Japanese television personality Tomoaki “Nasubi” Hamatsu has lived an incredible life. As with anyone who’s lived an incredible life, that means he’s doomed to be immortalized in a bland documentary or biopic, often one after the other. The British documentary The Contestant has bravely stepped forward to get the ritual going, sitting Nasubi down for talking-head interviews about his traumatic years in the public eye, supplemented by late-90s archival footage of the horrors he describes. The details of his life make for a great Wikipedia page but not necessarily a great feature film, as evidenced by the final half-hour of the runtime spinning its wheels detailing Nasubi’s post-fame charity work instead of sticking to the subject at hand. Most Wikipedia biographies aren’t illustrated with video clips, though, so I suppose The Contestant saves you the additional time & effort you’d spend opening a second tab for YouTube searches while you’re scrolling on the toilet.
It feels cruel to refer to Hamatsu by his nickname, since it started as a schoolyard insult. Bullied for being born with a “long face”, the name “Nasubi” refers to the “eggplant” shape of Hamatsu’s head. That bullying followed him into young adulthood too, as the aspiring comedian struggled to find a healthy balance between making people laugh vs being laughed at. His desperation for approval led him to becoming the star of the “A Life in Prizes” game show segment of the Japanese variety show Danpa Shonen, in which his bullying escalated to full-on torture. At the instruction of producer Toshio Tsuchiya (an obvious villain that the film nudges you to boo & hiss at in his own appearances as a talking head), Nasubi was isolated in a room with nothing but postcards and a rack of magazines for fifteen maddening months, with the goal of earning ¥1 million’s worth of prizes from sweepstakes contests. Provided no clothes and no food (beyond an occasional packet of crackers to keep him alive), Nasubi’s semi-voluntary imprisonment for “A Life in Prizes” was presented as an experiment to see if someone could survive on magazine contest winnings alone. Really, though, he was televised as a one-man geek show for an entire nation to mock, often with a nightmarish laugh track underscoring his daily suffering. As you’d likely assume, the experience fucked him up psychologically, and it’s taken him decades to find any joy or mutual trust in humanity again.
The late 90s and early 2000s were an ugly time for pop culture, most vividly reflected in the early stirrings of reality TV. Nasubi’s 15 months of fame only slightly predate the most obvious Western comparison points for “A Life in Prizes”—Big Brother and The Truman Show—and it doesn’t feel much eviler than most of what followed that decade. I’m sure someone could slap together a sinister montage of Jerry Springer clips that would make America look like a vicious hell pit, for instance, and maybe someone should. Still, even if Tsuchiya’s manipulation of his pet reality star isn’t more extreme than behind-the-scenes stories from the sets of shows like The Bachelor or Below Deck, that doesn’t mean he’s not a monster. Nasubi barely survived his time on Danpa Shonen, winning over a huge audience of fans with his goofball celebrations of receiving prize packages of car tires, camping tents, and dog food, but that micro-celebrity did not translate to a sustainable career once Tsuchiya ran out of ways to extend the gimmick of his imprisonment. It took a long time for Nasubi to rebuild his identity and his sense of place in the world after the entertainment industry spat him out, so it’s easy to forgive The Contestant for its third-act cheerleading of his charitable work in the years following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. That doesn’t make for great cinema, necessarily, but it’s at least a kinder impulse than what guided the last camera crew to center him in the spotlight.
The Contestant is not a great documentary, but it is great trash TV, in that it allows you to indulge in several of the most popular genres of trash TV (reality, game show, true crime) while still feeling morally superior to them. No matter how much disgust the film expresses for Danpa Shonen‘s exploitation of Nasubi, it can’t get around the fact that its own existence perpetuates that exploitation. The reason most people will watch The Contestant is to see the bizarre, out-of-context clips of a naked, lonely man starving to death on TV for mass entertainment, so it’s a little rich for the movie to act as if it’s above its subject. If I learned anything about Nasubi that I didn’t retain from reading his Wikipedia page, it’s that he’s credited for inspiring the association of the eggplant emoji with the penis, since his nudity was censored by producers with a floating eggplant symbol. Otherwise, the only reason to watch the movie is to watch Nasubi suffer, as opposed to just reading about his suffering in plain text. It’s the same perverse enjoyment that true crime obsessives get out of looking up crime-scene photos and serial-killer mugshots after hearing about them on podcasts. I can’t claim that I’m above that impulse either, since I chose to watch this documentary out of my own morbid fascination with its subject; I just wish it had chosen to challenge me a little more and indulge me a little less.
How to Build a Truth Engine is a documentary about disinformation and how we can try to combat it. Bookended by footage of the terrorist insurrection on January 6th, 2021, the film features journalists, software engineers, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and other talking heads as they tackle the topic of information warfare. The bitter irony, as one of those interviewed says, is that we live in an era in which people have access to more information than ever before, but that same mechanism which has enabled that access has also provided such a fertile breeding ground for misinformation that people have been algorithmically partitioned off into different realities. As we move from expert to expert, an idea of consciousness is constructed for the uninitiated: that among the strengths of the human mind are its abilities to recognize patterns and then complete those patterns. They don’t get into the nitty gritty about it overmuch, but if you’ve ever taken an anthropological literature course, it’s familiar, and it isn’t overcomplicated to the point where the viewer is going to have a syllabus’s worth of Michelle Sugiyama articles to read or need to learn the word “pareidolia.”
The film rests on several pillars that all of us living in reality understand to be fundamentally true. Neurologically speaking, humans find patterns in everything, even when there isn’t one (in the same way that we see a cloud and superimpose “bunny” or “whale”), and it’s become clear that information warfare is the new frontier of mankind’s conflicts. Journalism is a dying industry despite the fact that we need the fifth estate now more than ever, and the root cause of this has been the dissolution of legacy and local newspapers as advertising revenue dried up (the connection between this and capitalism, however, is not made by this film). There was a time when there was a (mostly) functional journalistic body wherein the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the world were capable of bringing down men who abused their power – sometimes, anyway. Now that most people get their news from social media, there is no longer any official entity or body that can be held legally liable for spreading and disseminating information that is not only not fact-checked, but which is often patently false upon its face. People’s algorithmically driven social media feeds exist solely to drive engagement on the platform, not deliver factual or truthful content, and we are all living in a bit of a hellscape because of it.
The people to whom we are introduced as experts in their field have very impressive credentials. There’s Susan Benesch, the current faculty associate of Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. She’s also the founder of the Dangerous Speech Project, an initiative that attempts to balance concerns about inflammatory, inciting rhetoric and the necessity of protecting free speech through the tactic of “counterspeech,” a form of providing alternative narratives in an empathetic way as a means to counter hate speech and misinformation. Zahra M. Aghajan, a clinical neuroscience researcher, is interviewed several times. There’s also Vwani Roychowdhury, a professor who has been with UCLA’s electrical engineering department since 1996, and who is also Director of The Roychowdhury Group in Computational Science, which specializes in machine learning and application; along for the ride is Behnam Shahbazi, a student for whom Roychowdhury was the advisor for Shahbazi’s paper a”StoryMiner: An Automated and Scalable Framework for Story Analysis and Detection from Social Media.” There’s also Itzhak Fried, MD, PhD, a neurosurgeon and Professor In Residence and Director of the Epilepsy Surgery Program at UCLA Health, who has been recognized several times for his advancement of the science.
Rounding things out are a host of New York Times employees, some of whom operate across multiple departments but all of whom are involved with the “Visual Investigations” team, which they themselves describe as “combin[ing] traditional reporting with digital sleuthing and the forensic analysis of visual evidence to find truth, hold the powerful to account and deconstruct important news events.” There’s Malachy Browne, who’s the “enterprise director” of this team, who has won the Pulitzer twice, first in 2020 for exposing Russian culpability in Syrian hospital bombings, and again in 2023 for the team’s involvement in exposing which Russian unit was responsible for the murder of over two dozen civilians in Bucha, and the name of the commander of the unit. We’re walked through a lot of the reconstruction of this particular investigation, which establishes the credibility of the team, which also includes Haley Willis, who mostly covers human rights topics with the V.I., and Muyi Xiao, whose beat includes covering the news out of China. Her credentials are established through her coverage of COVID-19 as early as mid-January 2020, initially through reconstructing forensic digital data of communication between medical professionals but which was quickly silenced by the Chinese government.
Several years back, I made a new friend who told me that he never watched documentaries, citing that he had taken a specific rhetoric of film class that made him too savvy to all of the ways that documentaries are manipulative, so he simply couldn’t trust any of them any more. I thought about him a lot while watching this doc, one that I was genuinely excited to see. As someone who has lost family members down the rabbit hole of bizarre, impossible conspiracy theories in the past ten years as they have approached mainstream metastasis, I was hoping for something new, something fresh, perhaps some new idea about how to break through to the brainwashed masses. And I was still mostly appreciative of the film, even as it repeated tired old canards that all of us who have watched as logic and reason were beaten back into the darkness in the past decade already know. I was a little surprised by the sloppiness of the proofreading for the subtitles (my screening featured them for the entire run time, not simply when translation was needed). I raised an eyebrow at the idea that A.I. (in the form of StoryMiner, a potential contender for the “truth engine” of the title) could somehow be harnessed for good to help seek and map out online conspiracy theories so that counterspeech could be developed to fight back against misinformation (it’s telling that I saw this just two days after another SXSW event featuring a sizzle reel of A.I. salespitching was booed). And, in the wake of the way that the Overton Window on trans liberation has been moved further and further into right-wing conservatism because the NYT is a chickenshit rag that has started acting as a mouthpiece for the exact kind of vile rhetoric that this documentary is (correctly) identifying as evil, I was skeptical of how much this documentary was dick-riding the erstwhile newspaper of record.
All these things, in combination with very style-over-substance editing (the visuals in this documentary are, at my estimation, 85% semi-related drone footage with voice over), were matters of concern. I was still willing to go along with the presentation, all while wondering if there would be a mention of Palestine’s apartheid and the way that even people who consider themselves “liberal” have been silent about the issue for years and have revealed themselves as genocide apologists in the past six months; as the film went on, I thought “well, perhaps that’s a topic that’s outside of the scope of this particular documentary.” After all, it was difficult to tell when this was produced, or when the footage was shot. Muyi Xiao appears in some footage with braces, and some without (and, simply to clarify and not to belittle, when I saw “without” I mean “before”). When she is walking around Times Square, advertising can be seen for the final season of Insecure—which aired its finale the day after Christmas in 2021—but then again, I’m 98% percent positive that some of the drone footage included an advertisement of the 2011 film Real Steel (it could be an advertisement for something else entirely that simply has the same name and a similar typeface, but I couldn’t find evidence of anything like that while researching in prep for this review). And then. And then.
As I mentioned before, this film milks the NYT Visual Investigations team’s coverage of the Bucha massacre for all the credibility that they can, and there’s no argument that they did damn fine journalism there. Their coverage of a Syrian bombing is likewise impressive, including their demonstration of how satellite imagery is combined with cell phone footage to triangulate where the videos are taken and establish their veracity. Before we get to see a recap of the Bucha investigation, we hear a phone call, translated from Russian to English via on-screen subtitles, in which a soldier (presumably one of the paratroopers from 234th Air Assault Regiment) calls his mother. He asks her what the news at home is saying, what she is hearing from people around her, tells her that they keep being told of victory after victory, but that he and his companions have no idea how much of what they are told is true, if anything. Although we then go on to learn just how depraved the activities that this caller et al went on to perform in Bucha were, I can’t help but interpret that there’s an attempt at an invocation of empathy for him; you don’t play the audio of a confused, possibly scared soldier calling his mommy without an agenda. An hour or so later, after dozens of interviews and countless minutes of footage of jungles, oceans, and city skylines, another voicemail is played, one which is identified as being a call from a “Hamas terrorist” in October of 2023, and which is translated on-screen with a speech I won’t transcribe, but one which aligns with the narrative that Israel has attempted to put forth to justify their ongoing genocide of the people of Palestine. It’s horrific to hear, so brief that you wouldn’t even have to take a bathroom break to miss it, just have a thirty second coughing fit. It’s so out of place that it feels like it was inserted at the last minute, a quick little virtue signal to the bloodthirsty neoliberals who think (or pretend to think) that it’s antisemitic to criticize starving millions to death in their homes or cutting them to pieces with death from the sky.
I was shocked at this. I kept expecting that the film would loop back around on it, bring it up, maybe even use this as a demonstration piece to say, “Look how easy it is to use media to persuade; we told you that this audio recording was from Hamas and provided a translation that makes the blood boil, when in fact this is a recipe from a podcast.” In fact, it is one of the never-verified messages provided to the West by the Israeli military, and is treated not as a potential piece of propaganda to be analyzed, dissected, and verified. At best, in a text that is taking a moral stance on the literally society-sustaining importance of journalistic rigor, it feels like a half-baked and careless attempt at relevance that compromises the film’s integrity. A less charitable reading would be to say that this segment shatters any pretense that Engine could otherwise make that it maintains a clear set of ethics, and is therefore useless as a document of fact. The latter is my personal reading, and it renders what is otherwise a strong (if atypically slick) “documentary” which makes strong points about disinformation … as disinformation itself. I’m not going to pile on the contributors to the documentary for this; from what I can tell from additional research, Haley Willis spoke out against the firing of Emily Wilder from the Associated Press in 2021 when conservatives fought for her to be ousted because of her collegiate involvement with a pro-Palestinian justice organization. Further, although I was initially annoyed that there appears to be zero commentary about queer rights from Benesch’s Dangerous Speech Project (despite the overt hate speech that the community, especially trans people, have been subject to in recent years), they did issue a statement that they concurred with the ICJ’s denunciation of Israel’s genocidal rhetoric. As for searching for the names of the other participants in conjunction with this topic, most of the results keep leading back to the same Variety article, in which Siddhant Adlakha comes to the same conclusion that I do.
As I sat in the auditorium before my screening, I overheard an older group of people behind me talking about another documentary that they had seen during SXSW, which I assume was The Truth vs. Alex Jones. They were discussing how they hoped that the film would open some people’s eyes about the man, and about how broken the system is when the justice system can find a man guilty of defamation on a scale that boggles the mind and that same person can get right back to grinding, telling more lies and spreading more misinformation and warping more minds, with no real consequences. They hoped that they could get others to watch it and that it would open some minds about just how much damage Jones has done to democracy. I couldn’t help but think about that Vonnegut quote about how artistic resistance to governmental malfeasance and war is as effectual as a custard pie, and I never really lost the feeling that reminder brought on throughout the rest of Engine, even when I was attuned to it. The ability that this documentary had to change hearts and minds was infinitesimal to begin with, and its lack of conviction in its ethics eradicates that potential.
When I first read a blurb in the paper advertising a screening of Deborah Stratman’s Last Things, the description called to mind Enys Men: a “documentary exploring the geo-biosphere throughout evolution and extinction” featuring “stunning visuals ranging from the microscopic to unending landscapes” that “defies the boundaries of what a documentary can be.” There was the promise that the film blended science fiction with science fact but which continued to express itself as truth. In the end, it wasn’t like Enys Men at all. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what a good point of comparison would be, other than to say, with an awe and respect that this description wouldn’t normally imply, that it’s one of the most student film-y pictures I’ve ever seen. I loved it.
Insofar as Last Things has a narrative at all, it tells the story of the geology of our planet as an epic poem about the emergence of life in a form we wouldn’t recognize as life. Through the anthropomorphization of molecules and minerals, an origin myth emerges – one that’s not untrue in the way that a lot of origin myths are not untrue. For instance, did you ever consider that rocks could go extinct? I certainly hadn’t, but as it turns out, there was a time when iron floated freely in the planet’s oceans, suspended in it much like salt is at present. With the emergence of the first organisms that performed photosynthesis (cyanobacteria), oxygen became a component of the atmosphere for the first time, causing the iron in the ocean to oxidize and fall to the ocean floor, where they formed into banded rock of magnetite, silica, and other minerals. Formations like this one are extinct rocks, in the sense that they can never form again (at least not on this planet).
It’s fascinating stuff, but it’s also not for the easily bored. At only fifty minutes, it falls shy of the length we would normally classify as a feature film, but there will be moments when you wonder how that amount of time has not already elapsed. It’s comprised almost entirely of open-source footage: NASA’s conceptual animation lab footage of the planetary nebula cloud, electron microscope imagery of chloroplasts, images of ice forming in water blown up to the highest magnification. Whether its ambition exceeds its grasp is in the eye of the beholder, but I thoroughly enjoyed the way that a story emerges from the cutting and pasting of bits of philosophy, poetry, vintage science fiction, and more against the visuals of rocks, minerals, and protozoa. As we are told by a scientist talking about chondrites—meteors that fall to earth without interacting with another body outside of the asteroid belt, meaning that they have been unchanged since the moment the furnace of the sun spat them out, before our planet was formed—“All matter does have a history, but it doesn’t remember it.”
On the more fantastical end of the spectrum that Last Things slides up and down, our own bodies are stated to have a “genetic memory” connected to the rock, as the emergence of eukaryotic cells (and therefore life as we know it) required that the prokaryotic cells which banded together to symbiotically evolve into eukaryotic life required that taking in of minerals in order to form mitochondria. The film does this, ping-ponging back and forth between scientific fact and what we might call speculative geology, and it does it all with pulsing, hypnotic electronic music. It called to mind a movie that I saw at the New Orleans IMAX on a fifth grade field trip entitled The Hidden Dimension, which included a lot of microphotography, but to a much more psychedelic effect.
There came a moment in Last Things in which the camera lingers for a long time on a rock formation in a park. It made me think of the Kuleshov effect, the theory and effect that Lev Kuleshov was able to demonstrate through the editing together of disparate images intercut with the face of Russian silent film actor Ivan Mosjoukine. Although the image of Mosjoukine was unchanging, the audience interpreted different meanings from his (identical) facial expressions based upon what footage appeared in between. Between the music and the fantasy, it does almost start to feel as if the rock is experiencing something, even thought that clearly can’t be the case. Can it?
What’s the relationship between eukaryotic life, Petra, and glistening space concrete? Is there one? Director Stratman has stated that the film was born out of her existential panic about living through the planet’s sixth mass extinction event, and although I can’t speak for her, it seems to partially be about finding peace with the finity of human existence by viewing our transience, brevity, and diminutiveness by holding us up against mineral formations that meaningfully predate our solar system. If our concept of prehistory does not extend beyond the formation of the earth, it’s barely scratching the surface. And hey, the life that became us changed the planet; our ancestors caused rocks to go extinct, and those rocks became part of us, and although there’s no meaning in that, there is beauty, and we should appreciate it.
I’d recommend reading this interview with Stratman; it’s insightful, and it says more about Last Things than I can. And if you get the chance to see this one, don’t miss it.
Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) is one of the greatest movies ever made – possibly the greatest. I say that without hyperbole. At the end of watching this movie, even though there was only one other person in the room with me, I stood up as the credits rolled, unable to contain the puzzled look on my face and started to clap. This is the first and only film to ever get a standing ovation in my living room, and I’m absolutely desperate for everyone else to see it.
Soy Cuba initially came to my attention over a year ago, when one of the many film folks that I follow on social media talked about how a particular scene featuring a bus should be studied by student filmmakers before they ever even touch a camera. This sparked my interest, but after an exhaustive search for it online, I gave up on ever seeing it and put it in the back of my mind. The film became part of the discourse again recently, when Phil Lord (half of the “Lord & Miller” duo) responded to the announcement of the film’s upcoming Criterion physical release to criticize it as a “distorted Soviet propaganda piece”, saying that the film should be contextualized as such, citing later that he had largely seen Soy Cuba “generally presented as a romantic documentary,” which I think says more about his college than it does about the film. It is Soviet propaganda, to be sure, albeit one that the Soviets didn’t care for much at the time of release (due to its accidental framing of capitalist excess as “cool”) and buried it, leaving the film largely forgotten until it was rediscovered by Martin Scorsese and remastered. And bless that man and all his progeny, because this is a treasure.
The film unfolds in four separate narratives. In the first, a woman named Maria, who lives in a hovel in a slum, goes to a casino to prostitute herself; her john for the night, an American, insists on seeing where she lives rather than taking her back to his hotel room, essentially acting as a tourist in her poverty for the evening before buying her most beloved possession—a crucifix—and leaving her behind. In the second, a sugarcane farmer named Pedro is told by his landlord that he must vacate the property, on which he has just raised his best crop after decades of working the soil, as the landlord has sold the land to United Fruit. In the third, a student rebel named Enrique takes part in the symbolic torching of a drive-in movie theater screen that is showing propaganda about Fulgencio Batista, the dictator of Cuba prior to Castro’s uprising. After he rescues a local woman from marauding American sailors, he retires for the night, only to learn the next morning that one of his comrades has been murdered by the police and to find that Batista’s regime is spreading the lie that Castro has been killed as a way of suppressing hope among the rebelling proletariat. In the fourth and final story, another farmer named Mariano is eating his meager breakfast with his family when an exhausted rebel stumbles upon their meager shack and entreats Mariano to join the revolution. The farmer declines, but the trajectory of his destiny is forever altered when Batista’s air forces bomb the valley in which he lives, with deadly collateral damage.
There are things that the camera does in this movie that utterly boggle my mind. The movie is made up almost entirely of stunning standalone shots, which would be impressive on its own, but there are ways that the camera moves that seem impossible to me. Right from the outset, there’s a sequence at one of the casinos that starts on a rooftop where a band is playing, as the camera zooms in and out on various musicians in a way that organically blends with the music itself, before our audience POV goes over the edge of the building and glides down to the poolside below, even diving below the surface to show off all the shiny, happy people who are having a great time at the expense of the impoverished locals. Even more impressive is a later scene in the third segment, which starts on the left side of a bus as the vehicle is approached by a news-seller on a bicycle. He rides straight up to Enrique’s outstretched hand and puts the paper in it, as the camera strafes leftward to enter the bus and focus on Enrique’s reaction to the news he’s reading. We get a full shot of the rest of the bus that shows that this wasn’t done with some kind of cutaway, either; when the bus comes to a stop, Enrique departs, and the camera stays within the bus to watch him descend, cross the street, and then run up a long set of steps, all without batting an eye. When I was watching this, I turned to my viewing companion and asked “Did we just go through the bus?” before shaking my head and declaring “I can’t figure out how the hell they did that.” It’s a technical masterpiece, a breakthrough on par with breaking through to the technicolor world from drab Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. A later scene moves away from a massive funeral procession into a building and then climbs to the top of it before panning through a room full of laborers and then back out through their window to watch the march proceed into the distance, unstoppable. It’s stunning.
It’s not just that mastery of the craft that makes this so impressive, though; it’s the humanity. The story of Maria, from the moment that we first meet her, is one of such tragic hopelessness that it’s impossible not to have your heart break for her. We first meet her as herself, as she encounters a poor fruitseller who is in love with her and dreams of marrying her one day in the nearby chapel, excitedly dreaming about her beauty in her white dress. She is forced to go from here almost immediately to a casino, where three boorish American sex tourists that we have already seen harass her and a few other working girls into drinking with them. One of them, who earlier waved off two of Maria’s colleagues and was accused of being prudish by his buddies, spots her immediately, and he makes it clear what attracts him to her: her faith and innocence, as evidenced by her displayed crucifix. She is entreated to dance and initially hesitant, but ultimately gives in and begins to move with such frenetic energy that she almost loses shape on film, a dervish, as she metaphorically resists the attempts of these capitalist pigs to buy her—buy her body, buy her dignity, buy her innocence, buy her soul—before being forced to relent, and in so doing gives up control of herself. After the tourist spends the night with her, he tells her that he is a collector of crucifixes, and as he lays a couple of bills on the bed, he offers her another, then a second, then lays a third beside her before he takes the symbol of her faith (et al) from her. It’s five bills in total; he pays more for her innocence than for her body, and it’s clear that he’s done this many times and plans to continue to do it forever, pillaging and plundering the colonized world for its body and its soul. What it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in its overt reminder that, yes, all colonization is predatory, now and for all time.
Not a day has gone by since my screening that I haven’t thought about this movie, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about it. Through the modern lens, it’s impossible not to look at the representation of the suffering of the people of Cuba under Batista and not see in their struggles and in their faces the embattlement and the countenance of all people, everywhere, who suffer under the oppression of colonialism and the evils of an economic system that can only exist by enforcing suffering on others. We are living in a time of great moral darkness, watching the systematic and unconscionable evil that is being forced upon the people of Palestine at the hands of the West and its collaborators, and although this movie is explicitly propagandistic, we can’t lose sight of the fact that this simple fact does not necessarily make its message incorrect or inapplicable. Across all spectrums, all marginalized people are struggling together, and our oppressor is always the same system. To fight that is the only fight that matters.
I’m not sure when the Criterion disc is expected to be released and I’m not sure that, when it is, it will also mean that the movie will be on their streaming service. You can watch it for free right now, however, as one of your four free monthly borrows with your library card, on Hoopla.
I would’ve watched my first Frederick Wiseman movie a lot sooner if someone told me he made a fly-on-the-wall nudie cutie. By all accounts, Wiseman’s documentaries are the height of observational, humanist filmmaking, but I can never quite motivate myself to actually watch one. A three-and-a-half-hour documentary about the current state of the New York Public Library system? A four-hour doc about the daily operations of a Michelin Star restaurant? A four-and-a-half-hour doc about the inner-workings of Boston’s municipal government? I often hear that these are some of the very best documentaries ever made, but they always sound more like doing homework or serving jury duty than watching a movie. There’s no valor in being incurious, though, so I did eventually find a Wiseman picture that met me halfway (by cutting his late-period runtimes in half) and spoke to one of my personal cinematic interests (sex). The 2011 doc Crazy Horse finds Wiseman hanging out in the titular Parisian strip club, documenting the backstage & onstage mechanics of its decades-running cabaret act. It’s a series of cutesy, old-fashioned stripteases occasionally interrupted by nitpicking arguments between dancers, choreographers, and producers about how the staging of the show should evolve. It delivers all of the usual step-by-step procedural storytelling of the fly-on-the-wall documentary approach Wiseman helped pioneer, except mildly spiced up with a little early Russ Meyer nudie picture kitsch. I can’t speak for everyone, but I would personally much rather hang around behind the stage of a Parisian burlesque than behind a desk at Boston City Hall, which made Crazy Horse the ideal entry point into Wiseman’s catalog.
I obviously can’t compare the stylistic approach of Crazy Horse to Wiseman’s more iconic works, but I will say it’s a lot less … dry than I expected. Sure, he locks the camera onto a single, fixed horizontal plane for long, lingering shots, but in this case it’s to capture the fluid movements of a nude body under psychedelic gel lights. There are also wordless montages of those gel lights switching on or off or switching colors, like the marquees lighting up at dusk sequence of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Wiseman might be a notoriously patient, restrained filmmaker, but even he can’t resist framing the stage performances of Crazy Horse with a touch of the razzle-dazzle pizazz with which Bob Fosse framed Cabaret; no one could. Self-promoted as “the best chic nude show in town,” the Crazy Horse stage show provides plenty of psychedelic-kitsch eye candy to fill a feature-length documentary. Wiseman being who he is, though, he also drags his cameras to the mundane meeting rooms, merch stands, and projection booths that make the magic happen – documenting long, circular debates about the future of the show. You get the sense watching the performances that not much has changed about the Crazy Horse cabaret act since it was first staged in the 1950s (besides maybe some technological stagecraft, some musical novelties, and the occasional celebrity appearance from someone like Dita Von Teese, who appears on background posters through the film), and yet the choreographer endlessly argues with other staff about the evolving creative vision of the show. It’s an empire built on cheap thrills, cheap champagne, and even cheaper pop music, but it’s treated like the staging of a high-art opera. The great joy of Wiseman’s film is in how he’s willing to underline the irony of those passionate discussions, while also fully indulging in the visual beauty of what those artists are fighting for.
A lot of the backstage bickering about the creative direction of Le Crazy Horse Saloon is a classic art vs. commerce debate. On one side, there’s the poetic visionary who draws inspiration for his choreography from his dreams; on the other, there are off-screen investors insisting on the most consistent, lucrative show possible to keep the money flowing. The commerce side of that debate can be outright grotesque, particularly in a sequence where hopeful dancers are auditioned for the aesthetics of their bodies instead of their talents as performers. The art speaks for itself, though, and as corny as some of the sub-Busby Berkeley stripteases can feel conceptually, there’s a genuine elegance to their artistry that goes far beyond mere sexual titillation. I wonder how often Wiseman’s had to sit through similar debates about the commercial viability of his own work throughout the decades. He’s a well-venerated auteur at this point, but even the most adventurous moviegoing audiences can be intimidated by the seemingly mundane stories he chooses to tell. I hear that his new film Menus-Plaisirs is one of the best documentaries of the year, but I’ve spent far too much of my life working in commercial kitchens to want to return there for another four sweaty hours. Even the two-hour stretch of Crazy Horse wore on me a little once I got the full scope of the movie’s subject, and this one features glittery titties & swinging tassels instead of lengthy meetings with a local city council. I enjoyed my time with Wiseman and the girls, but I’ll also confess that it still felt like clocking in for a shift at work. I felt like I was a Crazy Horse busboy for a night, a gig that only a teenage Parisians could fully love.
Normally, when I scan the New Orleans Film Fest line-up for titles I might be interested in, I rely heavily on the “Narrative Features” filter on their schedule. This year, only the gross-out Juggalo road trip comedy Off Ramp grabbed my attention from that section of the program, and I look forward to reviewing that film with regular podcast guest Bill Arceneaux later this month. Otherwise, the most exciting selections at this year’s NOFF were all documentaries, at least from what I could gather scrolling through blurbs & thumbnails on the festival’s website. All of the movies I ventured out to see on my own this year happened to be documentaries; they also all happened to feature queer themes in their subjects – sometimes subtly, often confrontationally.
So, here’s a quick-takes round-up of all the documentary films I caught at the 34th annual New Orleans Film Festival. It’s a short but commendable list, one that will make me think twice about my small-minded Narrative Feature biases in future years.
The Disappearance of Shere Hite
Since not all documentaries can get away with pushing the boundaries of fact or form, the medium is often most useful at its most informative rather than its most innovative. The Disappearance of Shere Hite feels like vital, vibrant documentary filmmaking without ever challenging the rules or structures of its medium; it’s simply an act of “Hey, were you aware this amazing person existed?” post-mortem publicity. Personally, I was not aware of Shere Hite’s existence before this doc’s festival run (starting way back at Sundance this January), which is something the movie assumes of anyone who’s too young to have experienced first-wave Feminism first-hand half a century ago. Shere Hite did not “disappear” in the Connie Converse sense; she only carries a similar air of mystique because the American media chose to forget her and willed her name recognition into cultural oblivion. Once upon a time, she was an important sex researcher whose debut publication The Hite Report was just as essential to American sex & romance discourse as the more formalist work of researchers like Kinsey and Masters & Johnson. That initial entry into the American sex chat was controversial in its time for reporting that most cisgender women orgasm through clitoral stimulation, not through vaginal penetration. It’s something that now registers as common, everyday knowledge but in the 1970s was treated as a vicious attack on traditional marital relations. In her most widely publicized follow-ups, she also dared to report that traditional masculine gender roles leave most men feeling dangerously lonely and that married women commit adultery just as often as married men. By that third common-sense statement, she was ridiculed out of her field by macho mob justice, fleeing to Europe so she didn’t have to hear any more angry men react to the headlines she made without ever actually reading the books she published.
Shere Hite conducted her research through self-printed sex-questionnaire zines. She was strikingly beautiful and dramatically eccentric in her fashion, making do as a nude model before reinventing herself as a D.I.Y. punk sex scientist. Her performative Old Hollywood glamour makes her an innately cinematic subject, so that there are hundreds of hours of televised interview footage to supplement the text of her writing. In a time when mainstream media was skeptically evaluating “the question of The Women’s Movement”, she devised a way to ask women what their private sexual lives were actually like in an intimately truthful approach, suggesting that there was obvious value to putting the tools of sex research in the hands of actual sex workers. I only know these things because I watched a documentary about her, even though there was a time when I could have seen her interviewed out in the open by the likes of Oprah, Geraldo, and Larry King. The Disappearance of Shere Hite is a politically sharp, oddly romantic documentary profile of an important figure the American media deliberately forgot because her challenges to traditional sex & gender dynamics were too uncomfortable to tolerate. The only thing that doesn’t fully work about the movie is Dakota Johnson’s softly precious narration as “the voice of Shere Hite” while reading her unpublished diaries between interview clips. It’s a performance that’s missing the Sandra Bernhard sass, Patricia Clarkson fierceness, and Susan Sarandon seduction of the real Shere Hite’s voice, which we often hear in direct contrast to Johnson’s. Still, having a movie star’s name attached to a woman who’s been deliberately stripped of her own name recognition is probably for the best. Anything that works towards undoing the Mandela Effect of a world without Shere Hite is worthwhile, so I can’t fault the movie (or Johnson) too much for it.
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Speaking of Sundance selections about badass women who’ve fostered combative relationships with the American press, Going to Mars is a wonderful, kaleidoscopic portrait of poet-activist Nikki Giovanni. Whereas The Disappearance of Shere Hite is formally straight-forward in its linear overview of its subject’s biography & professional record, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project attempts to at least partially match the inventive fervor of its subject’s art in its own impressionistic approach (and attempts to better match her tone in its own celebrity voiceover track, provided by Taraji P. Henson). It weaves together threads of Giovanni’s current, relatively comfortable life as an aging academic with her radical past as a Civil Rights organizer and her romantic visions of a sci-fi future led by Black women. The title refers to her assertion that no one is better prepared for space exploration than Black American women, whose ancestors were already forcibly transported to an alien planet and forced to mate with an alien species. Recordings of her poetry performances are just as often paired with outer-space screensavers as they are with footage of Civil Rights protests of the 1960s & 70s. Somewhere between those two distant worlds, there’s Giovanni’s current status as a peaceful, settled citizen of suburban America – still clear-eyed in her awareness of the nation’s ongoing racial atrocities but content to leave the fight for justice to future generations. There’s great tension in the way the archival footage’s incendiary fury clashes with her current-day domestic comfort, but what’s really impressive is how sharply observed her poetry remains in both states. She’s still one of America’s great thinkers; it’s just that her observations now sound closer to Wanda Sykes stand-up than Angela Davis activism.
There’s always great tension in Nikki Giovanni’s relation to the world, whether answering Q&A softballs from well-intentioned but intellectually inferior audiences or chain-smoking while verbally sparring with an equally thorny James Baldwin. It would be inaccurate to say she has no fucks left to give in her old age, since she’s always been a no-fucks-given communicator in her art & public persona. What Going to Mars offers is a chance to celebrate that combative candidness as a personality trait beyond its political utility; it celebrates her as a great, greatly difficult person.
Anima: My Father’s Dresses
Moving on to the festival’s Virtual Cinema program (which is still running through the end of this weekend), the German documentary Anima might be the most formally experimental documentary I saw in this year’s line-up. It’s an epistolary film, functioning as a posthumous conversation between director Uli Decker and her deceased father, Helmut. There aren’t many home movies or personal photographs to illustrate the details of that conversation, though, because it’s specifically about a family secret held while Helmut was alive and able to speak for himself. So, Uli reads his words from personal diaries and sends her responses via voiceover narration, often deviating from conventional interview footage to instead indulge in roughly animated collage. It’s an intimate family portrait personalized to look like a cut & paste sketchbook, staging a conversation that could have never happened in real time due to the Catholic conservatism of their family background. The film is about the shocking death-bed reveal of a family secret, but there’s nothing especially surprising about the story it tells its audience (save for the bizarre, newsworthy circumstances of Helmut’s sudden death). The project is not so much about telling a story as it is about offering Uli a sounding board where she can work out & express the feelings her guarded relationship with her father never made room for while he was alive.
The secret Helmut guarded was that he was a crossdresser in his private life. The betrayal Uli feels about that secret being kept from her is mostly resentment that her own explorations of gender & sexuality were severely policed by her family in her youth, as a queer woman who grew up as an eccentric theatre kid. Her father felt a close affinity to her as someone who felt constrained by traditional gender roles, but never expressed that affinity in any meaningful way while alive. He hid it in journals, which she could only access after he passed. To the audience, this is not especially groundbreaking subject matter. Between the anarchic formal experimentation of Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda? in the 1950s and the extensive visual documentation of vintage closeted-crossdresser culture in this year’s Casa Susanna, there have been plenty of more artistically & historically substantial works to seek out before making time for Anima. Uli’s frustration with her family for playing the game of posing as a “normal” middle-class Catholic household that wouldn’t allow itself to be free & happy is the personal touch that can’t be found anywhere else, which makes it one of the few documentaries that can get away with this kind of shameless cornball navel-gazing (alongside Stories We Tell, Madame, Origin Story, etc.). I’m also a crossdresser who grew up struggling with Catholic shame, though, so maybe I’m just a hopeless sucker for this kind of material in general.
Chokehole: Drag Wrestlers Do Deutschland
If you’re in need of an advertisement for the benefits of proud, public queerness (in opposition to self-imposed Catholic penance), NOFF also offered a short-form documentary on the local drag collective Chokehole. It even took the drag-wrestling hybrid show on the road to Germany, where the much more somber Anima is also set. I use the term “advertisement” deliberately, too, as Drag Wrestlers Do Deutschland feels like the exact kind of Tourism TV commercial filmmaking that’s only available on hotel room channels, prompting you to get out of your complimentary bathrobe and contribute some vodka-soda money to the local economy. The first few Chokehole shows I attended were can’t-miss community events, the culmination of everything I love about Art: the absurdist exaggeration of gender performance in pro wrestling & dive bar drag, the half-cooked fever dream storytelling of vintage B-movies, the D.I.Y. construction of artificial worlds on no-budget sets, etc. I had ascended to genre trash heaven. By contrast, this documentary plays like an infomercial for a drag-themed amusement park. Curiously, the movie it reminds me most of was fellow globetrotting queer travel guide Queer Japan, not the sister Altered Innocence doc made by its director Yony Leyser, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution.
This aesthetic quibble isn’t a dealbreaker, exactly. The Chokehole crew totally deserves the professional spotlight they’re afforded here. I’m just hopeful this short is a proof-of-concept tease for a grander statement down the line, where the tongue-in-cheek psychedelic editing that goes into Chokehole’s live-show video packages will inform the cinema about those shows the same way The Disappearance of Shere Hite is informed by its subject’s sensual mystique, Going to Mars is informed by its subject’s combative poetry, and Anima is informed by its subject’s cloistered intimacy.
“In the mountains of Norway, where the weather is cold There’s not much to do except kill each other And play guitars in the snow Corpse paint, which is a scary name for make-up, is what they wear They’d resemble Ink and Dagger, if Ink and Dagger had long hair They’re pretty evil, and they do not like God I don’t care if they burn down churches But they’d better not fucking touch a synagogue”
You won’t find a more succinct nor accurate summation of Norwegian black metal’s entire deal than that opening stanza to the Atom and His Package novelty song “Me and My Black Metal Friends,” which I listened to repeatedly years before I actually heard a proper black metal track. It touches on everything you need to know about black metal in just a few quick bullet points: the theatricality of the image, the brutality of the sound, the isolation of the region, the allure of the arson & murder and, most pivotally, the stain of antisemitism that sours most of the scene’s mystique. Maybe that’s why the 2008 documentary Until the Light Takes Us feels so thinly stretched across its 90-minute runtime. After all, Adam Goren was able to get its point across in less than 90 seconds an entire decade earlier. It doesn’t help that there have been two much heftier texts that have done much more extensive, contemplative work in autopsying the early black metal scene since: the 2013 “comprehensive guide” Black Metal: Evolution of the Occult, and the 2019 true crime drama Lords of Chaos (also adapted from a lengthy book). You can refer to the former for a big-picture encyclopedia of the black metal scene, which is mostly disregarded here in favor of dwelling on the grisly details of the murder that broke up the band Mayhem and made Norwegian black metal internationally infamous. The latter text, Lords of Chaos, also uses the Mayhem murder case as its focal point, but it does so with clear, critical purpose beyond morbid fascination: making fun of all involved. As a result, Until the Light Takes Us has little to offer to a 2020s audience beyond the novelty of seeing those better fleshed-out texts & images illustrated with real-life detail. Maybe it felt more significant 15 years ago, when I was still listening to smartass novelty songs, blissfully unaware of the white-nationalist ideology behind some of the scene’s monstrous guitar riffs.
The most salacious selling point for this festival-circuit documentary is that it interviews black metal musician Varg “Burzum” Vikernes in his jail cell about the reasoning behind his church burnings and his fatal stabbing of former Mayhem bandmate Euronymous, for which he was sentenced 21 years. Forever a publicity hound, Varg is eager to speak on the record, as it gives him an audience for the antisemitic, white nationalist talking points he feels have been misconstrued by the media. If this particular extension of The Media had a clear agenda of its own, it might not have given him such a wide platform to practice poised, philosophical hate speech without any editorial pushback either. There is some joy to be found in Varg’s frustration that his church burnings were misinterpreted as Satanic ritual by the press, but that feeling fades as he explains at length that the arson was meant to protest the way Christianity has erased & replaced Norway’s more authentic, ancient culture. It’s a sentiment that most reasonable people could agree with in broad strokes, which makes it all the more dangerous that it so easily slips into proud white-nationalist rhetoric (as easily as Varg labeling Christianity “a Jewish religion”). The only fellow player on the early black metal scene given equal screentime is the much more likeable Darkthrone musician Fenriz, who bumbles around modern Norway without any guiding political ethos beyond a love & nostalgia for vintage black metal aesthetics. Fenriz does a lot to explain what makes black metal such an enduring sound & image, but he does very little to overpower the hateful Nazi ideology Varg is spewing in their alternating interviews. Thankfully, the movie also includes sarcastic contributions from the older, wiser band members of Immortal, who essentially serve as the black metal Statler and Waldorf – mocking the kids beneath them for taking metal so unnecessarily seriously in the first place.
If there’s any way in which Until the Light Takes Us takes a clear point of view on the black metal scene, it’s in the way it strips the musicians of the Xeroxed-corpse-paint album covers that made them look so cool & mysterious to outsiders in the early 90s. It peers behind the veil of shock value self-promotion to show how mundane Varg & Fenriz’s lives look to the naked eye & camcorder. Between their messy apartments, their fluorescent-lit prison cells, and the corporatized, McDonalds-lined streets of Oslo, the movie zaps away all of the dark ritual & romance the scene cultivated through zine culture publicity stunts. The documentary’s low-fi digi sheen works in its favor in that way. It also echoes Fenriz’s explanation of how black metal musicians pioneered their signature “necro sound” by seeking out the worst, cheapest equipment they could blow out for a deliberately crunchy, D.I.Y. affect. Overall, Lords of Chaos does a much better job of taking a clear “point of view” on these gloomy nerds (by dunking on them mercilessly), but Until the Light Takes Us at least this makes their world look even smaller & less mystical. It’s a little frustrating that its soundtrack is so light on actual black metal music (instead relying on low-fi electro beats to study to for most of its mood setting), but that choice also strips Varg and his compatriots of the sound’s inherent cool. No matter how many vile “National Socialist Black Metal” bands with offensive-on-purpose names like Aryan Blood & Gestapo 666 have been inspired by Burzum’s Nazi rhetoric, the genre’s soaring guitar riffs still tower over you. Its blast-beat drumming still pummels the brain in just the right way. The trick is not letting the most despicable edgelords on the scene control the narrative and ruin the vibe, which is something this doc does without much of a fight. Fenriz’s metalhead aimlessness is adorable, but it’s not nearly potent enough to wash away the sour taste left by Varg. Thankfully, other works have since stepped in to take either a wider or a more fiercely critical view on the subject, although confusingly to much quieter fanfare.
I should be too ashamed to admit this in a public forum, but I’ve never fully understood the appeal of zydeco. My preferred mode of background-noise Louisiana kitsch is New Orleans brass, which hits a lot closer to home – literally, since I live on a major second line route where brass & bounce reverberate down the street practically every other week. I’m most used to hearing zydeco mixed with cornball swamp pop in French Quarter tourist shops, seconds at a time as I pass by on my way to a downtown theater or bar. I may be from Southeast Louisiana, but I’m a city boy through & through, and the routine regurgitation of folksy local traditions for spend-crazy out-of-towners always raises the hairs on neck. I was delighted to have those biases challenged by the Les Blank documentary J’ai Été Au Bal (I Went to the Dance), though, which recently screened in a 4K digital restoration at The Broad to celebrate this year’s Jazz Fest happenings down the street. Blank’s Always for Pleasure is just about the only documentary that has genuinely captured New Orleans culture onscreen in a way that doesn’t make this local cynic cringe, so I very much needed this extension of his humanist awe with Louisiana to the meanings & traditions of zydeco. To prime the pump, the programmers also invited musician Michael Doucet to open the show with his zydeco band BeauSoleil, since he is one of the few surviving performers from the film still alive to provide insight & context. The music was good, the crowd of WWOZ devotees was lively & chatty, and the film made a convincing argument for an artform I’ve been knee-jerk dismissive of my entire life. It was a lovely evening.
It’s a shame I didn’t see I Went to the Dance when I was in my Folk Punk phase a couple decades ago; its contextual positioning of zydeco as raucous, resilient roots music would have clicked a lot sooner & louder. In my defense, though, a large part of this film is about zydeco musicians having to explain the artform’s appeal to each generation of bratty children who are distracted from their heritage by popular music fads like rock ‘n roll. It turns out even swamp pop has its merits as a youth-outreach genre hybrid, attempting to inject a little Beatles & 60s New Orleans R&B into the usual zydeco formula to make it palatable for the kids. I Went to the Dance is more straightforward as an informational doc on the linear history of zydeco than Always for Pleasure‘s loose portrait of local Mardi Gras customs, possibly due to the influence of Blank’s more traditionalist co-director Chris Strachwitz. It provides a quick historical context for the migration of Cajun & Creole communities to Southwest Louisiana, moves on to explain the basic compositional structures & instrumentations that distinguish zydeco as a genre, and then tracks its struggles to remain popular yet authentic as it welcomed influence from blues, soul, country, and rock fads that energized the core musicians’ children throughout the decades. By the time the film concludes with a contemporary Jazz Fest performance from the R&B-infused Clifton “King of Zydeco” Chenier, a backyard cookout performance of the 80s novelty swamp pop hit “(Don’t Mess with) My Toot Toot”, and a cheeseball fais-dodo rock-out from what appeared to be the Reaganite frat bros of zydeco, I was fully won over – my cynicism thoroughly, methodically replaced with a smile.
I don’t think this academically minded zydeco explainer would be worth all that much without the Les Blank touch, though. As useful as it is in providing historical & cultural context for where the genre comes from and what pop-music indignities it has to endure for survival, it’s Blank’s loving, amused observations of Louisiana customs that qualify J’ai Été Au Bal as substantial filmmaking. The dancefloor audience is just as important as the fiddlers, washboarders, and accordionists onstage, as Blank’s camera searches contemporary bars & archival photographs for signs of vitality & exuberance in the people that made this music popular because it gave them an excuse to get tipsy & dance. Since he moved his camera too far inland to capture the wetland landscapes that have so quickly eroded in the past few decades, the Louisiana he captures here is exactly the one I remember growing up with “down the road” in St. Bernard Parish around when this was made. It’s also uncannily accurate to Louisiana today, as long as you avert your gaze from concrete & billboards to instead focus on the hand-painted signs & D.I.Y. dance parties that are forever encroached on but never fully extinguished here. There’s an authenticity to Blank’s portraits of this state as a people that I have found in no other outsider media, making him one of the most fully integrated Tulane University bros who ever passed through New Orleans for an education and never had the heart to fully leave us behind. It appears his estate is keeping that work alive & up to date by producing physical media restorations of his work to sell at high rates to university libraries as education tools, which is great but doesn’t fully convey how entertaining & endearing they are for a casual audience.
When I report that the Jazz Fest-adjacent screening of J’ai Été Au Bal at The Broad was a lovely evening, I’m brushing aside a lot of technical hiccups that disrupted the flow of the film. Getting the screening going in earnest involved the theater staff abandoning the DCP and climbing on a ladder to hook up a Vimeo stream with a laptop, an HDMI cable, and a smartphone hotspot crammed inside the projector box. There were many stops & starts before that Plan C was launched, which meant that the first fifteen minutes of the film were frequently broken up by premature Q&As with Blank’s surviving collaborators and bonus performances from Doucet sans band. If I’m not mistaken, there were also impromptu chime-ins from Belizaire the Cajun director Glen Pitre from the front seats of the audience. Some moviegoers’ patience was tested beyond its limits that night, but I soaked it all up as a Community Event, the strangest screening I’ve been to since The Broad ran The Mothman Prophecies a couple months ago. It also didn’t stress me out because I knew even while watching J’ai Été Au Bal that my first viewing would not be my last. Every year I squeeze in a screening of Always for Pleasure as a quick, convenient way to get into the Mardi Gras spirit (usually while working on costumes), and I can easily see throwing on Blank’s zydeco doc for the same purpose at the start of every Spring festival season. Jazz Fest is going to happen in my neighborhood regardless of whether I’m in the mood; French Quarter Fest is just a few blocks away from where I work. It was untenable to think I could live a full, happy life in Louisiana without appreciating swamp pop or zydeco, and I’m glad this movie is being kept in distro to help my cynical ass lighten up.
I had an unusually difficult time pinning down the intended purpose of the early-aughts punk culture documentary D.I.Y. or Die, despite its multiple subtitles’ attempts to provide context. The DVD copy of the film I picked up at my neighborhood thrift store was titled D.I.Y. or Die: Burn This DVD, proposing that this low-budget, low-effort documentary was intended to function as a kind of motion-picture zine, to be shared freely among aspiring punk artists who would benefit from its scene-specific insights & inspiration. The more official subtitle on its IMDb & Wikipedia pages is D.I.Y. or Die: How to Survive as an Independent Artist, which proposes that it’s more of a how-to guide for those sure-to-be-struggling punk artists, desperate for pointers on how to keep their half-shaved heads above water. The third, most robust title that populates under heavy pixelations and antiqued digital film grain effects in the movie proper is D.I.Y. or Die: “A documentary by Michael W. Dean on the means, modes, and methods on independent American artists in different genres & mediums.” That last one at least hints at the college-essay structuring of the piece, which includes an intro thesis paragraph delivered by Director Dean before he asks generic, rigidly segmented “What inspires you?” questions to an admittedly impressive collection of artists he’s roped in as talking heads. It’s the bragging rights of assembling those interviewees that gives the film its true sense of purpose, as evidenced by its DVD cover art attempting to squeeze each of their faces into a gargantuan Brady Bunch grid. D.I.Y. or Die is not the only place you can hear always-welcome punk proselytizers like Ian MacKaye, Richard Kern, and Lydia Lunch pontificate about the virtues of maintaining a D.I.Y. ethos in your outsider art, but it is a convenient check-in on how they were all holding up in the early aughts.
None of the writers, painters, sculptors, poets, musicians, or software developers interviewed here actually provide useful tips on how to survive as an independent artist. The closest the film comes to achieving that stated goal is in a DVD extra where longtime punk grumpa Steve Albini explains that it’s naive to expect a large enough audience will want or need your Art that you won’t have to maintain a day job to sustain yourself. The practicality of that sentiment is directly opposed to the vague anti-corporate rhetoric of the interviews that made it into the final edit, which mostly consist of artists wistfully explaining why they create, not how they eat or pay rent. For an actually useful guide on how to survive as an independent artist in the internet age, there’s no better resource than Matt Farley’s auto-fictional Local Legends, which sketches out a practical roadmap of how artists can have fun strategically “selling out” in minor, playful ways that keep the lights on. For its part, D.I.Y. or Die is a time capsule of the last possible minute when the countercultural betrayal of “selling out” meant something about your integrity, back when the internet was mostly made of fan pages & message boards and hadn’t yet turned the users ourselves into product via social media. There’s a tipping point between physical zine culture and intangible online ephemera incidentally documented here, both in how the DVD extras include “weblinks” to long dead URLs and how the founder of Craigslist is included alongside Ian MacKaye’s self-operated Dischord record label as if both companies were born of the same punk ethos. A more honest integration of what self-distributed art looked like in the early internet age would have included amateur pornographers instead, who are not represented here (unless you want to squint at Lunch & Kern from the most reductive angle possible). At the very least, I can’t imagine it would’ve been hard to track down Annie Sprinkle for a quick Q&A, considering how many of the contributors were filmed in NYC. Whether it’s because Dean didn’t think through why he was grouping together these exact interview subjects beyond how cool they’d be to talk to or it’s because D.I.Y. culture itself was in a confused, liminal stasis at the time, D.I.Y. or Die is unclear on what it wants to say about the state of punk culture in the early 2000s beyond “Fuck yeah.”
I don’t relish being a cynic here, two entire decades after this hour-long tribute to art-for-art’s sake creativity last meant something to anyone. If anything, I’m likely a little touchy about its intellectual laziness because it’s so similar to my own for-its-own-sake hobby of running this film blog & podcast. As an independent artistic project, Swampflix is equally confused about how to carry over zine culture ethos & aesthetics into the digital age, and I do sometimes worry that my casual, Xeroxed blogging stye comes across as the same kind of performative laziness that’s passed off as “punk” here. There’s something about the director presenting himself in wrinkled t-shirts and presenting his interviewees in unflattering, unconsidered angles & lighting that really bothers me. It’s often charming when an artist leaves noticeable fingerprints on a rough-around-the-edges work, leaving in mistakes and glimpses of the tools of production. It’s annoying when “punk” is misinterpreted as “no effort”, though, and I’m always looking for artists to use their available resources—no matter how limited—in the most passionate, effective ways possible. D.I.Y. or Die is from an earlier, easier era in online culture when self-distributed art like this motion-zine DVD could actually reach a wide, excited audience, because the digital landscape wasn’t so constantly flooded with #content — independent, corporate, or otherwise. I cut a lot of corners running this website, most notably in how often I’ll recycle the same Sharpie doodle illustrations over & over again instead of drafting new ones every post. For example, the little mohawked icon at the top of this review is a slightly doctored illustration I drew when reviewing Bulletproof Monk eight years ago, hastily edited in MS Paint. I’m not using the tools available to me to make the most effective, passionate #content I can, but I’m also a sell-out with a full-time desk job who does this stuff on the side for fun, so I don’t think I should be held to the same standards of artistic integrity. Steve Albini may have been sidelined to the DVD extras, but he still inevitably won the “debate.”
All that said, there was one aspect of D.I.Y. or Die that I did find genuinely inspiring: the inclusion of punk-scene cellist Madigan Shive. Shive enjoyed some brief notoriety in the 1990s when her band Tattle Tale was picked up by the tastemaker label Kill Rock Stars and landed a single on the foundational CD soundtrack for But, I’m a Cheerleader. Around the time D.I.Y. or Die was released in the early 2000s, her mostly-solo musical act Bonfire Madigan was an even more niche interest, which I can confirm anecdotally from having attended a concert of hers in a mostly empty Zeitgeist art gallery within a year of this documentary’s release, when my high school era obsession with her music was at its most intense. Shive is adorably earnest in her interviews here, and genuinely seems like a cool, intelligent person. What most inspired me, though, was following up after the film was over to see that she still regularly plays concerts (mostly in the Bay Area, where most of these interviews were filmed) and stays engaged with dedicated fans online, two decades since I last heard anyone say “Bonfire Madigan” out loud (besides when asking me about my now-ratty Bonfire Madigan t-shirt, purchased at that sparsely attended concert). I have no intel on whether Shive had to take the Albini advice on maintaining a day job to keep herself afloat, but I also don’t think that distinction matters. She’s continued to make passionate, independent art for decades now, regardless of the ebbs & flows of audience interest & commercial appeal, which is genuinely inspiring to me as a writer with no clear incentives left to keep writing. Maybe D.I.Y. or Die didn’t include any practical tips on how to survive as an independent artist because the only real tip you need is to “Just keep doing the work” and let momentum take care of the rest. That doesn’t mean the work shouldn’t have integrity in its artistic standards beyond the punk street cred of its production, though, which is where most of my cynicism is coming from here.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Brandon, James, Hanna, and guest Bill Arceneaux discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Fest, including the exhaustive direct-to-video erotic thriller documentary We Kill for Love (2023).
Swampflix 