Films from Day 4, Sunday

Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner – Freida Lee Mock – U.S.A. 2006, 98 mins. In English. Bias alert: I loved the TV miniseries Angels in America. So I jumped at the chance to see this. Freida’s craft is immediately apparent – this documentary is seamlessly put together – not surprisingly since she’s won an Oscar in the past for another documentary (Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, screened at the 14th FIFA). Kushner’s biography is formatted in three acts, similar to Angels, examining Kushner’s work and life in three areas: global responsibility in the post 9-11 world of terrorism, the AIDS epidemic and gay rights, and his principles and activism in social justice. All this from a nice Jewish boychik from Lake Charles, Louisiana (who knew?). And he’s funny, too. Which reminds me, I need to go buy my own decent copy of Angels!

Les Gymnases Olympiques de Yoyogi – Richard Copans – France 2005, 26 mins. In French. Japanese architect Kenzo Tange designed two gymnasiums for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics next to the Yoyogi Park area, near Harajuku and Shibuya districts. Forty-one years later, this dry, but informative film gives an ascetic view of the architect’s aims, philosophy, and the resultant structures. The larger of the two stadia is actually a suspension roof, in the same manner of a suspension bridge. An innovative design with some cultural references to older Japanese structures, the buildings remain in use today.

Citizen Lambert: Joan of Architecture – Teri When-Damisch – Canada/France 2006, 52 mins. In English and French with French subtitles. With Phillis Lambert having turned 80, this film serves as a toast to a life full of accomplishments, deserving lots of accolade. A real love-fest modeled on Citizen Kane, made with mockumentary style fake newspaper headlines mixed with historical ones, this authorized biopic traces Phillis Lambert’s (born Bronfman) life from her luxurious childhood in Westmount to her growing interest in Architecture, which led her education as an architect. Perhaps her most famous moment was when she convinced her father to ditch his grandiosely grotesque vision for the Seagram building in New York and hire Mies Van Der Rohe and Phillip Johnston instead. She is of course also famous for organizing committees to help preserve Montreal buildings of historical value that were threatened by real estate development in the 1970’s, leading to the eventual founding of Heritage Montreal in 1979. And her largest project, the Montreal Centre for Canadian Architecture, a museum and research center, firmly cemented her reputation of an architectural historian, researcher, and patron. The film spends a lot of time letting Ms. Lambert speak in her own words, something rarely offered to the public, who normally would be party only to newspaper articles or nth-generation gossip. In the end, she appears from this film to still be a vibrant, intensely driven individual, extremely private, and passionate about her love of architecture. She attended this second screening of the film at the CCA (it was the opening film of the festival and no doubt she was there as well) and received a standing ovation.

Milton Rogovin — The Rich Have Their Own Photographers – Ezra Bookstein – U .S.A. 2006, 59 mins. In English. Rogovin, son of poor Jewish immigrants from Russia in the early 1900’s, became, like his brother, an optometrist. Settling in Buffalo, New York, he swept up in the working man’s populist movement in the 1930’s. While he was doing little more than helping register Black voters and promoting union rights, he was subpoenaed by the Un-American Activities Commission in 1957 and accused of being the “Top Red” in Buffalo. Blacklisted for his refusal to implicate any others, and with his practice taking a big drop in business, he took up photography at fifty years of age, with a Rolleiflex twins lens reflex camera, taking pictures of the poor and disenfranchised in the Buffalo slums. His stalwart wife Anne (who died in 2003) accompanied him on many trips, which were later enlarged in scope to voyages to different parts of the world. This very unassuming man wrote to many a famous person, asking to collaborate. Pablo Neruda agreed, and accompanied Rogovin to poor villages in the south of Chile. Over the next forty years, his body of work has become so socially important that the Library of Congress agreed to be the repository of his work, something done with few photographers. For Rogovin, it was a moment of triumph, since it was the same government that had censured and blacklisted him forty years previously. http://www.miltonrogovin.com for more information.

Films from Day 3, Saturday

Spring is almost around the corner, and our second favourite Montreal film festival just finished. Here’s some reviews of this year’s picks.

La Pathetique – Iossif Pasternak – France 2005, 52 mins. French, English, German, Russian, with French subtitles. Having just heard the Pathetique at the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in late February, conducted by Valery Gergiev, I thought it would be interesting to see a documentary about Tchaikovsky’s last work, but several things conspired to lessen my enjoyment. The *horrific* insistence of voice-over in French productions, coupled with awful sound quality, leads to narration that is near impossible to follow, even to a native speaker (says Jonathan). I do suffer from a particular difficulty in filtering out background noise and speech when someone is speaking, so it’s mentally exhausting for me to do for any length of time. The other lamentable point was the smallest of mentions of what many consider the probable major impetus for the work, namely Tchaikovsky’s death being a suicide engineered by his former schoolmates. The fact that he was gay and had a crush on an aristocrat’s nephew, and was probably facing a long Siberian prison sentence of hard labour that would be fatal at his age, is hurried spat out and then summarily dismissed by most of the “keepers” of his legend, both within and outside of Russia. Despite these shortcomings, it was interesting to see to what extent his musical forms both foreshadowed the coming experimentation with atonality, and reflected back to his predecessors.

Kent Nagano conducts Classical Masterpiece: Richard Strauss: An Alpine Symphony – Oliver Becker & Ellen Fellmann – Germany 2006, 52 mins. English with French subtitles. I rather much enjoyed hearing Nagano talk live about his conducting the MSO in an interview with a Radio-Canada announcer at Place-des-Arts, just before a concert last year. In this German TV documentary series, rather sombrely structured and lit, Nagono’s introspective and studied articulation on Strauss’s composition seemed dull and lifeless by comparison. The Berlin Symphony Orchestra performance of the Alpine Symphony, 22 parts without breaks, is interspersed with Nagano’s discussion, and more interestingly, rehearsal sessions where we see his particular technique of working with the orchestra, along with mini-interviews with various musicians. However, what was totally incongruous were the small animations of moments in Strauss’s life, with the dialogue “taken from letters written by him”, to provide and underline didactic explication about his musical intent. If the format is the same with the other six episodes in this series, I probably wouldn’t watch them.

Robert Mapplethorpe – Paul Tshinkel – U.S.A. 2006, 79 mins. In English. I won’t talk about Mapplethorpe’s fame (or infamy), you can just Google it. This documentary is notable for never-before-seen footage of Robert in his New York City Bond Street studio, done in 1983 by some hapless and unintentionally clueless (and at times funny) interviewer. Tschinkel’s film gives off a raw feeling from an editing standpoint, but the structure is there. I only wish I had bothered to attend the retrospective showing (this being the 25th FIFA) of Nigel Finch’s 1988 documentary on Mapplethorpe, which won Best Film for TV at the 8th FIFA. However, this documentary, made well *after* his death, chronicles his place in the annals of photography, art, and art transcending trite working-class sensibilities which reduce all sexuality, particularly non-mainstream, as obscenity. I wonder in today’s world, with the rise of the literal-minded, biblically-hobbled non-thinking religious conservatism, if his works would have been found to be, as a mostly blue-collar jury in Cincinnati did 1990: a) pandering to the prurient, b) obscene, but c) with artistic merit. Aside: punctuating sentences with "you know..." seems to be a very New York City thing...

Jonathan saw the next two films and did the reviews for them:

La Cafetière Conica – Anna-Celia Kendall – France 2006, 26 mins. French. This documentary explores the life and times of the iconic conical Conica coffee-maker, so named because of its shape, the cone. Not originally on my list, I was *really* there for the other film – I don't even like coffee! Rossi, the designer, used his knowledge as an architect to design the coffee-maker, or was it a building he was designing? You could've fooled me, with those buildings, I mean coffee-makers, set-up on a table, like tall buildings on an island, and people walking in between the buildings, I mean the coffee-makers, and shouting from the window, err... the spout. Even in that dry, French style, the documentary was excellent. The original Italian ads from the 50’s were worth seeing alone – when one is used to ads by Maxwell House or *gasp*, Folger’s – you realize that coffee is to Italians what croissants are to the French. So much so that the only thing I wanted after the film was a big cup of coffee!

Rem Koolhaas, Architecte XXL – Markus Heidingsfelder – Germany 2005, 52 mins. French. Rem Koolhaas (pronounced cool house!) is *the* reference in contemporary architecture. You can't pick up a book or a magazine on architecture without his name popping here and there. A self-described anti-star, he does not like to attract attention to himself. But good grief, did the director have to make him look so… dull? To be fair, it's not so much the topic, or the man, that was dull, but the whole technical aspect of the documentary. The colours were bland (Technicolor was obviously not a sponsor), a vestige of the PAL-to-SECAM transfer or was it just bad editing? The sound was lousy – let's be fair, his heavily Dutch-accented English was not *that* hard to understand – but must we insist on using that wretched voice-over technique? Not only was the original audio too loud, but the French voice-over was neither clear, nor lively. Now, the architecture. Oh yeah, there's architecture too. His Casa da musica, Porto (Portugal) is worth looking at. So were those houses he designed (when, where, how? the film doesn't say). His plans for the new CCTV building in Beijing are very interesting, but again, it just skimmed the surface. The man is a genius (according to most architecture aficionados), but this film does not even come close to showing his genius.