Can making a film chnage minds and ideas? A documentary and experiment in race relations

Jean Rouch - anthropologist (with a particular interest in French ex-colonies in Africa) and filmmaker (and co-director of Chronicle of A Summer, qv) - filmed The Human Pyramid 1961 as a bold experiment in form and culture. He went to a mixed-race high school in the Ivory Coast and enlisted the students in one class in his project: They would create and direct a film about race relations; he would assign them roles - for ex., one of the black students was assigned to argue against fraternizing w/ whites - and they would play out the roles and develop a narrative and a film. The film they develop - it seems that they had a loose idea of where each scene was heading, but the dialog is always improvised on the spot - begins when one of the white students approaches the African students and suggests the two groups get to know one another; this leads to internal arguments in each group as to whether that is a good idea, or if the whites are patronizing, etc. Over time - the film seems to take place over maybe half a school year? - the groups begin to socialize, some friendships form, there are some interracial couples, leading to arguments and jealousy, there are a few social gatherings - dances and parties - and ultimately there's a fight between rival suitors. (A final scene was apparently staged by Rouch w/out student input, to test their reactions to the supposed death of a student - how this worked was unclear to me.) At the end, there's a little discussion about the project among the students at a screening, and a final shot of 4 of the students, seeming to be good buddies, on a street in Paris. The film is engaging and provocative - especially when the students get in some very heated discussions about Apartheid - but I think it did need a little more context. We don't have a sense as to what students truly thought about one another before them film nor whether the film actually changed attitudes and ideas; I expect it did, but before and after interviews might have helped (Rouch seems to have realized this, too - as his famous Summer Chronicle does including follow-up interview w/ key participants, to great effect).

Can anyone understand the ending of The Shooting?

The Monte Hellman (screenplay by Carole Eastman, of Five Easy Pieces) 1971 movie, The Shooting, is a strange and moody Western, all of it shot among the deserts, mountains, and bluffs of the far west, probably mean to be Nevada mining territory, and completely focused on 4 characters: Two miners, one of whom is a good trail guide and the other who is almost like a child in his naivete, a beautiful young woman who shows up out of nowhere and hires the men to guide her across the desert, and a malevolent hired gunman (played by Jack Nicholson), who turns up about halfway through. It's tightly scripted - almost like a domestic drama - and full of tension and mystery; we're pretty sure that the woman hired the men so that she could pursue and presumably kill a man (a friend of the miners) who may have harmed or killed her child - but this is all left vague and unresolved. It's entirely a film about mood, and it has many fearful moments, especially as supplies dwindle and they're faced with decisions about who to leave behind. The landscape is always terrifying and beautiful, and you can't help but think about how the actors, in their heavy Western outfits, must have suffered through much of the filming. All that said, the ambiguous ending completely eluded, and even after a re-watch I still have no idea who shot whom; ambiguity can be great, but filmmakers ought to at least throw a lifeline to their viewers. It's a film worth seeing, but having done so, I can see why it was a career backward-step for Nicholson and a dud with audiences.

An OK romance drama from the UK, but with a ridiculous title

Aside from its utterly ridiculous title - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - which makes it sound like one of those silly, concocted books - e.g Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants - the Netflix movie v of the bi-authored novel is at least pretty good as a romance drama, pretty good because, well, you can see where the romance is heading from minute #1, but better than average because of its unusual wartime setting. Yes, it's about the 1 millionth British movie set during World War II and the bombing of London (does anyone else find it astonishing how important that era is, still, to British writers and filmmakers, now about 75 years later?), but it has the unusual twist of being largely set on the island of Guernsey, which, apparently, was over-run and completely controlled by the Nazi forces, who brought in war prisoners to do all the dirty work (construction of ugly lookout towers, still standing apparently), seized property, enforced curfews and bans on assembly, and deported resistors to prison camps in Germany. So we get a romance set against this background in the immediate post-war years. Basic story line is that a beautiful, young, single (but engaged), author goes to the island at the request from a fan letter received from local pig farmer and while there begins an investigation of a deportation during the Occupation. The narrative is plot driving but somewhat mechanical, as the author, improbably, pieces together the story as one after another character speaks to her in confidence. The filmmakers bring to the fore all of the qualities we've come to expect from British film and TV: great landscape photography, incredible attention to period detail (including London street settings, buses, trains, cars, and even military transport planes), and really good acting. At risk of giving away what really should not be a surprise to any viewer, I think they took too many easy shots at the woman's crass and insensitive Yankee fiance, whom she, thankfully, throws over and moves in with the handsome, sensitive, even literary pig farmer. Possible? Maybe. Likely? No. Obvious? Way too.

Ozark may be the best cime miniseries since Breaking Bad

I'll be among the many to weigh in on the Netflix series Ozark, Season 2, and note that in my view it's become the best miniseries of its type (crime drama) since Breaking Bad (in fact the two miniseries share a number of elements: good guy gets involved w/ Rx to help his family, or so he thinks, and ends up putting everyone at risk). Like many, I was put off at first by the plot premise: Investment counselor/accountant gets drawn into working with a Latin drug cartel and forced to go on the lam w/ his family to try to make good on the demands of the cartel that he launder for them vast mounts of cash. Probable? hardly, except in movies. Possible, yes. And to its credit, the series - created and led by Jason Bateman in a fabulous performance - brings us in right away and gives sufficient background to help us see and understand that, yes, this would not happen to us but could happen to someone else. Season 2 does not miss a beat, further developing and building upon the events of Season 1 (tho we didn't do so, it might be helpful to re-watch Season 1 before starting #2) - while maintaining constant tension, keeping us guessing and thinking at every minute, constantly tightening the web of crime and conspiracy that is strangling the Byrd family, and building sympathy and understanding for all of the key characters and loathing toward some of the others). Aside from Bateman, Laura Linney gives a fabulous performance throughout the season, as Wendy Byrd (Bateman's wife) - in particular in the kidnap episode (#7 of 10) - but really throughout as she and Bateman in a sense gradually shift roles. And then can one say enough about Julia Garner's performance as Ruth, a tough as nails impoverished and uneducated woman who's smarter than everyone else and brave and loyal to her nephew and caught against her will in a terrible situation? You want to watch every scene that she's in and you root for her at every moment. In fact, there's not a single role that's miscast (though the actress playing daughter Charlotte Byrd is getting a little to old and mature for the role) and not an episode or scene that lagged.

Melville's French New Wave tribute to American noir

Like so many French movies from the New Wave era, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967) owed a huge debt to American noir - and it pays off the debt as well. The title is a bit of a joke, as the central figure, Jef Costello, portrayed really well by Alan Delon, is not a Japanese feudal warrior, but he does share the morality or nonmorality rather of the Samurai: He is a hired killer, who can off someone just for the payout, without a shiver of fear and without emotion. We see him in the opening sequence set up an alibi, steal a car, enter a nightclub, and without flinching he shoots the owner in his office. Then the trouble begins: by coincidence, he's one of the suspects rounded up by the Paris police; a beautiful woman jazz piano player at the club witnessed him fleeing after the shooting, but she refuses to ID him to the police. When Delon goes to collect his pay, he gets shot in the arm - the team that hired him thinks he's double-crossing them. From that point we go on an elaborate chase and escape, some seen from Delon's POV and some from the police, as the police close in on him; throughout, he remains incredibly cool, and a highlight is a cat-and-mouse game as he eludes about 50 police officers pursuing him through the Metro (part of the fun of this film is getting a look at Paris in the '60s - many fewer cars, a lot more urban poverty, and the Metro pretty much the same). To be honest, the complex conclusion of this drama swept right by me; I never quite get who exactly hired Delon or why and have no idea of the role of the supercool (and living in luxury) jazz pianist, whom Delon confronts in the final sequence (I won't give anything away), but this movie isn't really about plot, it's about atmosphere, which Melville creates beautifully: the dark streets and long alleys, the seedy apartment, the excellent use of tracking shots through long scenes of investigation and interrogation, the contrast between the flashy nightclub and the grim world on the streets, and most of all the presence of Delon throughout, always in moxie, with his trenchcoat (he chases from beige to blue after he's shot in the arm), white dress shirt, cocked fedora.

Amazing cinematography in Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev

To best watch Tarkovsky's 1966 Soviet film, Andrei Rublev, it's best to give up any pretense of trying to follow a traditional plot or narration and just focus on what you're seeing on the screen: An amazing and beautiful series of scenes the re-create better than anything I've ever seen (only other possible contender may be Chimes at Midnight) the look and feel of what life must have been like in the 15th century. Loosely, the film follows the eponymous Andrei  - based on a real Russian painter of church icons - as he travels with a few companions - an older mentor, a protege, a woman he at times protects - across a forbidding landscape, bound for one church or another at which he will practice his art. The film is a series of discrete episodes, and the main characters are in some, not in others, and it really doesn't matter: Each scene is discrete and can be taken as such. We see an encounter w/ a jester or comedian (extremely strange) in a hut where many have gathered in shelter from the rain, at attack by Tartar fighters and some Russian allies on a small city - an incredible re-creation of a battle scene, with unfortunately much abuse of animals, a scene in a churchyard (at which time Andrei has taken a vow of silence and is giving up his art), a long sequence about the fabrication of a bell for a church steeple, in which Tarkovsky directs probably thousands of extras, each in period dress and engaged in some aspect of the communal work - like a Bruegel painting, though all in muted gray tones, and at the conclusion an intimate look at Rublev's work (not sure if these are truly his icons or representative other icons of the period), all of which are painted on damaged or rotting wood panels in churches that are in near ruin (some amazing cinematic feats here, which I won't spoil or give away). We can see why the Soviets immediately suppressed this film, not because the religious overtones (easy to dismiss those as ancient relics) but the implication that a group of rebels can attack a city and toppled the government, the depiction of an artist remaining devoted to his craft in the face of official opposition, and the glorification of the individual hero or creator without even a hint of social realism of collective identity (except maybe in the community involvement in construction of the church).

An intelligent documentary about war photography

The Netflix 3-part series Five Came Back is an examination of the role movies, and prominent movie directors, played in creating propaganda films and documentaries at the outset and throughout World War II, with particular focus on the lives, contributions, and finally postwar careers of 5: Capra, Ford, Huston, and Stevens, Wyler. The footage, raw and completed, is great, as are the accounts of the challenges and risks of wartime photography: accompanying crews on bombing runs and in airfights, joining the forces to capture the first landings on D-Day, and of course the famous footage of the first revelations about Dachau. Some of the footage was too sensitive ever to produce and remained for years in vaults; military leaders were concerned about showing the carnage of war. That said, the military was quite progressive in recognizing the way in which documentary movies could inspire patriotism, valor, and sacrifice - and the film recognizes that the American military learned from the success of the hideous films of Refenstahler that inspired Germans before the war. Some of the most interesting material in this documentary showed the postwar work of these directors, who clearly became more profound and serious in their work following the war - the experience changed them at the core, leading to such films as The Best Years of Our Lives (directly about the struggles of returning soldiers) and what was apparently the first serious documentary about what we now call PTSD, a close examination of military veterans in a psychiatric facility. At times 5 Came Back is a little too celebratory - reminded me of some of the Oscar ceremony This is Hollywood clips - and there's probably too much use made of talking heads, although the directors (Spielberg, Coppola, et al) who comment on the war footage are top rank and have some intelligent observations and background info.