"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.
"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.
Gary Meyer and crew deserve a big birthday greeting for pulling together their annual bash to celebrate the Balboa Theater. With a tip of the hat to 1926, they'll be screening The Cat and the Canary with Laura LaPlante accompanied live by Dave Miotke, selected short subjects, a live vaudeville show featuring magician James Hamilton and singer Linda Kosut, the Balboa Premiere of Double Features, a silent short film shot at the theater, and birthday cake by Diane Boate, who each year creates a themed and delicious work of art to eat. Doors open at 6:30PM; show starts at 7:00PM. Jack Tillmany will be signing and selling copies of his books on the theatres of San Francisco and Oakland. Read more about the festivities here.
Like a veritable phoenix from the ashes, Ingrid Eggers has recovered from being summarily dismissed by Rudolf de Baey, Director of the Goethe Institute, where she was let go as the programmer for the Institute's annual Berlin & Beyond Film Festival. Her unexpected dismissal sent shock waves through the Bay Area film community—much like the graceless dismissal of Anita Monga from the Castro Theatre some years back—and brought to the surface the abiding respect and affection festival audiences have for the keen spirit Eggers has contributed to San Francisco's festival landscape. Whereas Monga's dismissal inspired an entrenched boycott of the Castro Theatre for several months, Ingrid's situation reflects the inverse: the rallying cry has been to show up at the Castro Theatre this Sunday, February 28, 2010 to support German Gems, Ingrid's one-day six-hour celebration of German and Austrian cinema. Three of the films will screen at Point Arena on March 6, 2010.
German Gems has added importance for filling the gap left by the capsized Berlin & Beyond film festival, which failed to run in its annual late January time slot. Word has it that one of Mr. de Baey's first decisions was to re-mount Berlin & Beyond in the fall, which immediately struck me as ill-advised since San Francisco's festival season is already at capacity at that time. One journalist friend emailed Mr. de Baey warning him that shifting the festival to the fall would be crazy, to which Mr. de Baey succinctly countered, "I am not crazy." Okay then, how does stubborn fit? Or better yet, arrogant? When it comes to Rudolf de Baey, little cattle little care. More pertinently, German Gems promises to be a new incarnation of Ingrid Eggers' insightful programming with five films screened back to back. The event has even received a vote of confidence from Berlinale Festival Director Dieter Kosslick, who has written: "Dear Film Friends in San Francisco, Good luck with your new film project. With Ingrid Eggers at the helm, German Gems is set to sparkle at the top of German cinema in America today."
KALW's Kevin Robinson elicited a preview from Ingrid Eggers on his radio program Crosscurrents. They discuss two of the films on the German Gems slate—Vision, Margarethe von Trotta's acclaimed portrait of Hildegard von Bingen, and Tender Parasites by Austrian filmmaker Wolfgang Murnberger—as well as financing opportunities for filmmakers in Germany's current climate.
On screener, I've watched two films from the German Gems line-up and look forward to catching the rest at Sunday's event. In Norbert Baumgarten's sophomore feature Being Mr. Kotschie (Mensch Kotschie, 2009) the skies are cerulean with promise, but the clouds in protagonist Jürgen Kotschie's coffee are ominously rumbling and roiling. Baumgarten has infused the male midlife crisis with droll melancholy and scored it with Baroque a capella music that adds a dash of whimsy to Jürgen's emotional quandary.
Though he seems to have everything a man could ask for: wife, home, family, success, money, and admiring colleagues, Jürgen Kotschie is having difficulty facing 50 and his self-confidence is as mutable as … well … the clouds in the sky. Plagued by insomnia, and with the constant reminder of his father's senility indicating what's to come now that his youth is behind him and his body is in decline, Jürgen's complacency unravels as he grows at odds with his hectoring wife, his selfish and unresponsive son, and the banality of his workday routine. He takes off on a last-chance adventure down the proverbial road not taken and encounters a freeloading dog, a free-spirited hitchhiker, a lost love, and a chance to bare his soul on a karaoke stage. That scene, incidentally, reveals actor Stefan Kurt at his best. It's painful to watch him awkwardly singing Del Shannon's "Runaway" even as he realizes his youth has already run away from him and there is nothing he can do about it.
This admittedly familiar fable is rendered poignant by top-notch production values, including winningly-pitched ensemble comic performances, a colorful palette, surreal setpieces, and the aforementioned baroque choral score (the film won Best Production at Kinofest Lünen 2009). Baumgarten will be in attendance at both the film's Castro and Point Arena screenings.
In the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department comes Erica von Moeller's Miss Stinnes Travels the World (Fräulein Stinnes fährt um die Welt, 2009), a fictionalized documentary hybrid that recounts the globetrotting adventures of Clärenore Stinnes, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist who decided to circumnavigate the globe in an Adler. Accompanied by two mechanics and Swedish cameraman Carl-Axel Söderström (who worked with Greta Garbo before she abandoned Sweden for Hollywood), the team set out from Berlin in 1927, passing through the Balkans via Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran to Moscow, where—abandoned by the two mechanics—Stinnes and Söderström carried on through Siberia, crossed the frozen Lake Baikal and the Gobi desert and arrived in Peking. They traveled by ferry to Japan, later to Hawaii and South America, eventually to the United States, and back home to Berlin two years later after a journey of 47,000 km by car.
As amazing as this accomplishment might be, the film suffers from the selfsame drudgery that characterizes the grueling effort to achieve such an accomplishment. The narrative is largely composed of incidents where the car gets stuck or breaks down and Stinnes cries about it. Söderström's original footage is interspersed throughout von Moeller's project and is, by far, its most redeeming attribute, along with some compelling graphics that chart the Adler's trajectory across the globe with intertitular historical context. Footage of Peking in 1927 is simply tremendous and greatly overpowers the film's anemic narrative construct, which is—unfortunately—poorly lensed. One wonders why von Moeller elected to mix genres instead of providing a straightforward documentary? Granted, Clärenore Stinnes lacked considerable charisma on camera and it might have been necessary to cast an actress (Sandra Hüller) to portray her in order to convey some of her conflicted feelings for traveling partner Söderström. Though this device pushes the narrative forward, it does so ploddingly, much like Stinnes' Adler in Argentina's Cordillera. Perhaps von Moeller will explain her choices when she attends both the Castro and Point Arena screenings.
Cross-published on Twitch.
I am pleased to announce the publication of Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities, edited by Dina Iordanova with Ruby Cheung, published by University of St. Andrews Film Studies in conjunction with their Dynamics of World Cinema project. The book is the second in the series; the first volume, the Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, was published in 2009. I'm pleased—not only because I was invited to contribute my essay "Diasporas by the Bay: Two Asian Film Festivals in San Francisco"—but, primarily, because my essay promotes two of my favorite film festivals in the San Francisco Bay Area: the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and the 3rd i Film Festival.
As the publishers have synopsized: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities, the second volume in the Film Festival Yearbook series, brings together essays about festivals that use international cinema to mediate the creation of transnational "imagined communities". There are texts about the cultural policies and funding models linked to these festivals, as well as analysis of programming practices linked to these often highly politicized events. The case studies discuss diaspora-linked festivals that take place in Vienna, San Francisco, San Sebastian, Havana, Bradford, Sahara, South Korea, and London and that feature cinema from places as diverse as Nepal and Kurdistan, Africa and Latin America. Authors include Lindiwe Dovey, Ruby Cheung, Michael Guillén, Jérôme Segal, Miriam Ross, Roy Stafford, Yun Mi Hwang, Isabel Santaolalla and Stefan Simanowitz, Mustafa Gündoğdu, and Dina Iordanova. The Resources section features an up-to-date bibliography on film festival scholarship (by Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck) and an extensive thematically-organized listing of a variety of transnational festivals. Dina Iordanova has offered the volume's contents at her own site DinaView.
Jonathan Rosenbaum has written: "The very ambitious aspiration of the Film Festival Yearbook is, quite literally, to define a new area of film study. Part of the implied agenda of the book, given the scope and seriousness of the aspiration, is to combine some of the best and most valuable features of scholarly rigor with some of the most valuable features of journalism. The book can be useful to potential and actual film festival programmers as well as to academics who are studying film festivals as a social phenomenon. Filmgoers with particular interests of their own as well as those who are invested in specific national or ethnic groups will also be attracted to this volume."
Faye Ginsburg, Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University has written: "Film Festivals and Imagined Communities—the second volume in the series—opens up new horizons both for those who study media and those who create the significant but often overlooked "media worlds" where films first get launched: film festivals from the "periphery". Anyone who has attended or helped run one knows the intensity and significance of these distinctive social arenas in calling attention to new work as well as to emergent cultural possibilities. This excellent collection clarifies the role that film festivals play as venues that constitute a social universe for diverse groups, audiences, and artists (diasporic, indigenous, LGBT, migrant workers). With articles addressing how these festivals work—from the economic and artistic considerations of those who produce them to the way they help to 'imagine communities'—we start to understand the role these festivals play for members of minority communities that too rarely see cinematic work related to their lives. This collection is indispensable for anyone interested in understanding contemporary global media and what makes it work."
Finally, of related interest, is a recently-published article by Konrad Ng (University of Hawaii, Mānoa)—"Thoughts from Oslo, Norway: Film Festivals and Expanding the Moral Imagination"—published at FlowTV. In his article Ng aligns certain lines of reasoning from President Obama's acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize with cinema, especially with regard to "the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there's something irreducible that we all share." Following this line of reasoning, Ng proposes that film festivals can serve as a "model of engagement that may help expand our moral imagination." Citing Michael Shapiro's Cinematic Geopolitics, Ng suggests that "film festivals can be a space for envisioning possibility and articulating critical attitudes towards acts of violence and oppression; film festivals can 'provide a venue for films with significant anti-violence and anti-war themes and cinematic styles' and by doing so, assist the expansion of the moral imagination." By way of case study, Ng takes a look at how grassroots Asian American film festivals such as the Los Angeles Pacific Film Festival (sponsored by Visual Communications), and the International Asian American Film Festivals in both New York (sponsored by Asian CineVision) and San Francisco (sponsored by CAAM) contribute "a critical role in translating and transforming a notion of community into cultural and political engagement."
CAAM's Executive Director Stephen Gong acknowledges Ng's thesis as "provocative and convincing" and states: "There are many kinds of film festival, [of] course. Some of the largest are integral to the marketing and distribution of cinema as entertainment. Some at the other end are more geared toward civic boosterism. Our sector, and one shared by dozens, if not hundreds of other culturally specific festivals, reflect, as Konrad asserts, an important connection to a cultural or identity-community, and as such, play a key role in the continued evolution of the community and its place within the larger world."
06/02/10 UPDATE: I'm so pleased that the Film Festival Yearbooks are receiving some coverage in film journals. Adam Nayman's review for the current issue of Cineaste surveys both volumes, along with On Film Festivals—the third edition of the Dekalog series guest edited by Cineaste staffer Richard Porton. Nayman has been especially kind to me. He writes: "This plurality of voices extends also to FFY2, which gestures towards the margins of the international film festival network, focusing on festivals geared towards different ethnicities and social groups. It's heartening, for instance, to see a piece written by somebody best known as a blogger—Twitch.com critic Michael Guillén, whose 'Diasporas By the Bay' patiently explicates the ways in which two San Francisco-based initiatives—the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and the San Francisco South Asian International Film Festival—have thrived by matching "content to constituency." Thanks for the shout out, Adam!
Cross-published on Twitch.
"My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose."—Bette Davis, The Lonely Life, 1962.
On Thursday evening, February 18, 2010, Queer Icon: The Cult of Bette Davis was screened at Santa Rosa's Rialto Cinemas as a benefit screening for Face to Face—Sonoma County AIDS Network. Gary Carnivele, the host of Outbeat Salon on KRCB—Sonoma county's NPR radio station 91FM—moderated the Q&A after the screening.
As synopsized previously on The Evening Class, Queer Icon: The Cult of Bette Davis examines the many aspects of the gay fascination with Bette Davis, featuring film clips of Bette's most iconic moments, juxtaposed with camp burlesques of her by Matthew Martin and others, including Charles Pierce and Arthur Blake; a profile of Martin highlighting his long identification with Davis; and interviews with fans, entertainers, and gay cultural historians—exploring the link between the gay community and Bette.
As director Mike Black has written at the film's website: "'Masquerade or Drag?' film scholar and Bette Davis specialist Martin Shingler has asked with regard to the Hollywood legend's on-screen femininity, masking as it does that anything but soft or submissive juggernaut, a virtual anti-vamp, at the core of her greatest roles.
"But Davis's sexual ambiguity is only one of the many interpretive challenges as regards her enthusiastic gay following. Does the exaltation of the vividly self-punctuating Davis represent no more than a travesty of the social charade of gender? Or are the hopelessly inadequate and yet all-encompassing twin tyrants Femininity and Masculinity charlatan avatars of the one true goddess ... with icon worship evolving as a means to solidarity among sexual outlaws?
"And if Bette Davis is the object of practically religious adoration, then what can be said of those actors in drag who impersonate her, entertaining gay audiences with farcical exaggerations of her most notorious mannerisms? How best to categorize their function in the subversion of sexual orthodoxy that is part theater and part liturgy?"
Mike Black's rhetorical questions raised their pointed little heads yet again at Queer Icon's benefit screening Q&A. Gary Carnivele kicked the session off by noting that film producer Carole Black Summers and director Mike Black, twins, were born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. As children they became interested in making movies but had to stop production on Attack of the Cactus because it was "too scary." Mike moved to San Francisco in 1973 and Carole followed in 1984. They released their first documentary Queer Icon last year to favorable reviews.
Carnivele asked Carole Black Summers why she decided to make a film about Bette Davis and her dedicated gay fans? "Once we decided to do a documentary," Summers responded, "we knew we wanted to do something about movies. My question to Mike was: why are Bette Davis and Joan Crawford such icons for gay men? We started talking about it and Mike said, 'Let's narrow the focus to Bette Davis.' Then we ran with it because we thought it was a great idea; no one had done anything like that or discussed that. I wanted to know the answer. Hopefully, we found out the answer."
Carnivele then asked Mike Black about his research methodology, including which Bette Davis films he watched to prepare for the documentary? Black answered, "Carole and I both were—and always have been—Bette Davis fans, so we were familiar with a lot of her films already. We re-watched some films, saw some new films, and read some new books. I'd read most of her biographies, including her autobiography The Lonely Life [ghostwritten by Sandford Dody]. Ed Sikov [Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis] has a relatively recent biography of her and I read that; it's a very good book. Matthew Kennedy has written a book about Edmund Goulding [Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory: Hollywood's Genius Bad Boy], who is a director who worked with Bette Davis four times so we got that book. We did a lot of book reading—but, we weren't really making a documentary that was a biography of Bette Davis or a comprehensive review of her career—so there was a limit to what that kind of research would do for us. Also, there's vast scholarly literature out there about—not just Bette Davis and gay audiences—but, the whole film spectatorship experience and what the film viewing experience is thought to be about. Reams have been written about the whole process of identifying with images on the screen and I didn't want to squeeze our documentary into some kind of pre-constructed academic thesis. I didn't want too erudite but, perhaps, too abstract an explanation of Bette Davis. I wanted gay men to tell the story themselves. The only real Bette Davis scholar that I sought out was Martin Shingler, only because he writes interestingly about her on-screen sexuality."
Asked how they assembled the talking heads for their documentary, Summers offered: "Once we decided we wanted to do this, immediately we knew we wanted to interview John Triglia and Scott O'Brien. We knew we had to get Matthew Martin because we had to have someone current who was impersonating Bette Davis and—once he was on board—then everything just took off. Everyone who we talked to led us to another person."
Black offered a specific example: "Michael Guillén is an old friend of ours and—once he agreed to be interviewed for the film—he, in turn, referred us to Matthew Kennedy who, in turn, referred us to Andre Soares, the editor of Alt Film Guide, an on-line film magazine. Andre doesn't appear in our film, but he referred us to Allan Ellenberger who does appear in the film and is also responsible for giving us the footage of Jimmy Bangley, who appears in the film.
"I relate all of that to the way a gay subculture itself gets transmitted. In the film Bernardo Espi and Marc Huestis talk about watching all these old movies on TV in New York and, later, Michael talks about how Bernardo introduced him to Now Voyager at the Castro Theatre, while Marc Huestis has latched on to the reference to Bette Davis in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which was also an initial point of reference for Matthew Kennedy. The point is: we're not born and raised in gay families and yet—through a chain of personal relationships and cultural osmosis—we get connected to a gay subculture that has seized on these public images (like Bette Davis) hidden in plain sight and used them to consolidate a distinct community identity."
With regard to how difficult it was to secure the multiple film clips used in the documentary—especially with regard to its application to a gay focus—Black explained: "There's a long complicated answer to that; let me think of a quick evasive answer. In 2005 there were guidelines published for documentarians who want to use copyrighted material under the principle of fair use. Fortunately for us, there's a special unit at the Stanford Law School called the Fair Use Project, which vets the claims of documentarians, using these published guidelines from 2005. They do so on a pro bono basis so that filmmakers like Carole and me—who have no money to pay for big-time attorneys—can get their legal advice. We submitted a cut to them and they got our claims of fair use and all the clips are used under the fair use principle."
Curious about whether Bette Davis worked with known gay directors and actors, Black fielded the question to Matthew Kennedy, since Davis worked four times with Edmund Goulding who was well-known for his "pansexual tastes." Kennedy confirmed there were some anecdotal stories about Davis working with Goulding whose bisexuality "was an open secret." "Specifically what he would do," Kennedy described, "is he would enact how he wanted a scene played by actually substituting for a female actor in a love scene. So this was how he got to smooch with Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, and other people that he worked with. There are some accounts of people joking about this technique of his on the set of The Great Lie. I try to imagine this scenario of Goulding saying to an actress, 'I'm going to show you how to play this scene' and then proceeding to stage this same-sex romantic scene with an actor. I would think an actress would be inhibited by seeing a director's re-enactment; but, many actresses said it worked well. There was much praise for this technique. But I've never heard of any other director doing that before or since."
"She had a lot of gay friends," Black added. "When she moved to Los Angeles, she had a gay roommate. That was written about in Ed Sikov's book; but, other authors also mention it. So she had a lot of gay friends. But that didn't stop her from saying bad things about gay people."
Approaching the ambivalency of Bette's performance of femininity in her films where—on one hand—gay male identification with her stages a compliment, while—on the other hand—gay male usage of her becomes a parody of women, possibly even a put-down of women, Black recalled, "In my generation of young gay activists who moved to San Francisco, there was a political argument made against drag precisely because it did seem to be mocking women or, at least, mocking femininity. It also denied a gay identity. It made everything either feminine/women or masculine/men. It didn't allow for a masculine gay man to be attracted to another man."
I added: "What I find interesting about the gendered arguments against an icon like Bette Davis is that it implicates the elasticity of the icon. A very good study could be made of how an icon shifts in meaning with each generation. What Bette Davis meant to gay men in a previous generation—especially with regard to cultural understandings of femininity and masculinity—is perhaps not the same as what she means now within our continually evolving definitions and cultural applications of gender. I object to the masculinization of Bette Davis. It demeans her real success in an industry that—at that time, as I understand it—allowed women to succeed. Everyone's always talking about how women were persecuted at that time; but, actors like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were real stars with real clout within the system. Even if their roles sometimes capitulated to what people expected of women, what we should be admiring or focusing upon is their strength and their success, which—unfortunately—gets capsized into masculinity."
On that note, Carnivele asked Scott O'Brien—author of Virginia Bruce: Under My Skin and Kay Francis: I Can't Wait To Be Forgotten—to comment on Davis's career and how she successfully fought the studio system for independence. "The first screening moment where I felt, 'Oh, there's a Bette Davis line' is from Cabin in the Cotton (1932)," O'Brien recalled, "where Richard Barthelmess flirts with her and she—blonde at that time—says, 'Ah'd love t' kiss ya, but ah jes washed ma hayuh.' She didn't really seem interesting to me until Of Human Bondage (1934). Leslie Howard wanted Ann Harding for that role because Ann had played prostitutes on Broadway several times; but, by then, she had become a gallant lady and she and RKO probably thought Of Human Bondage was not the direction for her to go. So Bette Davis took that role by the horns. At that point she started having some clout with her studio. She was on loan from Warners to RKO for that film. Then she was nominated for Dangerous (1935)—because she'd been overlooked for Of Human Bondage—and because of the clout she had at Warner Brothers, she went on strike. Jimmy Cagney also went on strike, back to back.
"Then another catalyst in her career was the downfall of Warner Brothers top star Kay Francis. Kay wanted a role in a light sophisticated comedy that Warner gave to Claudette Colbert so Kay took Warner Brothers to court and here she was their top star and the highest paid actress in Hollywood. They decided to punish her. She was up for three roles—Dark Victory (1939), The Sisters (1938), and the one role she had campaigned for: Empress Carlotta in Juarez (1939)—and these roles were given to Bette Davis. All of a sudden Bette Davis was able to move into Kay Francis's soap opera turf. The fact that Davis had success in her campaign against Warner Brothers and got these highly-touted roles helped her redefine her career.
"There were two other times she redefined her career. After Beyond the Forest (1949)—with her line 'what a dump'—she got All About Eve (1950), which had been scheduled for Claudette Colbert. Then in 1962 she did Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? I see those as the moments that insured her longevity as an icon."
A lot of the reasons given for the popularity of Bette Davis among gay men did not strike one woman as being that different from her popularity with a general audience. She wondered if Bette Davis had become an icon to gay men—not due to her overall popularity—but to its subsequent parody; if the parody wasn't the bonding agent among the gay male community?
Black countered, "That's a very good point. As Anthony Slide says in the documentary, Bette Davis movies were made for a general audience and she was a huge star. Her films were not made for a gay audience. I still think she had a special meaning to the gay community, but I also appreciate that it was her parody that helped solidify her image in the gay community. Someone like Charles Pierce kept Bette Davis alive for many years as the icon in the gay community and he was parodying her. So I understand your point and even agree with it to some extent. As I said earlier, these are images we all own. These are common property. That a particular community grabs onto it and uses it for their own purposes is unavoidable, even though you can say, 'Everyone knows she's a great actress. She's a strong person. She was this and she was that.' There are reasons for everyone to admire that. But that doesn't keep gay men from using her performances for their own purposes, even without parodying it. You can still admire all of that and use it for your own purposes and help create your own community image without parodying it. But, again, I think the parody—through people like Charles Pierce—helped keep her iconicity alive for a couple more decades."
Asked about his editing style, Black explained: "The editing started even before we shot the first footage of Matthew Martin back in August 2008. I had already started working with the film clips. Then we started doing the interviews as well and the editing was going on simultaneously with all the shooting. But when all the interviews got done, Carole and I sat down and independently reviewed every single interview, every second of the interviews, and consulted with each other about what we thought were the salient points that should be in the film somehow, even if it wasn't that person saying that at that time. I had been making notes since the beginning. I had an outline. It was a back-and-forth between the interviews and the narration I was writing and the editing itself that went on for months. There really was some thought to the whole process, though—if you look at the film—it looks rambling in the beginning. The first half of the film doesn't quite have the structure that the second half of the film does; but, that was pretty much deliberate, in the sense that I first wanted to document the phenomenon that there were these gay men who truly are attached to Bette Davis and what that was all about on a phenomenal level. The editing involved a couple hundred hours at least. Other than saying I had an outline and notes and Carole and I conferred, I don't know how to explain exactly how it ended up being what it is."
Asked what Bette Davis meant to him, longtime Davis fan Bernardo Espi replied, "She means a great deal to me. The most important word I can think of is 'liberating.' People of my generation, when we first became aware of Bette Davis it was a liberating factor for us because in most of her roles she showed the struggles that we as gay men were going through and still go through in our daily lives: discrimination, the loss of family, many different things. She brought all that to her roles. What happens, though, as generations see Bette Davis, is that they see the high campiness of her acting and that's mainly brought about by people like Charles Pierce and Matthew Martin. That high campiness is important; but, I also think it's important for gay men to appreciate the fact that in her roles she showed us the struggles that we were going through and how to face those struggles and regain our own self-esteem."
One fellow wanted to know if there were any male icons of comparable stature for the gay male community and I offered, "William Haines was probably an actor that gay males could identify with. Valentino. Ramon Novarro. Primarily I would say actors from the silent era. Concurrent with Davis, I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone. Though, later, actors like James Dean, Montgomery Clift, even Marlon Brando, introduced an attractive tolerance to their performances."
Naturally, as we were driving home to San Francisco, Matthew Kennedy and I were beleaguered by l'esprit de l'escalier. Kennedy regretted that he had not responded more fully to the issue of parody so I asked him to relay his thoughts. "Bette exists on multiple levels," Kennedy told me. "You can look at her as a great actress. You can look at the body of her work. You can look at her individual films. And you can look at her as this catalyst for gay communion. There's Bette and there's the performance of Bette and they are two different things. To Mike and Carole's credit, they have merged the two within the subject of their documentary. They talk about the phenomenon of Bette as the inspiration of drag and they talk about her as a great actress. But the performance of Bette by non-Bettes becomes the unifying force. The parody of Bette Davis is its own thing; it builds gay community. We can laugh as much as we gather around to appreciate her art. They're separate but connected."
That was, of course, what I was trying to stress by emphasizing the elasticity of an icon, which is not far different from considering the breadth of an image and all it can contain within itself, even if contradictory. For me this is the mysterious spectatorial dimension of film appreciation. Movies are a literal product that projects onto a physical movie screen, yes, but the imagery of films also projects inwardly, subjectively, transliterally, and that intrapsychic effect has equal value—if not more—than narrative structure, the shadow of performance and the interpersonal dynamic of projected image and audience.
I had expected Gary Carnivele to ask me about the importance of Now Voyager as a coming-out story for gay men and what I had given thought to was that the process of coming out itself—long considered the seminal moment of gay self-identification, if not self-acceptance—evolves over generations just as our understanding of cultural icons evolves. In other words, what coming out meant to a gay man in the 1950s is a totally different process than what coming out meant to me in the 1970s and is equally distinct from what coming out means to young queers today, even as they group under the overarching narrative experience of "coming out." Each generation mines cinematic images for their specific relevance within everchanging cultural, historical and temporal parameters. General audiences may have appreciated Bette Davis's performances for their current and popular box office success; gay men may have read into her performances the struggles of their own lives (as Bernardo suggested), especially with regard to the performativity of gender and power; the next wave of gay men may have balanced the artist with her parody; and even later that balance might be necessarily historicized as the building blocks to an increased understanding of the iconic resonance of a singular career. It's an ongoing assessment and reassessment. And, as Matthew Kennedy also suggested, there is no "requirement" that young gay men of this generation gather together around the icon of Bette Davis. But the process of community-building itself, as inflected variously through generations, is of ongoing value. I'm glad to have been part of a document that takes a look at a truly unique approach at community building.
"I've never said this before but we were born to be Siskel and Ebert."—Roger Ebert
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.
"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 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)
