Tony Ganz & Rhody Streeter only made films together over a couple of years in the early 1970s. A few of their documentary shorts aired on the syndicated PBS series The Great American Dream Machine, which was simpatico with their collaborations’ wryly humorous portrait of the nation. Otherwise, their catalog of shorts remained unseen by a wide public audience until their recent exhibitions in New York City, now collected under the anthology title America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of. Because of that spotty history of distribution & scholarship, there wasn’t much context for what Gap Tooth‘s weekly repertory audience would be seeing when the collection premiered in New Orleans last week, besides the films being rare. It was a packed room anyway. The ten Ganz & Streeter shorts that make up America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of were met with shocks of laughter and stretches of stunned silence, depending on the mood of the moment. The individual films weren’t produced with a unifying theme or intent in mind, but since they were made with such a small, consistent crew in such a short period of time, they end up forming a singular mosaic picture of 1970s America — especially the white parts, the very white parts.
America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of is at its strongest when its shorts are hitting on a common theme, illustrating a postcard advertisement for The American Dream as a prepackaged plastic commodity. The opening short “The Best of Your Life (a.k.a. Sun City)” plays like an early prototype for the recent surreal retirement community doc Some Kind of Heaven, inviting the audience into a 3D brochure to gawk at all the uncanny weirdos who reside within. The other standout shorts in the set also work as ironic advertisements for the kitschiest corners of American monoculture: a novelty sex resort in “Honeymoon Hotel,” a Christian Nationalist death cult in “Risen Indeed (a.k.a. Campus Crusade for Christ)”, an elevator music studio in “A Better Day in Every Way (a.k.a. Muzak)”, a finishing school for adults in “Woman Unlimited”, and a billboard advertisement painters’ studio in “Sign Painters (a.k.a. Signs)”. It’s in these ironic snapshots of microwave-dinner America that Ganz & Streeter land their biggest laughs, likening retirees’ synchronized workout routines to soldiers Sieg Heiling their Fuhrer and infiltrating anti-hippie Christian activist circles who believe Communists to be Satanists engaged in a literal holy war. At the same time, they find a way to mock institutions instead of laughing at individual interview subjects. Later documentaries like Grey Gardens & Gates of Heaven would soon take on a similar project to much wider attention & acclaim: recording sweetly humanist interviews with ordinary, everyday weirdos like you & me, who happened to have gotten wrapped up in fascinatingly unreal scenarios.
Any one of those on-topic shorts could land as someone’s personal favorite in the collection. Personally, I laughed the hardest at the robotic corporate speak of the “Muzak” and “Sign Painters” docs, as straightlaced business suits passionlessly explained how they’ve turned once artistic mediums into uniform, sellable products. The candy-colored splendor of the “Sun City” retirement home tour and the women’s-mag “Honeymoon Hotel” ad is also undeniably enticing, making for the most visually striking and spatially disorienting selections in the bunch. It’s the other, “off-topic” shorts in the collection that really make those works stand out, though. You don’t get a full sense of just how uncanny & inhuman the collection’s portrait of American culture is until they cut away from the Norman Rockwell postcards to black & white snapshots of real people struggling with real problems in real environments. In “Help-Line” & “Y.E.S.,” desperately lonely people on the verge of making life-ending decisions re-establish tenuous human connections via phone call. In “Bowery Men’s Shelter,” New York City alcoholics and discharged mental patients find a temporary place to sleep between psychotic episodes & binges, barely limping along to the next day. The furthest-afield inclusion is “Hoi: Village Life in Tonga,” which leaves America entirely for a quiet anthropological study of indigenous Tongan social life. It was the very first film that Ganz & Streeter shot together and, while it doesn’t fit in tonally or thematically with the other shorts in the collection, it does help contextualize their countercultural-outsider approach to American anthropology in the more idiosyncratic shorts. Not for nothing, but “Hoi” & “Bowery Men’s Shelter” are also the only films in the collection in which non-white subjects are interviewed, making for some politically productive tension in their contrast with other subjects, like the prayer-warrior fascists of “Campus Crusade for Christ”.
If there’s anything especially remarkable that Ganz & Streeter achieved with these short-form American anthropologies (besides conveying a clever editorial eye for selecting environments & industries worth documenting in the first place), it’s in their avoidance of outright condescension. The uncanny, hyper-American scenarios they captured on film range from conceptually funny to outright evil, but the people who are trapped within them are consistently charming regardless of their participation. The nation’s cultureless rituals have made fools of us all, and so we can only feel warm comradery with our fellow fools who’ve fallen into its strangest crevices. That warm humanism is especially apparent in the closing short, “A Trip Through the Brooks Home,” which expands on an interview with a married couple who live in the Sun City retirement community profiled in “The Best of Your Life.” It’s very simply a guided home tour, but there’s a pervasively sweet awkwardness to the husband & wife at the center of it, recalling the Mitch & Micky folk singer duo of Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind. It’s that generosity towards its subjects that makes America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of such great theatrical programming, as you can hear individual members of the audience being delighted by one isolated character quirk at a time. Hopefully, it’ll be more widely available soon, both in theaters and at home, since it’s both a useful historical document of vintage American kitsch (especially when juxtaposed with genuine American suffering) and a godsend for cult cinema freaks who’ve already rewatched similar human-interest docs like American Movie, Vernon, Florida, and Heavy Metal Parking Lot too many times to count.
The 36th annual New Orleans Film Festival will be staged all across the city next week, hitting local venues like The CAC, The Broad, and both locations of The Prytania from October 23rd through the 27th (with virtual selections streaming through November 2nd). Usually, I recap highlights from the festival after it’s already concluded, but this year I’ve got a preview of a few selections from the program before they screen in person. The five titles listed below are movies worth seeking out during the festival, especially if you’re interested in catching smaller releases that won’t get the same wide theatrical distribution as NOFF’s flashier local premieres for new films by Rian Johnson, Bradley Cooper, Nia DaCosta, Noah Baumbach, and the like. It’s a rare chance to see them on a big screen with a packed, lively audience, which is the beauty of the local film fest experience.
I hope to catch more of what the festival has to offer in-person myself next week, with more reviews to come. I’ll also be joined by frequent podcast guest Bill Arceneaux for our annual festival recap once it’s all over, so there’s plenty more NOFF coverage to look forward to. In the meantime, here are a few select titles worth your time & attention, along with the corresponding venues & showtimes for their screenings. See you there!
We Are Pat
You might not expect that a three-decade old SNL sketch would be worthy of its own feature-length documentary, but the Julia Sweeney character Pat! proves to be a surprisingly rich cinematic subject precisely because it’s out of step with modern culture. Rowan Haber makes their directorial feature debut picking at the complicated legacy of vintage It’s Pat! sketches, in which the titular recurring character baffles everyone they meet by not conforming to an easily definable gender identity. Pat is more gender ambiguous than gender nonbinary, but they still offered some shred of representation for that specific queer community on mainstream television at a time when few others could be found anywhere in the wider public sphere. At the same time, the sketches’ punchlines often rely on a point-and-laugh derision of Pat as a freak of nature because they cannot be immediately categorized as a single gender based on traditional cultural markers, driving everyone in their immediate vicinity insane. A nonbinary artist who works almost exclusively in a community of trans collaborators, Haber uses this project as an opportunity to dwell in the tension between a childhood fascination with Pat as a mirror to their own burgeoning identity and an adult understanding of Pat as a public act of transphobic bullying. It’s the kind of movie that will admit in a single breath that, yes, Pat is a transphobic joke and, yes, Pat can also be very funny.
We Are Pat shamelessly commits a couple major modern-doc filmmaking sins (mainly, dragging the director and social media posts onscreen instead of sticking to the subject at hand), but it mostly gets away with it out of discourse-hijacking chutzpah. Haber assembles an impressive range of talking-head commentators on the Pat! phenomenon, ranging from gender-nonconforming indie musician JD Samson (who has no direct association with SNL or the larger comedy scene) to recent nonbinary SNL cast member Molly Kearney to Julia Sweeney herself, who extrapolates on how Pat helped her express frustrations with the social limitations of her own public gender expression. More importantly, they also assemble a writer’s room of trans & nonbinary comedians to write new, politically savvy Pat sketches that undo the harm of It’s Pat!‘s most egregious punchlines. The resulting sketch comedy that’s staged after those writing sessions is not especially funny, but the roundtable discussions of how to modernize Pat for a more expansive understanding of gender leads to fruitful discussions that help save the movie from becoming a simple I Love the 90s-style nostalgia fest. We Are Pat doesn’t attempt to reclaim Pat! as a gender-nonconforming queer icon so much as it uses Pat as an excuse to open a huge can of pop-culture worms just to watch them squirm. Screening Sun, Oct 26th, 5:15pm @ The Broad Theater (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)
Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt
Speaking of cultural relics that peaked in the 90s, NOFF will also include a screening of a new Butthole Surfers documentary, adorably subtitled The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt. The hole truth be told, I never really got the Butthole Surfers outside their one alt-radio hit “Pepper,” which is an undeniable Gen-X earworm. The musicianship on their records is impressive in an athletic sense, with complicated guitar riffs and punishing tribal drum patterns formulating a new kind of abrasive noise rock in a time when most underground music was a more simplistic, sped-up version of hardcore punk. I just could never find an in as a fan, an album that could be enjoyed from start to end. That is, until I saw them perform in a tent at Voodoo Fest sometime in the aughts, where their nonstop aural assault was matched with the bad-acid-trip visuals of film projectors, go-go-dancers, and clashing strobes. I finally understood the band’s appeal as a kind of circus side show after that performance, and this new documentary explains how that stage craft was constructed one component at a time. Butthole Surfers started as a few bored teenagers in Texan suburbia, naming themselves after an off-the-cuff quip that their brand of abrasive noise rock “sounds like surf music;” “Yeah, butthole surf music.” As they gradually added more musicians, light show technicians, and drugged-out stage performers, they toured the globe and crossed paths with people as famous as Richard Linklater, Johnny Depp, RuPaul, and their one-sided nemeses R.E.M., each of whom are featured in their own standalone anecdotes among testimony about their musical greatness from bands who I do regularly listen to: Fugazi, Melvins, Meat Puppets, Minutemen, etc.
Freaked! co-director Tom Stern breaks up the visual monotony of these talking-head testimonials by matching the band’s multimedia approach in his filmmaking style. The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt is a playful mishmash of stop-motion, crude zine animation, Crank Yankers-reminiscent puppetry, and warped VHS psychedelia, illustrating the band’s wilder, druggier exploits from the days before they could be captured on cellphone video. Like most party bands who continue nihilistic drug use past their early 20s, the vibe among members sours the longer the Butthole Surfers soldier on, and much of the back half of their story is mired in the hurt feelings between core contributors Gibby Haynes & Paul Leary, giving them room to grieve what’s been lost in their once-vibrant friendship. That getting-in-touch-with-your-feelings section of the third act might surprise longtime Butthole Surfers fans who fell in love with the band for mixing overly complicated noise rock with pre-recorded farts & burps, but hey, being a perpetually stoned, sarcastic prankster gets tiring after a while. Speaking of which, this film completes the unofficial trilogy of this year’s documentaries on the gods of sarcastic rock ‘n’ roll, after similar treatments for Pavement & DEVO. It’s time to place bets on whether the next one will be about Ween, The Dead Milkmen, or dark-horse choice (and apparently former Butthole Surfers collaborators) Bongwater. Screening Sun, Oct 26th, 6:45pm @ The Broad Theater
Move Ya Body: The Birth of House
For a documentary profile of a less scatological pop music phenomenon, check out Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, which presents an oral history of the early house music scene in 1980s Chicago. Much like with Butthole Surfers, I’ve always found house to be an especially difficult musical avenue to fully explore, since it’s a movement mostly built off DJ sets and mixtapes instead of a canon of must-listen albums. Move Ya Body doesn’t offer much of an explainer on the core texts to seek out when first getting into house, outside of its focus on the DJs signed to the Chicago-based D.I.Y. label Trax Records. Instead of getting nerdy about cataloging every notable track & DJ in the scene, it mostly digs into the cultural context of the racist & homophobic era that birthed the movement as a flashpoint of Black, queer political opposition. That story starts with the Disco Sucks! phenomenon, which peaked at a “Disco Demolition Night” rally in which a mostly white rock ‘n’ roll audience smashed & burned disco records on a Chicago baseball field before being dispersed by the cops, effectively turning into a race riot in the streets outside. The story eventually ends with the disco offshoot of house music becoming internationally popular due to the appropriation of the sound by major-label artists like Madonna, leading to the same white audiences joining in on the fun once it proved profitable. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least a tale as old as America.
Move Ya Body features some stock footage and dramatic recreations of nightclub life in 1980s Chicago, but it’s overall much more of a sit-down interview presentation than the Pat! or Butthole Surfers docs. The entire point of the picture is to offer the sidelined DJs of Trax’s early days to tell their side of the story after being overshadowed by major-label artists like Madonna & Beyoncé in the global exportation of house. It’s a story with clear heroes & villains too, not just a vague gesture toward the broad concept of Black queer joy as a form of political resistance. At the very least, the looming figure of Screamin’ Rachael emerges as a perfectly loathsome heel, self-proclaiming herself to be The Queen of House despite only being included in early recordings as a hired hand. It would be like if Deborah Harry continually claimed to be the Queen of Hip-Hop for her vocals on “Rapture.” She’s part of the story but miles from the center of it, and so her shameless self-aggrandizing as a white woman who happened to be invited to the party crosses a line that affords the movie some genuine dramatic tension (despite its images mostly being restricted to people sitting in chairs). Screening Sat, Oct 25th, 8:45pm @ The Contemporary Arts Center
Your Own Flavor
One of the highlight shorts blocks featured at this year’s NOFF is titled “Body Horror Shorts: Picking Scabs”, commemorating the festival’s proximity to Halloween. Within that collection, I found a subcategory of short films about the bodily embarrassments of sex & dating, which play more like comedy sketches about the follies of hookup culture than genuine body horror. The animated shorts Caries and Mambo No.2 fixate on the embarrassments of inopportune bowel movements and the stink of oral bacteria when would-be lovers are trying to get into the mood, and the standout short of the bunch, Your Own Flavor, goes a step further to make the acting of hooking up itself to be a source of grotesque horror. After being stood up on a date, a young twentysomething is lured into buying ice cream from a rolling-cart vendor in a public park. That vendor is Chompers, a magical hand puppet who owns & operates Ice Guys ice cream. Chompers uses some of his vaguely defined puppet magic to cheer up the jilted lover with a song & dance routine about how she will one day prove to be someone’s favorite flavor of ice cream, making the temporary embarrassments of online dating worthwhile. Then, Chompers’s demeanor takes a nasty turn, as all (n)ice guys’ temperaments inevitably do. In short, it’s a Wonder Showzen update for the Tinder era.
The brief runtime of a 10-minute short film typically demands a simple set-up and punchline structure, which Your Own Flavor satisfies by making sure its punchline hits hard and hits funny. It’s got a bright, cartoonish visual panache to it as well, especially in its follow-the-bouncing-ball singalong sequence, set against a handmade, 2D cardboard ice cream factory backdrop. Not all of the shorts included in that “Body Horror” block satisfy the “horror” portion of the descriptor, but they consistently deliver on the gross-out gags associated with the genre, appealing to audiences who miss getting stoned after midnight to peak-era Adult Swim. Within that gross-out alt-comedy context, Your Own Flavor is a standout. Screening Sat, Oct 25th, 9:00pm @ The Contemporary Arts Center (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)
West of Greatness: The Story of the Weswego Muscle Boys
Of course, one of the major advantages of going to a local film festival is getting to see local films, so it’s my duty to recommend at least one selection from the program’s “Made in Louisiana” category. The narrative feature West of Greatness: The Story of the Westwego Muscle Boys is hyper local New Orleans cinéma verité, as if someone hired Sean Baker to direct a TV spot for a Westwego gym. It’s the story of two scrawny West Bankers who enter a bodybuilding competition despite their cartoonishly nerdy physiques. One is an aspiring actor who hopes the prize money will fund an escape from LA for a brighter future in L.A., while the other hopes it will pay to move out of his abusive home with his sibling in tow. Both are followed by a fictional documentary crew, and they become unlikely friends in the months leading up to the competition, mostly because they’re the only rail-thin nerds training in a gym packed to the walls with legitimate muscle boys.
West of Greatness is endearing enough as a hopeless underdog sports story, but its real achievement is in its verisimilitude. Director Jared LaRue and crew staged a real-life local bodybuilding competition to stand in for the fictional Greatest Gains competition of the narrative, so that all periphery players afford the low-budget production some impressive authenticity. The mise-en-scène’s gym rituals, protein shakes, posing coaches, and baby-faced bros bulk up the credibility of the documentary format and open the story up to larger themes of Alpha Male cultural trends outside the tiny lives of its scrawny leads. There’s also a semi-documentary aspect to those actors’ physical progress, pulling some solid sports-movie pathos out of the transformations of their bodies from string beans to disconcertingly jacked string beans. It’s a remarkably ambitious project given the obvious limitations of its budget, especially in its tension between manufactured drama and documented reality. Screening Fri, Oct 24th, 7:45pm @ Prytania Theatre & Mon, Oct 27th, 8:00pm @ The Broad Theater (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)
I have owned the same used copy of the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi actioner The Running Man for as long as I can remember. It’s been so long that the DVD itself has become just as kitsch as the cheesy 80s movie it stores. Between its standard-definition transfer, its double-disc presentation of both wide & full-screen formats, and its 3D-animated menu transitions, it’s a time capsule of physical media’s ancient past. What really dates that Special Edition DVD set, however, is its special features menu, which includes two short-form documentaries explaining The Running Man‘s continued cultural relevance into the early 2000s. One disc includes a featurette titled “Lockdown on Main Street,” which links the film’s themes of totalitarian government surveillance to the privacy-violating overreach of the Bush Administration post-9/11. Topical! The other disc’s featurette “Game Theory” covers the prescience of the film’s game-show premise in predicting the dystopian state of reality TV in the early aughts, which had then recently mutated from early human-interest documentaries PBS’s An American Family & MTV’s The Real World to more preposterous, sadistic programs like Survivor & Fear Factor. The titular, fictional TV game show The Running Man is a government-sanctioned crime & punishment program in which prisoners fight for their freedom against homicidal American Gladiator types with deadly weapons & pro wrestler gimmicks. The real-world state of reality TV hadn’t gotten quite that malicious by the early 2000s, but the other fictional programs advertised during its fictional television broadcasts—Paul Verhoeven-style—weren’t too much of an exaggeration. For instance, the commercial for a show titled Climbing for Dollars, in which contestants climb a rope over a pit of barbed wire & rabid dogs, no longer felt all that outlandish in a world that had already produced Fear Factor or the Japanese game show “A Life in Prizes” (as documented in last year’s The Contestant). Even when that Special Edition DVD was produced in 2004, the film’s dystopian game show America still seemed plausibly achievable by its far-away future setting of 2019.
The Running Man‘s quirks & charms have not changed much over the years. As a pun-heavy action showcase for a spandex-clad Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s just as amusing now as it was four decades ago. The worst you can say about the way it has aged is that it’s been outshone by its Verhoeven-directed contemporaries RoboCop & Total Recall, which make for much sharper & more vicious satire. Oddly, the short-doc featurette “Game Theory: An Examination of Reality TV” feels much more out of date, since it speaks to current trends of reality TV production in the early 2000s instead of predicting what the format might evolve into in the future. There’s something surreal about watching talking heads explain the basic components of reality television after decades of drowning in household-name series like Real Housewives, Below Deck, Love Is Blind, The Bachelor, etc. Everything from those shows’ reduced production costs to the way they’re cast for conflict to the way their semi-scripted & heavily edited version of “reality” is a far cry from pure documentary filmmaking is spelled out as if the audience is considering those factors for the very first time. Even if obvious to a modern audience, there is still something validating about hearing former Survivor contestants and Fear Factor showrunners explain that what they’re attempting to capture is a genuine reaction to artificial scenarios — a conscious mix of reality & artifice. Sometimes, it does help to hear an everyday concept defined in simple terms like that, even if in this case it feels like explaining the existence of water to a fish. The fictional TV program The Running Man could not be more artificial; it has a pro-wrestling promotion’s relationship to Reality. The pain, shame, and death that contestants suffer on the show is real, though, which is why it’s totally plausible that massive audiences would tune into its bread-and-circuses entertainment spectacle as nightly appointment viewing. It’s the same sadistic impulse that recently inspired Netflix executives to greenlight a “real” version of The Squid Games to cash in on the popularity of the fictional one, with predictably inhumane results.
This early-2000s “Game Theory” understanding & definition of reality TV is both accurate & incomplete. It gets across the reality TV audience’s bottomless sadism, but it largely ignores the sexual voyeurism that also makes the format so enduringly popular. The success of Survivor & Fear Factor may have made it seem like society was headed towards more physically violent & punitive television programming in an impending Running Man dystopia, but it’s arguable that the format has veered towards a more sexually pornographic impulse instead. While early reality-TV breakouts like The Real World & Big Brother offered brief, night-vision glimpses into its contestants’ private sex lives, more recent shows like Love Island, Temptation Island, FBoy Island,MILF Manor, and Naked Attraction have disposed of any pretense that the audience cares about anything else but sex. While The Running Man & “Game Theory” only acknowledge the format’s sex appeal in context of casting hottie hunks & babes as eye candy, there were other early examinations of the format that fully understood its reliance on sexual voyeurism. For instance, No Wave filmmaker Beth B’s 1996 documentary Visiting Desire plays like a direct response to & escalation of the sexual voyeurism of MTV’s The Real World. Triangulating the middle ground between Annie Sprinkle, Marlon Riggs, and the street interview segments of HBO Real Sex, Visiting Desire is a social experiment shot in the cultural dead zone between reality TV & amateur pornography. It starts with a sequence of therapists & psychologists explaining the function of Fantasy in healthy adult sexuality, staged in a black-box void to look like an especially risqué episode of Charlie Rose. Then, Beth B points her camera at a series of NYC pedestrians, who ruminate on what fantasy they would want to play out if they could share a bedroom with a stranger for 30 minutes, no boundaries. Finally, she puts that scenario to a live test, bringing two strangers at a time into a sparse set decorated with only a bed, a chair, and a box of Kleenex, with 30 minutes to act out a fantasy of their choosing. It looks & feels like the set-up to an amateur porno, but the bridge from fantasy to reality becomes too intimidating in the moment for most participants to cross, and it ends up playing like an art-gallery video loop instead.
Already a few years into the initial run of The Real World, Visiting Desire totally understands the basic appeal of reality television. Beth B has set up an intensely artificial scenario (30 minutes of filmed fantasy play with a total stranger) hoping to illicit & capture a genuine human reaction (sex, or something like it). It’s not accurate to call it a failed experiment, exactly, but the range of genuine human behavior captured in the film isn’t as sexy nor as gratifying as its premise promises. Some participants are committed to the semi-scripted fantasy of their choosing: trading spankings, swapping clothes & gender roles, instructing a stranger to masturbate, etc. Unsurprisingly, NYC punk scene legend Lydia Lunch is especially game to lean into her dominatrix persona for the camera, fully playing out each fantasy prompt she’s confronted with regardless of whether she shares any attraction with her scene partner. Most participants completely chicken out, though, shying away from the fantasy they entered the room ready to perform and, in several instances, breaking down crying. That fear and that emotional release still count as unexpected genuine reaction to the artificial “reality” of the project, but they also so obviously miss the mark of what Beth B initially proposed that the cast often apologizes to the camera for not giving her what she wants. While the Running Man “Game Theory” undersells the pornographic aspect of reality TV, Beth B’s take on the format also misunderstands an essential component of what makes it work in the first place. 30 minutes is simply not enough time for her cast to adjust to her artificial environment or, more importantly, to her camera. In “Game Theory”, a former Survivor contestant describes how awkward she felt during her initial hours in front of the cameras, but then she became a more natural version of herself a few days into the shoot as she adjusted to their presence. All Visiting Desire has time to capture is that initial, awkward awareness of the camera without breaking through to the comfort that allows for genuine human response to its artificial scenario. If it were a multi-episode TV show instead of academic video art, it might’ve gotten somewhere genuinely interesting (and genuinely sexy). Instead, it’s a mixed-results experiment that’s neither pure documentary nor pure pornography.
If there’s anything instructive about this early reality-TV academia, it’s that Edgar Wright’s upcoming Running Man adaptation is unlikely to have much new to say about the violent or pornographic extremes that make the format popular. The Running Man-style violence of game shows like Survivor & Fear Factor peaked twenty years ago, while the pornographic avenues the genre has recently taken instead have no relation to the film’s Stephen King-penned source material. It’s difficult to imagine a new Running Man could even be dated in the fun way, not without Arnold Schwarzenegger quipping, “I’ll live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist, because I’m going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine!” in his trademark Austrian accent. The cartoonish action cinema of the original Running Man movie was already outdated by the 1990s, and the American game-show dystopia it predicts was already in full swing by the 2000s, long before its 2019 setting. So, what’s even left for a new movie adaptation to accomplish? Based on current trends, the future of reality TV looks a lot more like the semi-pornographic artifice of Beth B’s Visiting Desire, flaws & all. Maybe that’s what we should be remaking instead, now that TV producers know exactly how to manipulate game show contestants into fucking on camera. It would likely make for some very popular major-network primetime porn, à la Love Island UK (or whatever happens to be your island-themed softcore game show of choice).
The 90s alt-rock band Pavement is, undoubtedly, one of “the most important and influential” bands of their time. There’s just no way to point that out without betraying their relationship with artistic sincerity & professional ambition. So, the new career-retrospective documentary Pavements has to hide that sentiment behind several layers of self-protective sarcasm & ironic remove, declaring Pavement to be “The World’s Most Important and Influential Band” of all time, forever . . . as a goof. Here, Alex Ross Perry gives the rock-band mascot of 90s slackerdom the same kaleidoscopic hagiography treatment Brett Morgan gave David Bowie in Moonage Daydream, except in this case his subject is around to make fun of that idea the entire time they’re going through the motions of it. They made fun of the positive press & financial success they found in the 90s too, constantly mocking the concept of rock stardom until they were no longer in danger of achieving it. And yet, both their songs and this nostalgic overview of their history can be genuinely beautiful & moving at times, despite all efforts to undercut any overt sincerity. The words are pyrite, but the soundz are gold.
Pavements is a loosely constructed document of four simultaneous projects meant to commemorate the important, influential art of Pavement’s heyday: a diary of their recent reunion tour, an art-gallery exhibition of their vintage artifacts, a Bohemian Rhapsody-style biopic spoof and, most improbably, a staging of an original jukebox musical. All of your favorite Pavement tracks from their Quarantine The Past greatest-hits compilation repeat several times throughout, but none are heard in total. They’re all fragmented between fictional & real-world variations in the four simultaneous projects, practically lyric by lyric. As a result, the film feels deliberately formless & unfinished, a documentary that runs over two hours in length but never feels like it truly gets started. That approach might be frustrating for newcomers hoping to actually learn something about the band or to at the very least be hooked by their standout singles. Anything I learned as a casual fan was entirely by accident – gleaning some interpersonal band member dynamics and album-cycle evolutions of their sound that I didn’t pick up on while discovering their records the decade after they broke up. Still, it’s a perfect approach for a band that was so stubbornly committed to maintaining their detached 90s slacker cool while contemporaries like Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and The Smashing Pumpkins were becoming unlikely household names.
The biggest surprise of Pavements is the comedic chops of Stranger Things alumnus Joe Keery, cast here as the fictional biopic version of Pavement singer Stephen Malkmus. Keery outshines the much more luminary comedic performers Jason Schwartzman & Tim Heidecker in those sequences, making a big show out of impersonating Malkmus with unwarranted method-acting commitment. Like everything else in Pavement lore, it’s a flippant mockery of artistic pretension, but it also occasionally touches on something strikingly impressive & true. There are several interview clips in which Malkmus is being aggressively sarcastic & uncooperative with press that are indistinguishable from their corresponding Joe Keery parodies until the camera reveals which of the two brats is yapping. Much like Sophie Thatcher’s performance in the recent music video for the once-obscure Pavement B-side “Harness Your Hopes,” Keery acts as a modern avatar for the band’s pranksterism so that they don’t have to take the spotlight themselves, and he provides a lot of the movie’s most coherent reference points for tone & narrative. Otherwise, Pavements is a scrapbook of 90s-era college radio slacker rock, as soundtracked by “the most important and influential” band to define the sound. Its fragmented approach that avoids enthusiastically committing to any one framework for retelling Pavement’s story is likely the only way that story could be told; it could only make fun of itself for trying at all.
The scariest films I saw at this year’s Overlook Film Festival featured none of the ghouls, ghosts, goblins, demons, and vampires that typically populate the screen at the horror-leaning genre fest. I was mostly scared by the dark-sided media consumption habits of my fellow human beings, some of whom were in the audience of the very same theater as me. Personally, I can watch supernatural evil illustrated on the screen all day without being emotionally affected by the darkness & cruelty depicted, but when it comes to turning true-crime documentation of real-world evil into passive, consumptive entertainment, my heart sinks in my chest. True crime documentaries have recently become a hugely popular micro-industry, with a huge audience second-screening 10-hour miniseries about heinous murder sprees while eating dinner & folding laundry, as if they were half-listening to episodes of The Office or Friends. Something about that passive, disaffected viewing habit is even more disturbing than the crimes being dramatized for mass entertainment (and for easy, routine streaming-service profit). So, it’s appropriate that two of the documentary selections at this year’s Overlook focused on general audiences’ insatiable true-crime appetite from a critical distance, asking how, exactly, did we allow our formulaic background entertainment to get this fucked up?
Sometimes, you need a little distance to recognize just how rotted things have gotten. David Osit’s documentary Predators profiles the aughts-era true crime series To Catch a Predator as a reality-TV phenomenon in which Dateline NBC anchor Chris Hansen baited online child-molesters from behind their keyboards to stage sensational on-camera confrontations in the meat space, to great financial success. Deploying “decoy” actors who pretended to be underage, the show would then interview the titular predators in the lowest moment of their lives, watching them to beg for mercy & therapy before promptly being arrested by local cops. I remember finding this premise and the show’s success too grotesque to stomach as a teenager when it first aired, so I spent the first 40 minutes or so of Predators fighting back the urge to vomit, confronted with how deeply evil it was in practice after only being aware of it in the abstract. No one in the To Catch a Predator production—Chris Hansen included—cared about the children they were supposedly protecting by luring these men to a bait house. The show is a seasons-long ratings stunt meant to hook & shock an audience by tapping into our animalistic impulses for violent vengeance. Its legacy is not in making the streets safer; it’s in prompting one of its targets to commit suicide during a taping and in inspiring dipshit influencers to stage their own D.I.Y. versions of the show on YouTube & TikTok, each with their own brand-conscious catchphrases & subscription models. Osit eventually wrestles with his personal connection to the show and how his young mind was shaped by it while it initially aired, but I mostly walked away disgusted with the broader, mainstream audience that made it a hit in the first place.
Charlie Shackleton’s self-deprecating meta documentary Zodiac Killer Project is much more current and much more conceptual in its own examination of true-crime cinema’s popularity. Shackleton’s original pitch was to adapt a book about an unprovable theory on the identity of the titular serial killer into a generic true-crime miniseries, but the rights for the adaptation were pulled at the last minute before production, so he couldn’t legally complete it. Instead, he’s made a movie about what he would have done if he had maintained those rights, breaking down the tropes, rhythms, and attention-grabbing tactics of a formulaic true-crime documentary as he outlines the incomplete project. He illustrates this game plan through four rigidly segmented visual approaches that afford the film a kind of academic distance from the typical straight-to-streaming docs it satirizes. In one approach, he narrates the scenes he cannot legally film over celluloid images of empty Californian landscapes, slowly zooming in on minor background details whenever he gets wrapped up in the heat of the story. In another, he illustrates individual images from that story with “evocative B-roll” in a purposefully artificial sound stage environment, mimicking Errol Morris’s pioneering true-crime doc The Thin Blue Line as it’s been diluted through countless reiterations. He’s also often shown in the recording booth as he’s being interviewed by an off-screen collaborator, making all of this observation & deconstruction of the true crime genre sound casually improvised, as if it’s occurring to him in real time. In the most important approach, he proves his point by inserting scenes from the made-for-Netflix true crime docs he’s describing in a YouTube video essay presentation, demonstrating that he clearly knows what he’s talking about as a self-critical fan of the genre.
Zodiac Killer Project reminded me of a couple post-modern television series I did watch in the early 2000s, while avoiding the amoral cultural rot of shows like To Catch a Predator. I’m thinking of Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed—for how it spoils the magic of how the true crime genre works its audience—and The Soup, for giving a broad enough overview of the genre that I don’t feel like I have to watch any genuine examples of it to get it. Even when breaking down the laziest & evilest aspects of the genre in real time, however, you get the sense that Charlie Shackleton is still a little bummed that he didn’t get to complete his formulaic streaming-service doc as originally conceived. His mourning the loss of that work is even tied to his realization that so many fewer people are going to watch this artful, academic documentary than the audience that would have auto-played his formulaic Netflix slop, if completed. Indeed, only a miniscule fraction of the audience who watched To Catch a Predator as it originally aired are going to reckon with the moral implications of that mass-entertainment character blemish as examined in its post-mortem doc Predators. Hell, I’m sure David Osit would even settle for a fraction of the still-watching audience commanded by micro YouTube celebrity Skeet Hansen, who lamely punctuates his Chris Hansen-impersonating predator exposures with the catchphrase “You’ve just been Skeeted.” The scariest aspect of all of this is how little anyone gives a shit about the exploitation of real-life violence, suffering, and abuse that provides the background noise to our absent-minded chores & scrolling; it’s all comfort watching. The monsters are the audience.
At the turn of the millennium, Michael Townsend spent five years as a drawing instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design, but unbeknownst to his colleagues, during that time, he and seven other artists were working on something unbelievable. Inspired by a 2003 radio advertisement for the then-new Providence Place Mall in which a woman expressed her excitement about the shopping center’s opening and how it would allow her to get everything that she needed for her life in one place and expressing a desire to “live in the mall,” Townsend set about finding out if this would be possible. Over the next few years, he and several others, including fellow Providence-based artists and even a few of his students, managed to locate an unused vacant space within the mall itself and, over time, turned the 750 square foot “void” into a (mostly) habitable space, before being discovered by the mall’s powers that be and being evicted. In the nearly two decades since, the others who assisted in making the mall their home have remained unnamed—Townsend is no narc—but recently participated in the creation of Jeremy Workman’s most recent documentary, Secret Mall Apartment.
I was intrigued by the premise, but I didn’t expect to be moved by the film. On social media recently, I saw someone calling out the documentary Waiting for Superman as being propaganda for charter schools and denouncing the way that contemporary critics had been too kind to it. This led into a discussion about documentaries that included a quotation about how a documentary that does not improve one’s knowledge about the subject more than reading an article about it is one that should be met with criticism. (With James Gunn’s upcoming Superman film, you can imagine that even with boolean additions, searching for “waiting for superman” was a futile endeavor in trying to find this discussion again.) Secret Mall Apartment is much more than that, weaving together a tale of a group of artists in opposition to gentrification, as well as a more subtle narrative about the ephemeral nature of art, that its beauty (like our lives) are meaningful not because of permanence but because of impermanence. Nowhere is this more clearly made evident than the section of the film which focuses on Townsend (and his students)’s work with in tape art, as instruction (as we see Michael teaching a class of students about using masking tape as a kind of temporary graffiti), as installation (as seen when the camera tours the Hasbro Children’s Hospital and all of the art there that was made by and in collaboration with patients), and as memorial (when Townsend and some of his students spend half a decade creating silhouettes all over Manhattan in the shape of four superimposed hearts).
It’s the last of these that’s the most transitory, as even the website that was used to document this project is now defunct. (When this was noted during the documentary, I wondered if this was true and if the website was really gone, but even when checking the WayBack Machine’s archive, all of the pages I could find looked like this, so it does appear to be well and truly lost.) That transient nature of art is made manifest early on, when Townsend and others speak about the experience of losing Fort Thunder, an underground art collective in a Providence textile factory that hadn’t been in operation since the 1860s; for five years at the end of the last century, the place was used as a living and working space for artists and musicians. However, while the Providence Place Mall was being built—notably with no entry access on the side that faced the Olneyville district that it butted up against—developers turned their eye to that warehouse district as a place that they could further capitalize upon, and they ultimately did destroy Fort Thunder. It was this parasitic ideology, the desire to completely fill out “unused space” in every way possible, that was part of the inspiration for the Providence Place apartment artists, as they, too, were finding a way to fill an empty part of the mall which had come to dominate the city. We also get to explore an outdoor exhibit that Townsend created even earlier, a hidden public space that was only accessible by slipping through train tracks and entering a sort of covered canal, in which he had placed dozens of human figures. That exhibit, Fort Thunder, tape art, the secret apartment itself — all of these things are fleeting. The secret apartment is recreated as a set for the film, and we get to see it being explored by Townsend, his now ex-wife Adriana Valdez-Young, and others, and it serves as a stage to recreate the day that Townsend was caught and apprehended in the apartment. And then, we see it dismantled.
And yet, in all of this, there are things that remain eternal, and which we do carry with us. Several of the other members of the secret apartment crew retain, to this day, the keys used for entry into their protest/clubhouse (the building of a cinder block wall and the installation of a door is one of the highlights of their activity). One of them was originally painted with flames, the image of which has long since been worn away on the key’s surface but remains, in some small form, in the grooves. That’s where we carry art with us, and where it stays—in the grooves. It’s a surprisingly moving piece, and I can’t wait for others to see it.
I have been aware of George Dureau’s legacy as a local artist for as long as I have been aware of local art, but until now I’ve only ever seen a toned-down, smoothed-out presentation of his actual work. Dureau was an edgy, confrontational presence in the early decades of his notoriety, but by the time I was old enough to explore local art galleries on my own in the 2000s, he had become a respectable cultural ambassador for the city, delivering commissioned works of public art for institutions like NOMA & Gallier Hall. The only time I’ve ever seen his image outside of self-portraits and still photographs is in a made-for-PBS documentary about the process of constructing Mardi Gras parade-floats, titled From the Ground Up. Introduced to him as a venerated public artist, I assumed his personal work was as safe & kitschy as George Rodrigue’s, but Dureau was much more provocative than that. He had just already gone through the John Waters trajectory of outsider-art iconoclast turned Respected Filth Elder before I was around to see the transformation. Thankfully, the new documentary George Dureau: New Orleans Artist is here to correct the record.
George Dureau: New Orleans Artist is a documentary portrait of a classic French Quarter eccentric, crudely stitched together from the stories & works he left behind. The movie itself is ragged in its construction, seemingly assembled from whatever scraps of interviews with Dureau could be found on YouTube and molding camcorder tapes, with little attention paid to their mismatched sound quality. Despite enjoying an active social & professional life in the city for over eight decades, only eight interviewees are included in this hagiographic portrait, which either feels lazy or cowardly (depending on how divisive other participants might have found his personality or art). The filmmaking team of Sergio Andres Lobo-Navia & Jarret Lofstead are inconsistent in the final edit on when to illustrate those interviewees’ anecdotes with location-specific images captured around the city and when to just repeat triple-exposure shots of oak tree canopies filmed from below as a place-holder background image for the audience to zone out to. Still, no matter the moment-to-moment quibbles I had with the presentation, I left overall grateful for them giving this subject a feature-length treatment in the first place.
As a slideshow of art stills, New Orleans Artist is thrilling. Dureau thought of himself primarily as a painter and was frustrated by the curational attention paid to his photographs instead. Both mediums are presented with equal weight & importance here, drawing a throughline between the macho, muscular models he scouted to photograph in his home studio and the classical figure paintings that resulted from those studies. A homosexual lush with a warm but caustic demeanor, Dureau is portrayed as his own worst professional enemy, self-sabotaging his way through The Art World as he blew easy opportunities in order to maintain a vague personal integrity that only he fully understood. This self-driven conflict is mostly explained in his relationship with infamous NYC photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whom both the film and Dureau himself argue photocopied all of his best visual ideas in less interesting, crueler works that made a lot more money in a market that thrives on cruelty. Dureau’s own work could cynically be seen as exploitative towards his nonprofessional models, whom he often sought for their differences in race & physical disfigurement. Mapplethorpe is presented at length as both an example of Dureau’s self-sabotaging professional combativeness and as an example of how this same work could be truly exploitative in the wrong hands.
A better movie might have focused entirely on Dureau’s warmly bitchy clashes with Mapplethorpe and the mutual influences of their work as contemporaries. There’s a specificity & purpose to that subject that’s missing in the film’s broader recollections of Dureau’s life in the city, which often devolve into “Ain’t dere no more” nostalgia and understandable-but-rote mourning over the devastation of AIDS & Hurricane Katrina (both of which Dureau survived relatively intact). By the time local art gallery owner Arthur Rogers explains that the French Quarter of the 1970s was different from today because it was full of “true eccentrics” then, I was nauseated by the obliviousness to the city’s ongoing art-scene counterculture; speaking of it purely in the past tense is embarrassing, not validating. Dureau’s work is powerful enough to speak for itself, though, and it loudly speaks over any good-old-days distractions from the film’s few interviewees. His work feels especially alive when compared with Mapplethorpe’s, seeming much cooler & kinder than his more famous frenemy’s (which was blurred at local screenings, presumably due to copyright issues). No one would have hated a side-by-side Dureau/Mapplethorpe documentary more than George Dureau himself, though, so it’s probably for the best that the only feature-length documentary of his work to date is about his relationship with New Orleans instead, something he did have genuine affection for.
The first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidential term have surprisingly been defined more by the daily stunts & shenanigans of unelected government official Elon Musk than they have been by the actions of the president himself. Sure, Trump is signing a relentless barrage of hateful, unconstitutional Executive Orders that are threatening to crumble decades of social & economic progress in a matter of days. That was fully expected, though, especially if you paid any attention to the “Project 2025” agenda advertised during his election campaign. Musk’s overt, oligarchic influence on these Executive Branch actions have been just as nefarious but much more bizarre, especially as an extension of the failed meme humor of his current reign as the Villain King of Twitter. It’s not enough that Trump & Musk are wielding institutional power to reshape America with a straight-up Nazi agenda; they’re also irony-washing that Nazi ideology through several layers of internet meme humor, so that their above-board, bought-and-paid-for coup is read as a humorous prank meant to “trigger the libs,” not to welcome in a new, shameless era of American fascism. Between Musk’s “DOGE” branding, his juvenile obsession with the numbers 69 & 420, and the bar now being so low that his executing a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration now qualifies as a “dog whistle,” it’s clear that we’re living through America’s first 4chan presidency. Evil has never been so inane.
If you catch yourself wondering how, exactly, we got here over the last few years, I’ve seen no better explainer than the 2020 documentary Feels Good Man. A 90-minute history lesson on the memeification of a cartoon stoner frog may sound trivial in the context of America’s Nazi takeover, but Feels Good Man somehow does a better job explaining & contextualizing that far-right political shift than any other film I’ve seen – predating and overriding all of those QAnon docs that auto-populated on every streaming service in the years following the January 6 coup attempt of 2021. The stoner frog in question is, of course, Pepe the Frog, the breakout character from alt-comics artist Matt Furie’s cult series Boys Club. A soft-spoken San Francisco stoner who’s been drawing goofy frog doodles his entire life, Furie confides that Pepe is the Boys Club character he most personally identifies with . . . which is a brave thing to admit given the character’s eventual perversion and radicalization in the Hell pits of 4chan once it escaped the pages of his comic book. A single frame of Boys Club in which Pepe explains to his burnout roommates that he urinates with his pants completely lowered to his ankles because it “feels good man” was a funny enough image that it started getting shared on the internet outside the context of its source material and, as the movie argues, somehow snowballed into Donald Trump becoming the 45th President of the United States.
I have a general affection for Anthropology of the Internet documentaries that immortalize disposable online ephemera for cinematic prosperity, especially when they capture the sinister atmosphere of the Internet’s dankest dungeons (see also: the Russian dashcam compilation The Road Movie, the evil-clown sightings doc Wrinkles the Clown, and Jane Schoenbrun’s Slenderman doc A Self-Induced Hallucination). Even so, Feels Good Man does a better job than most at explaining how its own subject’s online virality led to real-world consequences outside niche meme forums. It chronicles Pepe the Frog’s transformation in the hellfires of 4chan from loveable frog to “the new swastika”, explaining how users who identified with Pepe as much as its creator had to force the frog to “go dark” to protect him from “normies” (i.e., women) who might identify with him as well. Because 4chan is an attention-economy culture that mostly traffics in “ironic” racism, this effort manifested as Pepe becoming a mouthpiece for Nazi rhetoric and an online dog whistle for alt-right C.H.U.D.s. Making Pepe as bigoted as possible became a kind of online game, and it gave real-world Right Wing ghouls a way to signal to the keyboard Nazis at home that the Trump-led establishment shared their values without abandoning their more buttoned-up, traditional voter base. That co-opting seems a little quaint now that Elon Musk is Sieg Heiling on an official government stage, but it was a major stepping stone that led us here.
The half of Feels Good Man that explains how 4chan memes created a new Nazi America is populated with all the expected demons of 2010s alt-right ascension. Pepe’s Nazi radicalization was directly inspired by Steve Bannon’s political strategy to “flood the zone with shit,” which has become the go-to playbook for the Trump-led Republican Party. During the infamous street interview when Richard Spencer is punched in the face by a protester, he’s explaining his Pepe the Frog lapel pin to a reporter at the moment the fist connects with his jaw (which the movie graciously repeats in several loops for our viewing pleasure). Pepe is even transformed into a direct stand-in for Trump himself, outfitted with a new smug facial expression and a Trumpian wig. Most critically, former Infowars blowhard Alex Jones is sued for copyright infringement by Matt Furie after using Pepe’s image on a fundraising campaign poster, marking Furie’s too-little-too-late attempt to reclaim his intellectual property from the worst people alive. The half of the film that’s about Furie’s astonishment & unpreparedness for the Internet’s hateful perversion of Pepe is adorably naive and populated with fellow alt-comics artists who are sad to see their friend suffer in this exponentially shitty shithole of a world: Lisa Hanawalt, Johnny Ryan, Aiyana Udesen, etc. Their attempt to reclaim Pepe and save his reputation was heavily outgunned, though, since the opposition included literal White House occupants.
It’s easy to roll your eyes at the twee preciousness of Furie’s pleas for good vibes and kindness as opposition against the hateful scum who’ve stolen & desecrated his art, but I appreciate the sentiment. I could not have sat through an exhaustive recounting of how 4chan “elected a meme as a president” and ushered in a Fourth Reich for the LOLs without a little kindness & levity. Being reminded that there are still sweet, reasonable people in the world who are oblivious to the deep well of evil on the other side of their computer screens was a calming counterbalance to the infuriating co-opting of meme culture to enact real-world fascism detailed elsewhere in the film. Five years later, it’s clear which side of that divide is winning the Culture War, but it’s also clear that they cannot create anything substantial themselves worthy of sharing & celebrating; they can only pervert, corrupt, and drain the humor & life out of previously existing art & language (which explains their more recent fondness for generative A.I.). As evidenced by the interstitial animations that imagine what it might be like if Boys Club had been adapted into a psychedelic Adult Swim sitcom instead of a Nazi dog whistle, Pepe deserved so much better than the hell-world we live in. He’s a cool frog.
Nearly ten years ago, a trove of presumed lost photographic prints and negatives belonging to the late exiled South African photographer Ernest Cole was discovered in several Swiss bank deposit boxes. Cole, born in 1940, was a critical component in the eventual overturning of the policies of apartheid in South Africa, as the 1967 release of his photobook House of Bondage was one of the first pieces of media to expose the inhuman cruelties occurring in South Africa under the hand of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (the “architect of apartheid”). Exiled as a result of this act of activism, Cole ended up in the United States, where he ultimately died—essentially homeless—in 1990. At the time, much of his work, which he had stored in a boarding house storeroom and had been unable to regain access to, was assumed to have been tossed out and lost forever, until the 2017 Swiss bank discovery. One of Cole’s last living relatives, a nephew, was flown into the country to collect these items, and found himself unable to get any information about why his uncle’s work had ended up in the safe at this bank, who had deposited it, or how they had paid for it.
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found spends some time on this Swiss mystery, and I want to get that out of the way first since it is, to me, the least important aspect of this documentary. When it was first mentioned that Cole’s assumed-lost work had been found intact and preserved in the SEB vault, I considered this a cause for joy, and it didn’t occur to me to presume malice on the part of whoever put it there. Surely, it would have to be someone who wanted to keep that material safe and preserved. If someone wanted to get rid of his documentation of social injustice, they would just destroy it, right? Once we learn later in the documentary that Cole’s mental (and physical) health had degraded to the point that he was unable to regain possession of his work before his death, one could almost imagine some Good Samaritan rescuing the work from being hauled away in the back of a sanitation truck, although this doesn’t explain how it ended up on the other side of the Atlantic. When the doc revealed that there were a remaining 504 photographs that the Swiss government was still fighting for possession of with Cole’s estate, I was a bit more convinced of the possibility of malintent on the part of whomever had spirited away Cole’s work. It was only after I started to write this paragraph that it struck me that I might be failing to inspect the colonialism of the idea altogether since any preservationist instinct that removed art from Africa to “protect” it by storing it in Europe is, well … colonialist by default. We may never know how a collection of Cole’s work ended up there, but its return to Cole’s family prompted filmmaker Raoul Peck to create Lost and Found, and it’s an unequivocal good that this film exists.
Nearly all of the footage within the film is Cole’s own, as are the words; LaKeith Stanfield provides voiceover that is taken from Cole’s correspondence and other writings, weaving together the narrative of a life. Cole talks about where he grew up, how a racist campaign of term-redefinition and expansionist neologisms led to the destruction of homes, communities, and families of native Africans under European rule. He escaped with his negatives and published House of Bondage, and as a result of his political exile, found himself adrift in a world that he had no hand in making and in which he could find little purchase. An attempt to expose the racism of the American South as he had the racism of South Africa was mounted, with Cole being sponsored by publishers to travel, but contemporary critics were less receptive to this work. Whether this is purely a matter of Western tendencies to find depictions of injustice abroad moving and empathy-inspiring while bristling when we see it in the mirror, or if there is some validity to the idea that his artistic eye was less capable of capturing the emotion of his subjects because of the cultural differences between the kind of racism that they experienced, I shall leave to your discretion. Despite the horrors of what he saw at home, his exile had a profoundly depressive effect on Cole, leaving him constantly in search of work and making it nearly impossible for him to keep a residence for long. Changes in leadership at publishing houses would mean that he was only half paid for a job and thus never finished it, and the discrepancies between how Cole would describe himself in his journals (not depressed) versus how his friends remember him to have been at the time (severely affected by depression) reveal a man who was lost, alone, and who never fully recovered from what he witnessed in his youth. Ultimately, he never did return home, although his aged mother was able to be at his bedside in New York when he died on February 19, 1990, just eight days after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in one of the defining moments in the collapse of the apartheid regime within the next few years.
This documentary is deeply felt, wonderfully composed, and unfortunately timely. The portrait of Cole that is created is a warm but not overly sentimental one. The narrative choice to use only Cole’s words is one that means that the voiceover informs but does not contextualize and, thus, requires you to build the story yourself from the juxtaposition and editing rather than having your hand held about what you should be thinking or how you should feel. One feature that stood out to me particularly was the frequent appearance of filmed political speeches and U.N. forums that, for decades, repeated the same tired canards justifying a lack of embargoes or sanctions against South Africa. “It would only harm those we are trying to help” says the U.N. president in grainy black and white footage from the 1960s, and which is said again by his successor in the 1970s, before being repeated almost word-for-word in vibrant color video of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I have to be honest with you; it’s bleak, and the portrait it paints of what’s in store for us in the coming years is even bleaker. When House of Bondage was released, it created a sense of moral outrage in the populace that, even at full force, was completely incapable of causing national and international leadership to take any action to end apartheid. We’ve spent the last 15 months with constant, new images of harrowing, monstrous, evil violence enacted by an apartheid state that currently exists, and the modern American is so inured to this kind of wickedness that the coalition of those who are rightly horrified is mocked, belittled, shouted down, fired, and legally silenced by conmen, grifters, and empowered bigots. If it took two and a half decades for apartheid to fall despite international (citizen-level) support for its abolition, then it does not bode well for the end of any current campaign of government terror, when people are unmoved by the plight of their fellow man. The past is never dead. It is not even the past.
One of the more diabolical trends in recent film promotion & distribution has been the decrease in access to premiere screenings for professional critics in favor of inviting online influencers instead. The thought is that the younger, less journalistic influencer crowd is more likely review a new movie favorably than a traditional critic—especially when buttered up with parties, booze, and merch—so studios can effectively purchase cheap advertising by elbowing the old-world press out of the way to make room for the brats. Being neither a paid critic nor a young upstart with a substantial online following myself, I’ve never experienced that kind of blatant buttering-up first-hand, but I did get a small taste of it at last weekend’s local premiere of the microbudget documentary Holding Back the Tide at The Broadside. The ticket price for the screening included a Happy Hour icebreaker where local shuckers supplied unlimited raw oysters for the crowd to slurp down in excess, supposedly as a live demonstration of the shell-recycling program helmed by The Coalition to Restore Costal Louisiana, which has been repurposing shells from local bars & restaurants to rebuild the state’s eroding coastline. No matter how many helpful CRCL representatives were around to answer questions via personal interaction or post-film panel discussion about the recycling program, I could clearly see the truth; those oysters were a bribe – a bribe far more valuable than any Los Angeles red carpet meet-and-greet with the voice cast of Mufasa. They put the audience in a euphoric mood that was impossible to break.
In all seriousness, Holding Back the Tide does pair extraordinarily well with pre-screening oysters, since half of the movie’s credibility relies on a shared understanding that oysters are an exquisitely delicious treat. Once you agree to that premise, all the movie has to do is explain that they are also an admirable political tool & role model, as exemplified locally by CRCL’s Oyster Shell Recycling Program. This is not a talking-heads advocacy doc so much as it’s an invitation to mediate on the nature of the oyster as a divine organism for 77 breezy minutes, best enjoyed with the mollusks’ briny taste still lingering on your tongue. It walks a thin line between poetry and incoherence, but it also makes a convincing enough argument that oysters deserve that awestruck aspiration. By the time this seafood industry documentary ends on a heartfelt dedication “to The Queer Future,” it earns a hearty “Right on,” from its audience. At that point, we’ve touched on the oyster’s relationships with and answers to political subjects as wide-ranging as Climate Change, gender identity, communal solidarity, racial justice, and capitalistic overconsumption – each with seemingly enough contextual history worthy of their own standalone doc. Oyster farmers, vendors, shuckers, and scientists pontificate about their collective fav in fragmentary interviews, focusing mostly on the oyster’s significance to the life & history of New York City. This hands-on academia is counterbalanced by a more metaphorical appreciation of the oyster’s tendency to change genders mid-life to maintain social balance, as voiced & modeled by trans performers who personify the little wonders.
Holding Back the Tide is resistant to linear explanations of the oyster’s significance to NYC culture, choosing instead to mimic the circular, repetitive structure of human breath or crashing waves. Its imagery can be abstract to the point of counterproductivity, such as its gorgeous underwater photography of subway cars being used to restore coastal reefs along with humanmade, recycled oyster beds – which are seen but not verbally explained. When a seemingly cis-het couple orally exchange an oyster back & forth Tampopo-style, then emerge from the experience as a different pair of lesbian actors, their literalized transformation into The Queer Future is just as confused as it is corny. However, the living-tableau recreation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in an oversized oyster shell, reworked as a portrait of modern transgender beauty, is one genius image among many, with clear thematic intent. It’s especially easy to get on board with the movie’s religious exaltation of the oyster as a Louisianian familiar with its pleasures as a seasonal delicacy and its uses in coastal hurricane protection, maybe even more so than for the average New Yorkers in the target audience. Love for the oyster is something you feel more than it is something you can articulate, like the stupefying awe for rocks expressed in Deborah Stratman’s recent film Last Things. Holding Back the Tide is less abrasive & challenging than Stratman’s film, calling back to the more playful 90s NYC indie filmmaking of a Fresh Kill than anything so academically experimental. Its love for the oyster is raw & heartfelt, and it wants to be shared to its audience so badly it sometimes comes with a real-life oyster bar to help supplement the experience.
Swampflix 