to San Francisco; specifically, a key to the original Mission Dolores.

Be sure to check out the many riches to be mined at the SFFS History Project, whose database stores information on most of the films shown at the festival: credits, print sources, film stills, notes from the Festival program guide, awards, tributes, out-of-town guests and even some posters and trailers. The festival's oral history is likewise laid out in multiple interviews with key festival personnel.

Cross-published on Twitch.

AKIRA KUROSAWA @ 100—TCM / CRITERION / RIZZOLI

There's nothing like a birthday party to bring out the festive and when that party is to celebrate and honor noted Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa on the 100th anniversary of his March 23 birthday, then it's very good reason indeed to shout out, "O-tanjôbi omedetô!"

For starters, Rizzoli has just published Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema authored by film historian Peter Cowie, with a preface by Kurosawa's daughter Kazuko Kurosawa, a foreword by Martin Scorsese, and an introduction by Donald Richie. The most lavishly produced and profusely illustrated volume on Akira Kurosawa ever published, Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema is the first illustrated book to pay tribute to Kurosawa's unmistakable style—with more than two hundred images, many never before published. The filmmaker is also famous for his attention to detail, and fans will delight in seeing annotated script pages, sketches, and storyboards that reveal the meticulous craft behind Kurosawa's genius.

The Criterion Collection's AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa likewise groups together 25 of Kurosawa's most beloved films in a linen-bound deluxe box set celebrating his astonishing career. AK 100 is the most complete set of Kurosawa's works ever released in this country, and includes four rare films that have never been available on DVD. As if that isn't enough, AK 100 comes with its own illustrated book featuring an introduction and notes on each of the films by Stephen Prince (The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa) and a remembrance by Donald Richie (The Films of Akira Kurosawa).

Naturally, The Auteurs Notebook has been all over this one. They've established a film-by-film discussion board and Glenn Kenney has done a particularly fine job of promoting the enhanced context the package supports. Kenney writes: "There's that old story about the anti-loyalty-oath Director's Guild meeting where an American master introduced himself by saying 'My name's John Ford. I make Westerns.' Some eager novices in Japanese film appreciation could well imagine Kurosawa introducing himself by saying 'I make chambara [sword-fighting] pictures.' But of course, just as Ford proved a master of several genres, Kurosawa too could not be pinned down. And, as with Ford, …all of Kurosawa's pictures say things about each other, whether watched in genre-specific groups, by period, or just chronologically across the course of his career as a whole, which mode this set definitely encouraged. To call the journey rewarding is rather an understatement. The individual pleasures never let up, and are invariably enhanced by context."

For those who can't quite afford the Criterion price tag, however, fear not. Turner Classic Movies launches their month-long celebration of Kurosawa's ouvre this coming week, crowned by a 24-hour marathon on Tuesday, March 23, the anniversary of Kurosawa's birth. "There are many reasons the name Akira Kurosawa means so much in the world of moviemaking, and we're going to be showing 26 of those reasons this month on Turner Classic Movies," says TCM host Robert Osborne. "It's the largest gathering of Kurosawa films we've ever shown in a retrospective of his work, and we couldn't be more excited."

TCM's March celebration of Kurosawa will include such popular samurai films as Seven Samurai (1954), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961) and its sequel, Sanjuro (1962); the groundbreaking classic Rashomon (1950); literary adaptations such as Throne of Blood (1957) and The Lower Depths (1957); compelling domestic dramas like No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), Ikiru (1952), I Live in Fear (1955) and Red Beard (1965); crime dramas such as Stray Dog (1949), The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and High and Low (1963); and the vibrantly photographed Dodes 'Ka-Den (1970) and Kagemusha (1980).

Among the films making their debut on TCM are two of Kurosawa's later films, Dersu Uzala (1975), which earned Kurosawa a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar®, and Ran (1985), which is based loosely on Shakespeare's King Lear. Also making their TCM premieres are The Idiot (1951), based on the book by Dostoyevksy, and The Most Beautiful (1944), a World War II drama that wasn't released in the United States until the late 1980s.

In addition to its slate of Kurosawa films, TCM will present two Westerns inspired by Kurosawa's work. On Sunday, March 21, a double-feature will include The Outrage (1964), an adaptation of Rashomon, and The Magnificent Seven (1960), adapted from Seven Samurai.

Below is a complete schedule of TCM's centennial celebration of Akira Kurosawa (all times shown are Pacific):

Tuesday, March 9

5:00PM Ikiru (1952)—Frequent Kurosawa actor Takashi Shimura turns in a heartbreaking performance as a man who finds out he only has a short time to live. Kurosawa explores the meaning of a man's life with this poignant drama.

7:30PM Throne of Blood (1957)—Kurosawa's stunning adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth stars frequent Kurosawa leading man Toshirō Mifune as the feudal lord who kills his rival at his wife's bidding. Kurosawa skillfully blends elements of Noh drama to craft this fascinating and visually arresting film.

9:30PM The Hidden Fortress (1958)—One of Kurosawa's more whimsical samurai dramas, this film follows a pair of inept misfits as they try to help a princess pass through a rival territory. Mifune is the general who assists. George Lucas has acknowledged this rousing tale was the primary inspiration for his first Star Wars film.

12:00AM The Idiot (Hakuchi, 1951)—Dostoyevsky's tale of a love triangle served as the basis for this Kurosawa drama starring Mifune and Shimura. Kurosawa's original cut was edited down by the studio before release, but much of Kurosawa's brilliance remains.

3:00AM The Lower Depths (1957)—Kurosawa's adaptation of the Maxim Gorky play is a character study of a group of people living in poverty. Mifune leads a fine cast. Jean Renoir tackled the Gorky play in 1936, but Kurosawa remained more faithful to the original than the French master.

Tuesday, March 16

5:00PM The Bad Sleep Well (1960)—In this variation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Kurosawa captures the feel of the great Warner Bros. crime dramas. Mifune stars as a man determined to exact revenge against the high-profile businessman he blames for his father's suicide.

7:45PM High and Low (1963)—Mifune plays a shoe company executive whose son is targeted for kidnapping. But the kidnappers end up taking his chauffeur's son instead. This cat-and-mouse thriller, based on an Ed McBain novel, provides a unique view of Japan in the 1960s.

10:15PM Red Beard (1965)—Kurosawa and Mifune worked together for the last time with this gentle drama about a doctor and his intern, played by Yūzō Kayama.

1:30AM I Live in Fear (1955)—Mifune, nearly unrecognizable thanks to old-age makeup and a superb characterization, plays a successful businessman whose fear of nuclear war leads him to want to move his entire family from Japan to South America.

3:15AM Scandal (1950)—This Kurosawa drama stars Mifune as a painter who sues a magazine over a scandalous story. His lawsuit is threatened when his lawyer, whose daughter is deathly ill, takes a bribe to lose the case.

Sunday, March 21—Adapted from Akira Kurosawa

5:00PM The Outrage (1964)—In this remake of Kurosawa's Rashomon, Paul Newman plays the bandit who attacks a couple, played by Laurence Harvey and Clair Bloom. Each of the three has a different perspective on what exactly happened. Edward G. Robinson and William Shatner co-star.

7:00PM The Magnificent Seven (1960)—John Sturges' thrilling western is based on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and stars Yul Brynner as the head of a gang of gunslingers who come to the aid of a village threatened by bandits. Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach, Horst Bucholz, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and Robert Vaughn co-star. Elmer Bernstein provided the memorable score.

Tuesday, March 23

3:00AM Sanshiro Sugata (1943)—Kurosawa's first feature film as director is the simple tale of a young judo fighter who must battle another fighter over a woman. The outstanding use of photographic composition and sound make this one of the more striking martial arts films of the era.

4:30AM The Most Beautiful (1944)—Kurosawa's story of young women working in a factory during World War II stars Shimura as their difficult foreman. This interesting early work from Kurosawa includes several elements of pro-Japanese propaganda.

6:00AM The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945)—Based on a Kabuki play, this film tells the story of a lord who disguises himself and his generals as monks in order to avoid detection from the lord's murderous brother. This film was banned twice in Japan, first for not being faithful to is source material and then again by the occupation forces for its favorable depiction of feudal militarism.

7:00AM Sanshiro Sugata, Part 2 (1945)—Bordering on outright propaganda, this government-suggested film uses judo as the background for a story extolling the virtues of Japanese warriors.

8:30AM No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)—In this revealing domestic drama, a young woman learns about life after leaving the politically charged atmosphere of Tokyo and going to the country house of her executed boyfriend's parents.

10:30AM One Wonderful Sunday (1947)—Dreams and despair collide in this gentle drama about a couple who try to spend a Sunday afternoon on just 35 yen.

12:30PM Drunken Angel (1948)—An uneasy friendship between an alcoholic doctor and a gangster is at the center of this gripping drama featuring Shimura and Mifune in two early Kurosawa performances.

2:30PM Stray Dog (1949)—A grueling heat wave becomes its own character in this outstanding drama about a pair of police officers determined to track down a gun that was stolen from one of them. Shimura and Mifune play the cops. Kurosawa uses the story as an opportunity to shed light on the difficulties Japanese soldiers faced when they came home from the war.

5:00PM Rashomon (1950)—This groundbreaking film established a new story-telling style using the different points of view of several characters to explore the meaning of truth. Mifune is a bandit who attacks a couple and kills the husband. But as each person's story reveals, truth may be in the eye of the beholder. This film won Kurosawa an Oscar® for Best Foreign Film. The title has now become synonymous with the multiple-storytelling style the film established.

6:30PM Seven Samurai (1954)—Considered by many critics to be among the greatest films ever made, this extraordinary tale follows a group of ronin (masterless samurai) who agree to protect a village against bandits. Kurosawa explores everything from class distinctions to the nature of violence in this deeply humanistic film starring Shimura, Mifune and a host of stock Kurosawa performers. Tatsuya Nakadai, who would later play the lead roles in such Kurosawa epics as Kagemusha and Ran, can be seen briefly as one of the samurai walking through the town in the first half of the film. Kurosawa's use of slow-motion death scenes greatly influenced the work of Sam Peckinpah.

10:00PM Yojimbo (1961)—This Cold War allegory features Mifune as a samurai who plays two sides of a warring town against each other. Kurosawa uses satire and cynicism to tell a story that in many ways reveals the worst in human nature. This film was later remade by Sergio Leone as the 1964 spaghetti western Fistful of Dollars.

12:00AM Sanjuro (1962)—Mifune returns as the nameless samurai in this humor-laced action flick. This time around, he helps a group of young warriors expose corruption within the leadership of their clan.

1:45AM Dodes 'Ka-Den (1970)—Kurosawa's first color film is a character study of various people living in a Tokyo slum. The director uses his painter's eye to craft a unique color scheme. The title refers to the sound Tokyo streetcars make as they travel down a track. Noted symphonic composer Tōru Takemitsu created the enchanting score.

Tuesday, March 30

5:00PM Dersu Uzala (1975)—Kurosawa won his second Oscar with this story of a Goldi tribe hunter who teaches a Russian explorer how to survive in the harsh Siberian terrain. The pair gradually come to understand one another, despite the remarkably different worlds from which they come.

7:30PM Kagemusha (1980)—George Lucas and Francis Coppola served as producers on this extraordinary epic about a thief who is used as a double for a noble lord. But when the lord dies, the thief has to become him. Tatsuya Nakadai plays the thief, a role that was eventually supposed to go to box-office star Shintaro Katsu, but Kurosawa objected to Katsu's demand that he have his own personal video crew on the set and fired him. At the time this film was made, Kurosawa was having difficult securing financial backing. So he appeared in a series of Suntory Whiskey commercials shot on the set. Kagemusha marked Kurosawa's final film with actor Takashi Shimura.

10:45PM Ran (1985)—Kurosawa adapted Shakespeare's King Lear with this lavishly produced film about a lord who divides his kingdom among three sons, inviting disaster in the process. Nakadai once again takes the lead as the lord, who eventually goes insane as he sees his entire land descend into chaos. Mieko Harada, as the lord's daughter-in-law, creates one of cinema's most memorable and conniving villains. Gender-bending star Peter plays the lord's jester. Costume designer Emi Wada took home an Oscar® for her work.

Cross-published on Twitch.

ESQUIRE PROFILES EBERT

"I've never said this before but we were born to be Siskel and Ebert."—Roger Ebert

In the wake of the theatrical release of Shutter Island, it stands to follow that the cover article of this month's issue of Esquire would feature Cal Fussman's interview with Leonardo DiCaprio. However, when I reviewed the issue, the piece that most caught my attention—and which moved me quite a bit upon reading—was Chris Jones' revelatory profile of Roger Ebert: "The Essential Man", which I'm delighted to say is now available online at the magazine's website, along with additional photography by Ethan Hill. As value added, Ebert has selected what he considers one of his best-written pieces for Esquire: his 1970 interview with Lee Marvin.

As chance and other choices would have it, just as I was drafting this announcement, I received word from the San Francisco Film Society that Roger Ebert will receive this year's Mel Novikoff Award at the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (April 22-May 6). The award, named for the pioneering San Francisco art and repertory film exhibitor Mel Novikoff (1922-1987), acknowledges an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public's knowledge and appreciation of world cinema. The Novikoff Award will be presented at "An Evening with Roger Ebert and Friends", Saturday, May 1 at 5:30PM at the Castro Theatre. Confirmed guests to date include directors Jason Reitman and Terry Zwigoff, with others to be announced soon.

The program will close with a screening of Julia, touted by Ebert as one of the finest films released in 2009. Erick Zonca's character-driven thriller, starring the fearless Tilda Swinton, barrels straight into the sleazy wasteland of an abrasive alcoholic kidnapper who is in way over her head.

"It's an honor to pay tribute to a man who has enhanced the public's knowledge and appreciation of world cinema for more than 40 years through his writing, television shows, Web site and film festival," said Rachel Rosen, the Film Society's director of programming. "His passion for film is an inspiration."

Here are a few excerpts from the Esquire article that inspired me.

"His new life," Jones writes, "is lived through Times New Roman and chicken scratch. So many words, so much writing—it's like a kind of explosion is taking place on the second floor of his brownstone. It's not the food or the drink he worries about anymore—I went through a period when I obsessed about root beer + Steak + Shake malts, he writes on a blue Post-it note—but how many more words he can get out in the time he has left. In this living room, lined with thousands more books, words are the single most valuable thing in the world. They are gold bricks. Here idle chatter doesn't exist; that would be like lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. Here there are only sentences and paragraphs divided by section breaks. Every word has meaning." (2010:121)

"Ebert's dreams are happier. Never yet a dream where I can't talk, he writes on another Post-it note, peeling it off the top of the blue stack. Sometimes I discover—oh, I see! I CAN talk! I just forgot to do it. [] In his dreams, his voice has never left. In his dreams, he can get out everything he didn't get out during his waking hours: the thoughts that get trapped in paperless corners, the jokes he wanted to tell, the nuanced stories he can't quite relate. In his dreams, he yells and chatters and whispers and exclaims. In his dreams, he's never had cancer. In his dreams, he is whole. [] These things come to us, they don't come from us, he writes about his cancer, about sickness, on another Post-it note. Dreams come from us." (2010:121)

"He took his hardest hit not long ago. After Roeper announced his departure from At the Movies in 2008—Disney wanted to revamp the show in a way that Roeper felt would damage it—Ebert disassociated himself from it, too, and he took his trademarked thumbs with him. The end was not pretty, and the break was not clean. But because Disney was going to change the original balcony set as part of its makeover, it was agreed, Ebert thought, that the upholstered chairs and rails and undersized screen would be given to the Smithsonian and put on display. Ebert was excited by the idea. Then he went up to visit the old set one last time and found it broken up and stacked in a dumpster in an alley." (2010:164)

"Ebert is dying in increments, and he is aware of it. [] I know it is coming and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear, he writes in a journal entry titled 'Go Gently into That Good Night.' I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. …I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out." (2010:165)



Photos courtesy of Ethan Hill and Esquire. Cross-published on Twitch.

DARKEST AMERICANA & ELSEWHERE: RUHR—A Few Evening Class Questions For James Benning

"I've got a lot of patience, baby / but, that's a lot of patience to lose."—Laura Nyro

In his aptly-entitled essay-interview with James Benning for Artforum International—"Testing Your Patience"—Scott MacDonald emphasizes how Benning's films "confront the hysterical consumption modeled and sold by American commercial media and attempt to retrain those who come to see the films, testing viewers' patience in order to reinvigorate their perceptual capacities" and, thereby, offering "the possibility of perceptual retraining and psychic cleansing." As Benning shifts away from the constraints of 16mm filmmaking and flexes the potential of HD work, the opportunity to lose patience and reinvigorate perception increases exponentially.

"I have a very simple definition of an artist," Benning told MacDonald. "The artist is someone who pays attention and reports back. A good artist pays close attention and knows how to report back. I teach a course called 'Looking and Listening.' The class and I practice paying attention. I take them to many different places, often for a full day, and we look and listen. Sometimes we go to an oil field in the Central Valley, or to a mountaintop to watch the sky brighten as the sun begins to rise, or to a homeless neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles, or to the port at Long Beach. We gradually learn that our looking and listening are coded by our own prejudices, that we interpret what we see through our own particular experiences, and we learn that we need to confront our prejudices and learn to see and hear more clearly. And to learn more about what we do see."

Not the least of Benning's lessons in visual acuity is the awareness of narratives immanent in meteorological phenomenon and/or industrial processes. He carries that awareness forward—by way of an outsider's perspective—into the industrialized Ruhr Valley of Western Germany with his first feature-length digital work Ruhr, which premiered at the Duisberg Film Week. For as much as Benning has verbalized his discontent with processing and projection errors in 16mm filmmaking, motivating his rationalized shift to HD, the Duisberg premiere was marred by "auditory disruptions both on screen and off" and—as assessed by Mark Peranson at Cinema Scope—though no damage was ultimately done, "this was more a statement about the present and a harbinger for the future." Peranson's initial impressions will, no doubt, remain the most salient. "Along with being one hell of a head trip," Peranson concludes, "Benning's first digital feature is his closest to theory. More than a series of specific images, Ruhr is best considered a film about image-making itself." Specifically, digital image-making, where "the medium … take[s] the reins."

What full HD shooting has afforded Benning, Peranson continues, "is the possibility of playing with other forms of editorial shorthand." This has proven to be a slightly controversial issue, as indicated in the robust discussion at The Auteurs Notebook—a discussion in which Benning has admirably participated—where the fine hairs between "reality" and "truth" have been combed. It's a somewhat couffiered argument that I put to rest over a decade ago when I fell in love with the digital photography of Pedro Meyer but an argument that—I guess—requires restyling each time an artist enters the digital domain. Peranson nails it: "With digital filmmaking, we're in a cinematic space where the 'real' has no meaning; rather, Benning is using all the means at his disposal to create what we could call a reality-directed document."

The Auteurs team kicked into high gear when Ruhr screened at Rotterdam 2010, commencing with Matthew Flanagan's "descriptive zoopraxography" of Ruhr's seven chapters. It should come as no surprise that Flanagan's appreciation is evocative with attentive poetry; his own website Landscape Suicide is named after an earlier Benning film exploring the relationship between text and image. Flanagan's reaction to Benning's digital erasures is that they're "wholly imperceptible, irrelevant to the activity of viewing." To the purists alarmed at Benning's digital sleight-of-hand, Flanagan reconfigures Benning's " intricate act of betrayal." He explains: "Benning's work has only ever inversely acted as documentary; its objective is to interrogate, or foster, a certain mode of seeing—realism as attention, not style. André Bazin once pointed out that 'the more the image tends to resemble reality, the more complex the psycho-technical problem of editing becomes,' and Ruhr might well be one of the most sophisticated, and devious, solutions to that problem we have."

Danny Kasman adds: "Video may remove tactility and perhaps even weight from an image, but what it enhances is a totality, one that favors the long-take and the long shot." (I expect, however, that Benning will argue that his HD works are not video.)

Neil Young's reactions were admittedly mixed. He observed that Benning "seemed to be learning his way through the possibilities of digital while 'on the job' ", resulting in a "curate's egg" of "uneven results."

The program capsule for Ruhr's US premiere at REDCAT in Los Angeles mollifies Young's criticism as "a meditation on the notion of terra incognita. Faced with the unfamiliar landscape of Germany's Ruhr Valley, the cradle of heavy industry in that country, and a new medium, he turns the film into a process of slow discovery." In his Artforum piece celebrating the REDCAT premiere, Michael Ned Holte brings the critical discussion full round by observing that Benning wants his viewers to "feel" time rather than forget about it, and that "the true promise of HD lies in its capacity to capture images at durations that push the limits of the viewer's attention toward an almost-inhuman scale of time—albeit in a physical way that an all-too-human viewer, seated in the theater, will surely register." As quoted at the start, that's a lot of patience to lose.

As part of a weekend celebration of Benning's films in the Bay Area—"Darkest Americana & Elsewhere"—the San Francisco Cinematheque and the USF Film Studies Program screened Ruhr at the Presentation Theatre of USF. This afforded the opportunity to pose a few questions to James Benning.

* * *

Michael Guillén: I need to ask the obvious question. Since this was your first work in the HD format and the first piece you've shot outside of the US, and—since I'm aware that you create each of your films learning from the film you've just completed—what have you learned from these two new experiences that you think might inform your next work?

James Benning: Well, I've learned very much about the difference between an HD camera and a 16mm camera. The very first shot I did was the one at the Dusseldorf Airport and I was lucky enough to shoot it on a day when there was no wind. I discovered that there was this system of weather that the plane would pull behind it; these subtle wind patterns that would come through as the plane would cross over. You'd hear these wind vortexes that the wings cause and then 30 seconds after that it would drag behind it a wind system, a weather system, that would cause the trees to lose leaves and move.

After I did the shot and went home, I realized that I probably wouldn't have been able to do this with film. First of all, I was able to shoot two hours worth of footage and was able to shoot a number of reiterations of these planes landing. I realized that if I had watched just one plane landing, I wouldn't have realized that this weather system was from the plane. I might have thought it was a coincidence of wind going by. By being able to shoot for two hours, something like 35 planes landed during that time and each time each plane would create a slightly different weather system and a different noise. That interested me.

I realized that the resolution and the registration of the HD camera was so much more steady and precise than in 16mm that any little movement that happened could be captured by this camera, where it would probably be lost in the movement of the 16mm frame; the jiggling of the frame during projection. I immediately got very excited that I could look at things in a much closer, deeper way than before at much more subtle things that were happening.

I also immediately realized it had a completely different look than film and that I would want to pursue that look. Unfortunately, we didn't have an HD projector here so what you were seeing wasn't HD—it was video—and so it didn't have the resolution that it should have had. I guess if you sat back farther, it looked a little better. But if you looked at it from one of the closer rows, you could see all the dots from the projector. Some of what I'm learning now is that the projection systems in HD haven't been developed yet. As 16mm film gets worse and worse in projection, HD will get better and better. There, of course, are systems that are set up now where it's a completely different experience if you see it there; but, I think you get the idea.

I've also learned in digital that you can do a lot more post-production than you could with 16mm film. You can do post-production with 16mm film; but, it's much more difficult and you're not quite sure what the result's going to be. With digital, you're working with a computer and you can see the results almost immediately. When I shot the [Schwelgern] coking tower, I actually did a two-hour shot. I shot it at dusk so it goes from light to dark over the course of that two hours. Then I decided I only wanted to use the middle hour of that two hours; but, in that middle hour, it doesn't go from light to dark and I wanted it to go from light to dark. What I was able to do was to color correct the shot. The shot is in real time but the color changes in an unreal way. I was able to color correct the last frame to match the brightness of the last two hours of the shot and the first frame to match the first part of the shot. Does that make sense? The shot is two hours long. I take the middle half but I color correct the first part to match the key frames at the beginning and the end, to slowly go from this brightness to that darkness. It's cheating; but, it's cheating in a way that I felt gave a better feel of what I originally recorded.

I also shot the very first shot in the [Matenastraße] tunnel for two hours. I was able to pick the cars and the movement of the leaf and the little piece of cellophane and cut out cars and trucks that I didn't like through dissolves. Again, what you see is a reality but it's a constructed reality.

The color of the tunnel isn't changed. It's a remarkable tunnel. It's actually a tunnel that goes underneath a steel mill. It's mainly workers that use that tunnel. It's dark and dingy; but, what's remarkable about it, is that—when you're in the middle of it—you feel like you're in somebody's ear drum. You can hear each side of the tunnel and it funnels the sound back and forth and it's magnified by bouncing off the tunnel. I liked the way the tunnel itself stripped the color from it except when the cars come through—I showed a red and a green car—but, otherwise there's no color manipulation at all.

It's true that in a number of my films—like, 13 Lakes and Ten Skies—I used a 400-foot magazine and end up with a 10-minute shot, which means I still trim a minute off that 11-minute reel so that I could slide the shot slightly. In One Way Boogie Woogie, I did 50-feet shots and used 36 feet of that. So I still had a choice as to where I could start and stop. But in those films I was thinking of early cinema where they would do a full roll of film, although I was never really using the full roll; I was doing some editing. Now with digital I can do a two-hour shot but if I bought a new card—they have two-hour cards that fit into my camera and the camera takes two cards so I could potentially shoot four hours and, if I got someone to jerryrig it to go into a hard drive—I could make shots that would only be limited by the battery life of my camera. For me, however, two hours seems manageable. I love the luxury of being able to do the two-hour shot. It doesn't cost me any money at all. If I don't like it, I just erase the card and use it again. So there's this luxury of recording shots that are much much longer than I was able to do in the past because—first of all—I was limited by the reel size but I was also limited by money more than anything. Even if I was limited by reel size, I could do tricks to extend that. I did a film in 1975 with a 22-minute take and there's a dissolve in the middle—I used two 140-foot magazines—but, you can't see where the cut is so it looks like it's a 22-minute shot.

Sharon Lockhart just made a film called Doubletide where she used five 10-minute shots together and had her actor hold still while they changed magazines so that she could actually simulate a 50-minute shot. So there are tricks one can use even when you are limited by roll size. But now I'm more interested in process itself. The interesting thing about making Ruhr is that, generally, I know a place well. I don't make a film until I know a place very well. From knowing place, I can study a process of what happens there. With Ruhr, I didn't know the place at all so I chose processes that I already knew about. When I watch Ruhr, I think it's really not about the western part of industrial Germany; it's more about Milwaukee, Wisconsin where I grew up, because I knew those processes of steel from the Midwest, and I knew about the working class, and I knew how Blacks were used as cheap labor, rather than Muslims and Turkish people. So in a way what I'm looking at in Duisberg is really a lot about the politics and the kinds of work I was familiar with in my own home town, which I like. I think it's interesting that my first film outside the US is not really about being outside the US at all. It's by looking outside, I can understand my own place better.

Guillén: Speak to your evolving fascination with steelmaking.

Benning: There's a film festival in Korea, the Jeonju, where in the past five years they give a digital grant to three different filmmakers in different parts of the world. This year they chose three filmmakers from this hemisphere, and I am one of those.

So I went back this fall to shoot at a steel factory. The way steel is made, they use blast furnaces. They heat iron ore in a blast furnace and it becomes a molten metal called pig iron. The pig iron is separated from the slag—the impurities—that comes off it. It comes flying out of the blast furnaces into [ladle] cars. The film I made there is a half-hour look at these [ladle] cars moving pig iron. It's called Pig Iron. But I became very interested in the whole steelmaking process when I made Ruhr.

The very last shot of Ruhr is the coking tower where they make coke, a highly dense and compressed coal that's used in the blast furnaces. The way it's made, they superheat this coal in furnaces for 25 hours. The tower that you see in Ruhr is in Duisberg and it's the state-of-the-art coking tower in the world. People come from all over the world to study the process that they've developed at Duisberg. They have 72 different ovens that cook coke coal for 25 hours at a time. At the end of 25 hours, the machine pushes the coal out of the coking oven into a train car. It falls into that car and travels about a hundred yards and locates itself beneath the coking tower, which you see in the last shot. When you hear the noise of the siren, that's the train moving the coke underneath the tower. Then they dump 10,000 gallons of water on top of that coal in a little less than a minute and that creates this water vapor that rises through the coking tower and makes these big plumes. Generally, this process takes place about every 10 minutes. In other words, every 10 minutes the coal in one of the 72 ovens gets pushed out into a train car, moved beneath the coke tower, and they dump the water. In that last shot in Ruhr, there was a problem on the line at one place so one of the iterations is skipped. So there's a 20-minute section where nothing happens. You see the coke being processed five times in the hour-long shot

Guillén: Speak to the soundscapes you're created for each chapter.

Benning: First, because I shot outside of the country and because I was just learning digital filmmaking, I didn't shoot double system like I did with 16mm. I actually had a very good microphone that plugged right into my camera and I recorded the sound in synch in the camera. I'm not doing that now. Now I have sound devices equipment and I do both recording into the camera and double system. Because I didn't want to learn so many things at the same time, I simplified the sound. Also because I realized I couldn't travel with so much equipment if I wanted to carry my camera on the plane. Since it was new equipment that I had just bought, I was hesitant to put it underneath. I ended up doing synch sound that's recorded right into the camera. Then I used Pro Tools to enhance that. I've learned lots of tricks on how to double sounds and put them slightly out of synch to create a fuller sound, like they were recorded with more microphones than I actually used. But I was very much interested in the actual sounds that were in those places. Those seven shots that you see in Ruhr were chosen as much for sound as they were for the image. Perhaps the very first chapter was inspired by the sound of the tunnel itself. Once I spent more time in the tunnel, I realized it was as visually stunning as the sound was. In each chapter I tried to create a realistic sound of that place itself.

I did cheat at a few places and I don't know if I want to admit it. I added the piano in the street sequence. However, after I stopped filming, I heard somebody playing the piano in one of those houses on the street; but, I didn't record it there. I had a friend fool around on the piano afterwards. In the tunnel sequence—you hear trains that make this wonderful sound in the tunnel?—I put one of those sounds in the very last shot to make a bookend of that. Otherwise, all the sounds are from the place.

I don't like surround sound at all. I don't like sound that's bigger than the image because the image is up here on the screen, it's not back there in the auditorium. It should have the presence of the picture and not be bigger than the picture. I don't like overproduced sound. I like it to be subtle.

Guillén: Knowing that—along with the problems you were having with labs—that you were having issues with projection of your 16mm films, I'm intrigued by the comment you made earlier about the HD projection technology not being quite ready for what you're doing. This situates your work at a cusp between a declining 16mm technology and a yet-to-be-fully-implemented HD technology.

Benning: HD technology is ready. It's just that most theaters aren't set up for it yet. I showed Ruhr at REDCAT—which has state-of-the-art sound and image—and it was absolutely incredible. So it does exist. When people ask to screen Ruhr, I'll say, "Do you have HD projection?" They'll say yes. Then when I get there, it's not HD projection; it's video. If you saw a proper HD projection of this, it would look much better than 35mm. It would have an outstanding resolution.

Guillén: So Ruhr has been shown about five times, is that right? It premiered in Duisberg, screened in Rotterdam, at REDCAT, here….

Benning: That's about right. It's been showing a lot lately and I'm not quite sure where they're showing it and I have no idea what the projection systems are like. My producer has been sending it out and saying, "We will only show it in HD" but then it turns out to be video. But this will change. With 16mm I know it's going to change for the worse. I love 16mm filmmaking; but, I didn't like what was happening in my life for the last four or five years, where it took six months to get it printed and the print was maybe destroyed on the third screening and the first two screenings were out of focus or they didn't have the sound right and it was incredibly bad. I'm too old to have that kind of stress.

Cross-published on Twitch.