Chained Relations #10

The Ray Carney-Mark Rappaport saga carries on.  Following the attempted mediation by several of Carney’s sympathetic former students, who spoke with Professor Carney regarding this, with some false hopes of a resolution which went apparently nowhere, the situation today remains as it was:  Carney remains incommunicado, in possession of Mark’s materials, and thus far has suffered no consequences from Boston University owing to his behavior, which includes, transparently, as seen in the items shown below,  previously published, perjury in a legal setting, not to mention a seemingly endless series of falsehoods and lies regarding what he has, what he has done, and so on.   While stating he has emails which show Rappaport having “gifted” him these materials, bizarrely claiming “the high ground” and moral rectitude, Carney has never produced these emails.

Recently Mark sent me a kind of announcement/letter on the matter.  I print it here.

HOW DOTH HE DISSEMBLE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS…

To those who’ve come to this story late, let me bring you up to speed. In 2005, when I moved to Paris, Ray Carney, tenured professor at Boston University, eagerly offered to take digital videos and extra prints of my movies and keep them for me at Boston University until the time I would need them back. He now claims they were “a gift” to him, given to him forever and ever—although I can’t imagine for what reason I or anyone else would do that—but that’s his story. He refuses to return the films I wrote, directed, edited, and produced, films which he had nothing whatever to do with, which he does not have the rights to, and can’t do anything with, and claims they’re now his. His actions, which I’ve made public, for some reason that I don’t understand, now seem to focus not on his atrocious behavior but on how much money he spent taking “care” of these objects. For some reason that I also don’t get, no reporter has ever held his feet to the fire regarding various improvised figures he says he spent or the inventive strategies that he keeps coming up with—different ones for each interview—and lets him get away with these fantasy figures and fabrications he keeps throwing out there.

Here are his feet. Here’s the fire.

1. So far, no reporter has questioned him (isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?) on these sworn, perjurious statements regarding the inventory of items I entrusted to him. These statements were made under oath.

This one from July 13, 2012

 Then there’s this sworn statement from August  27, 2012

Now, really! Would you buy a used car from this guy? After this shabby performance, would you believe anything he said? Ever? And if you were a reporter, why wouldn’t you pursue this in an interview?

As for the “careful visual inspection by a trained inspector” (Carney himself, I presume), you don’t inspect a digital master or any other video by eye. You have to play it on a very expensive lab-quality, studio-quality machine that Carney doesn’t have access to.

2) Carney makes himself available, through a friend of his, for an interview in Artinfo

 http://es.artinfo.com/news/story/862468/filmmaker-mark-rappaport-fights-to-regain-possession-of-his

 in which he claims he was willing to return my materials to me but he needed $27,000 to send the stuff to me in France!. I never wanted or asked him to send the stuff  to me in France. I had given him my credit card number so he could FedEx it to a friend in NY on my account and, then, much later told him to deposit the stuff at my lawyer’s office in Boston, the same city where Carney teaches. So, it seems he did not need the $27,000 he asked for shipping costs, after all. He just thought it might be a good idea to have $27,000.

He has still not returned my stuff to me.

3) In an interview with the Boston Globe,

http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/style/2013/04/06/battle-over-film-archives-puts-boston-university-professor-ray-carney-uncomfortable-spotlight/ICdyD6WjGuP52JEVKr3z3O/story.html

he claims to have spent $40,000 (!!!!!) “restoring and preserving” my materials. First of all, you don’t restore videos. Nor do you restore films. You can clean films, you can remove scratches— and that’s very cheap— but you don’t “restore” them. You restore negatives, Mr. Carney. Secondly, how much does a tenured professor make? $100,000 a year? $125,000 a year, before taxes? $40,000 of his own money???? $14,000 more than is the average annual income of most Americans??? If you believe that someone would spend that kind of money “restoring and preserving” materials by, in his own words, an “obscure” filmmaker, who gave him “trash,”

http://cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/chained-relations-8-carney-comes-in-from-the-cold/

there’s a bridge I’d like to sell you real cheap. He says in his deposition, the one in which he perjured himself, that he has a special place where he keeps many other such “gifts.” In other words, whatever Taj Mahal he claims to have built for me alone, had been already built. Not that I believe that story, either. And assuming he did spend some money building a garage where he also keeps films, what does that have to do with me? You let a friend stay at your house for a few months. He does major renovations and then stiffs you with the bill for renovations you never asked for. Are you responsible for that?

3) While being interviewed for Indiewire

http://www.indiewire.com/article/how-filmmaker-mark-rappaport-lost-his-movies-and-what-he-can-do-get-them-back

Carney lets on that he would return my stuff to me for $10,000 to cover his legal expenses. This time it’s not $27,000 or $40,000 but a more modest $10,000. I think it’s sort of unethical to use an interviewer as a go-between—maybe that’s just me— but Carney, even though he talks about ethics with a capital “E” ad nauseum, doesn’t let them get in the way of his own actions. He floated it past the interviewer in order to make himself look like a very reasonable, accommodating guy. The interviewer bought it hook, line and sinker. When I responded, through the interviewer, that I would pay him $7,000, which was my final counter-offer when he initially demanded $27,000 in ransom money for returning my work to me, the owner and creator, Carney called the offer “just another veiled (or not-so-veiled) set of threats.” HUH? Do I not speak English as well as I think I do? What is the threat here, “veiled or not-so-veiled”???? In other words, saying he would return my work for $10,000 was just a public relations ploy, to make himself look good. He floated a trial balloon, for publication only, that he wasn’t in the least bit serious about acting on.

4) through 84) Despite Carney’s endless blather about “restoring” and “preserving” that which cannot be either restored or preserved, when I asked him for video masters of several of my films in 2010, this is what he wrote

January 21, 2010

Rest assured that I will do ANY AND EVERYTHING to help you. And no money necessary (except for shipping)!!! DON’T WORRY!

(Capital letters and exclamation points his, not mine.)

January 30, 2010

Again my apologies. I was out of town for about a week and only received your message about a week ago….. and I’ve been totally crazy busy every day of the week I’ve been back (publishing crises, what else is new?), but I did retreive all of the stuff, brought it home, and have it here now, and shall go through it today (Sat) or tomorrow (Sunday) and locate Postcards and Garfield, assuming they are in the stuff you sent, which I have no reason to doubt… As soon as I paw through the boxes, I can mail the two things to you.+

And this from February 1, 2010

You almost stumped the stars today, the stars of fate, I mean; but I think I came up with everything you need. I done me darnedest! Some of those suckers sure were hiding from me underneath stacks of VHS tapes or other rubble! Here’s what I came up with. In every case, it was the best I could do. I looked hard and long! Went though the material twice in fact! You’re lucky I’m giving you a steep discount on my usual hourly rate!!! (Zero dollars an hour just for you, my friend!)

I always looked for a Beta SP Master in NTSC and (even though you didn’t say to do it), just in case, tried to find a BetaSP PAL version of the same thing if it was there, which I am also including in each case I could find one.

 

In other words, he had not even opened the boxes, did not know what was in them, and even subtly suggests that the things I ask him for might not be there. They were all there. In fact, the boxes had not been opened  5 years after he got the materials. When he was, in August 2012, forced to deliver a complete inventory to the courts, after he swore that he gave away and/or destroyed much of my material, he goes through the materials FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER and—guess what?—it’s all there, everything I itemized. How do I know that it’s the very first time ever (well, second time—he rummaged around in the boxes in 2010 to give me back films I asked for)? In a email dated August 27, 2012 he writes that he was

 spending something like forty or fifty hours doing this inventory to fulfill the court order.

In other words, he never knew what was in those boxes which contained all the materials that he so carefully “restored and preserved.” I would also question the “40 or 50 hours,” but that’s the standard Carney hyperbole, suggesting how difficult everything is and how manfully he overcomes every obstacle.

85) through 100) And here’s the real kicker, the photo of the materials which the court demanded he place in his lawyer’s office.

 

I know those boxes. The Samsung box on the left was the box that the DVD player I bought came in. The box underneath it is the box my Sony DVD player came in (to replace the Samsung player which died exactly after the warranty expired). In short, these items that he so preciously cared for, restored and preserved, built a special palace for, even though he hadn’t the vaguest idea what was in the boxes, and is hanging onto with such tenacity, were in the same darn boxes I sent him seven years earlier. Now, I ask you—can anyone believe a single word this man says? Does he ever tell the truth? And why, you ask, does the university he works for permit him to get away with these whoppers? Isn’t he, as a tenured professor, also a representative of the school’s integrity?  Don’t they have an ethics code that has been repeatedly violated? But I guess that doesn’t apply to tenured professors, only to poorly paid, non-tenured adjuncts, lecturers, and janitors.

You have to wonder what the upside is for Carney, holding onto this material. He didn’t make my films, he doesn’t have the rights to them, he doesn’t even know the formats the digital masters are on, and even if he did, he doesn’t have the equipment to use them. At this point, I suspect that he doesn’t even want the materials and, if those unopened boxes are any indication, never did. They’ve been nothing but a burden to him and haven’t done his reputation any good, either. The longer this continues, the more his reputation is damaged. All he has to do is give everything back. But he won’t give them up. Because he has them and I don’t. Go figure! He keeps whining incessantly that it was “a gift” and he has a right to hang on ferociously to a gift he has no use for—“a gift” that he himself describes as “trash” by an “obscure filmmaker.”

Maybe my films will be digitized from the original negatives two years from now. Or three or four. It may take even longer than that. It may not happen until after I’m dead. America, after all, is not very sentimental about its living artists but gets very misty-eyed about dead ones. Carney, however, will have to live the rest of his life with the consequences of his actions. I don’t envy him. Even if everyone else thinks he’s wrong, he pretends not to care because, to paraphrase the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964, in his heart he knows he’s right. So be it. His obit, assuming he warrants one, will not start off with “Inspirational Teacher, John Cassavetes Scholar,” the way it was meant to. I suspect it will read like “Ray Carney, The Man Who Walked off with the Bulk of Mark Rappaport’s Life’s Work.” I would write, if it were up to me, something a little more colorful—like “The Man Who Casually, Cavalierly, and Maliciously Hi-jacked a Major Portion of Rappaport’s Work Out of Narcissistic Spite.”

But you don’t have to worry about it, Mr. Carney. In your heart you know you’re right. Sweet dreams.

At risk of a kind of over-kill, I asked Mark to send me the actual legal documents listing those items which Professor Carney holds, and I print below Rappaport’s initial claim, itemizing those things which he had shipped to Carney (and which, under penalty of perjury in his deposition for the court Carney claimed not to have).  Juxtaposing Carney’s sworn statement below, to his sworn statement above, made in a legal context, Professor Ray Carney, Ph.D, tenured at Boston University, is a self-convicted perjurer.  In light of his constantly shuffled statements regarding this case – the numbers, the money, the reasons  – along with his pious claims of virtue, Professor Carney shows himself to also be that classical American archetype, the Jimmy Swaggart sort of preacher snared in sin while exhorting others to virtue (and raking in money for it):  a con man.  That a man of this dubious moral and ethical example is left to teach raises questions exactly of the kind he has charged to Boston University about a form of corruption.   Had Professor Carney a modicum of honesty within himself, he’d return Rappaport’s materials with an apology, resign his teaching position, and seek out the psychiatric help he so clearly needs.  However, I wouldn’t make any bets on his doing so.

 

          

Cinema Musings: Amour and The Master, and other things

Haneke’s over the shoulder shots, in Amour

Flying back from my visit to the Jeonju festival, with 9 hours to burn up, I found Michael Haneke’s Amour among the films on tap to fill the little LCD screen in front of me, and having been encouraged by a few friends to see it, I flicked it on.   Admitting that the context was questionable, along with the visual quality of the screen, I took a deep breath, trying to set aside my a priori assumption I would not like it as I haven’t liked any other film of the very few I have seen of his, and figuring for sure it would be way too conventional in form for my tastes.  I was not disappointed in that regard.  In what seems his stripped down quasi-minimalist manner, Haneke is really a by-the-book rather, well, conventional, filmmaker.  He shuffles the deck a little, in this instance opening the film (contrary to what I think I recall from the critics who say it begins with a concert sequence) with the narrative’s last shot:  firemen break into a nice Parisian bourgeois apartment of an older kind, and find a man dead on his bed, self-gassed, flower petals arranged about his head.   This is presumably a wicked avant-gardism suggesting high art or something like that.  From there the story proceeds in rather clockwork manner as our heroine has a stroke, and her husband must then cope with the quick declension to follow – loss of memory, another stroke, a wheel-chair, helping at the toilet and changing diapers, stressing out, and rather predictably as Haneke presents it, finally doing a mercy-killing, followed with taping up the house and getting around to the film’s opening shot.   Winner of a Palme d’Or at Cannes, and swooned over by critics (including some who were previously hostile to Haneke’s signature épater les bourgeoisie audience and who cooed over the seeming shift to some hint of human compassion in this work), Amour is really a rather normal Euro-art-house film, tracing its lineage back to Antonioni, early Chantal Akerman, and carrying on through a long list of others who work in the same stripped down (but conventional) style, seen, say of late, in the so-called Berlin School.  And yet, despite the modesty (the dour perhaps non-lighting) it is still by-the-numbers industrial filmmaking:  there’s establishing shots, a cluster of conversation cross-cutting over-the-shoulder sequences, and strictly conventional film syntax.  Not one shot or sequence shows the least originality or shifts the cinematic language in any way.  Haneke’s tiny little narrative time shifts, or “it’s in his mind” sequences, have been worked almost since the beginning of cinema, and certainly to far richer and denser effect in the hands of Alain Resnais (Muriel) and many others.   That he is lauded for taking on the matter of getting old and dying is one thing – bravo, Michael, for taking on this non-commercial matter and not making a sappy soft-focus piece of syrupy sentimentality.  One thumb up for that.  Now – from someone you have cited as being an influence – here’s a kick in the butt to make a film that isn’t essentially conservative.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix acting in The Master

Arriving back in Portland my friends happened to have obtained a copy of The Master, by Paul Thomas Anderson, one of America’s answers to the Euro-artfilm crowd (along with the Coens, Lynch, Payne, etc..)  I’d never seen one of his movies, though I’d seen some clips on the net of There Will Be Blood, and had decided not to see it owing to my usual aversion to Hollywood slick/false production values.  But, what the heck, this was for free and I needed to stay up late to get into the local clock.  Again, this film had arrived with ample critical hosannas, though there were those less pleased.  Like Haneke, Anderson is a practitioner of a kind of stripped-down conventional cinema syntax, though he fully utilizes the Hollywood gloss factory of sumptuous (and false) lighting, sets clean enough for Disney (here a scene in which a parade of  never-touched-by-dirt classic cars sit in polished splendor pretending to be the early 1950′s).  Similarly the clothes and all the rest are spotless and fraudulent.  Which for a film which is presumably about life is in deep error.  Also unlike Haneke, Anderson periodically opts for the artsy camera angle (artsy here only because these stick out like a sore thumb in the midst of the quite conventional balance of the film), ones which could have been lifted out of, oh, my Slow Moves (1983), or Rembrandt Laughing (1989) or All the Vermeers in New York (1990); little excursions into abstraction except that Andersen yanks them away rather quickly, and returns promptly to the well-coiffed theatrical talking heads.

And those talking heads!  Joaquin Phoenix has been cited for his bravura performance, one which in my contrarian eye is a perfect example of actors acting and looking very much like they are acting.  Here Mr Phoenix adopts a kind of left-tilted mouth sneer which oscillates wildly, sometimes clearly a consciously forced matter, and sometimes evaporating away.  Likewise he sports an absurd body gesture, with his hands on his hips, arms akimbo, elbows leaning forward.  A bundle of transparent acting mannerisms which our critics seem to think is good “acting.”  I’d suggest they look at some Japanese films to see some good acting – say Kurasawa’s High and Low, or Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Cafe Lumiere: in the former, done in extreme wide-screen, Kurasawa has tableaux of 10 actors or more on screen, each inwardly using their entire being to embody their character; in the latter, the father, without seeming to do anything (unlike a flailing American “method” trained actor would), silently contains his character’s explosive anger but makes it readable to the spectator through real acting.  Phoenix instead takes his bundle of mannerisms, and, in several terrible scenes, wildly flails about in one of the worst examples of the damage inflicted by Lee Strasberg’s famed acting studio.  Mr Hoffman opts for a more subdued performance, though it too is all too clearly “acting.”

Not content with this acting, his mise-en-scene and costumes, Anderson also lathers on a nearly continuous track of music (Jonny Greenwood), alternating between rather artsy classical sounding stuff, jazz, and old pop and jazz tunes of the era (Ellington, Strayhorn, Berlin, etc.) .  He leans on this musical crutch as hard as any Hollywood block-buster does, and seemingly almost more so. (Note: Haneke’s film is absent music with the exception of the concert scene at the outset or when someone is actually playing music.)  Despite all this, Anderson’s film, for all its transparent effort to be “serious,” is seriously boring and an effort to sit all the way through.  The “story” is diffuse and meanders.  The content ends up being a head-scratcher, not because it is “deep,” but just the opposite, because it is shallow.   Of course a gaggle of critics perceive all these things as proof that it is a masterpiece of some sort.

That these films are lauded by critics, given awards, and accorded pages and pages of blather, points towards the general conservatism which has overtaken our society, almost globally.   Anything genuinely creative will be suffocated at birth, ignored or ridiculed should it survive, while cooky-cutter theatrical films like these will be celebrated.  One need only glance at the output of the current hot “art” event in NYC, Frieze, to get the gist of it – art is now a matter of the old end-game of imperial Rome, bread and circuses.  The tribe gathers, fashionably dressed in black, nibbling on 4-star chefs’ costly snacks, as the CO2 level tilts over 400ppm, our government shreds the Constitution before us, and the oligarchy which now runs the show sucks in all the wealth, strips the lower 90% of all economic and political power, and the stupified, glazed-eyed public lets itself be led to the gallows.

“Art” of our times….

Festivals and follies (50 years)

The Jeonju Hanok Village outside the hotel window

Jet-lagged from the journey from Portland to Seoul, I arrived in Jeonju for what is maybe my 5th or 6th visit – I forget and don’t want to look it up.  I was here in 2000, with their first issue, a spanking new eager young festival out to put this small provincial Korean city on the map.  I recall that one, charmed by what seemed a modest provincial university town, suffering an inferiority complex which found them constantly inquiring of me if all was going OK, were they good enough.  They were. (I had experienced the same thing in my first visit to the Yamagata Documentary festival in Japan, in 1989).  Now it is 14 years later, and Jeonju has exploded, along with most Korean cities, with the standard issue concrete residential highrises (Lotte, Samsung, Hyundai, or another cheobol name signifying the brand painted on the side, along with a number – capitalist workers housing akin to the old Soviet ones of the USSR and eastern Europe, though built a bit better), stretching out from view, snaking up the nearby valleys, a version of soulless Seoul stuck in the midst of rice paddies, industrialized agriculture, and rural factories.   The modest charms of 2000 have pretty much vanished.  Similarly the festival ballooned, now a much bigger affair which takes over the downtown area,  has its own building, and after some kind of palace coup a year or two ago, is run by other people, and seems a little less organized than before, though the ticketing policies seem draconian now.

Follies:  in a little error of idiot festival politics, I let Jeonju program both my new films, a failure on my part to think ahead and realize I was squandering one of my glorious “world premiers” by letting them show both.  So 120 or so people, off in little Jeonju, will see my films, and a large number of festivals will hence decline to show either of them because it isn’t a fkn premiere, a matter that no one except film festival directors/organizers could give a shit about.  So they trade a good film for a virgin of  dubious qualities.  Real smart…   While I know the ropes of the festival game I guess I find it all pathetic and indicative of some kind of warped cultural BS that those running these things should give another think.  There are a handful of larger festivals that show films that have shown elsewhere, but not many.  Those that insist on world premiers and such are merely slitting their own wrists, assuring that they fulfill my cynical view that festivals are by and large an institutionalized system for screening of a lot of mostly rather bad films under the least ideal circumstances for seeing good ones.

So on Tuesday I showed The Narcissus Flowers of  Katsura-shima to an audience of 50-60, and got a look at the DCP of it and confirmed that the process only inflicts some damage on it (conversion from 29.97 fps to 24 fps). It was marginal damage, but visible and stupid, done only at the behest of Hollywood and its desire for a single uniform system for projection.  I am 100% sure the equipment here and any place that can show off computers could have as easily shown my original h.264 file and spared the motion quirks, color shifts and other crap the DCP conversion brought into play.  And spared me a $300 expense.  Put it this way: assuming the next audience is the same size, I had to pay about $2 per viewer to make their experience worse.  Ain’t that grand!

Even so, not having seen it for some time, and never having seen it on a good big screen projection, with good sound, I must say it is an impressive work – minimalist, beautiful, of measured (slow) pace, and intelligent – qualities which assure it will hardly be seen at all, and naturally I will never see a dime from it.  Which, after 50 years of doing this, draws from me some doubts – about the world I live in, about my sanity or at least my intelligence, about at this late date in my life persisting in this.  I recall a few years back seeing Raul Ruiz wandering the lounge space of the Rotterdam Film Festival looking inwardly lost, as if he were wondering the same thing I am: what’s the point? (Though Raul managed to make a decent living from what he did.)

On May 1st I was present at the second screening of Coming to Terms here (hadn’t arrived for  first screening).  Packed house of 150 or so, which was a nice surprise, though as the film came up it was painful for me to see the damage inflicted in the DCP conversion: slow fades turned into digital waves of light jumps, all lateral movement (cars going by) now juddered in little jumps, even relatively slow human movements became jerky.  As I watched felt as if I’d been raped – another $300 to severely damage my film because the festival bought the Hollywood DCP con.  They will be getting a pretty harsh letter from me (and perhaps a request to pay for the stupid conversion they required though I told them before hand what it would do.)   Setting all that aside, and  some remaining sound tech matters, I was very happy with the film – certainly as good as anything I have ever done.   So coming full circle to Jeonju, where at a screening in 2006 my Yonsei teaching  job offer began and subsequently found me wondering if, after nearly 4 “dry years” of not making any new films when teaching  (I did edit previously shot ones) , I’d lost the creative moxie.   The two films here, made immediately after I quit in August 2011, seem to suggest the well is not yet dry.  Though I should hasten to state that it would be perfectly OK if it were dry – creative work is like that, and when the source runs out, it is fine.   I intensely dislike the critical view that  there is something wrong when an artist hangs it all up, or when, pursuing their work, it falters.  We get old.  We deplete our energies.  We curl up and die.  And that is as it is and as it ought to  be.

However, though I am happy to feel that this work can go on, I must say I am rather fed up with the other end of it: festivals, getting things shown.  And I think I will likely write an open letter to the festival and exhibition world, letting them know that while I continue to make films most likely, I won’t be sending in entry forms and jumping through all the hoops and idiocies required, and if they want to see my work, they can contact me.  Or perhaps I will post it on a private Vimeo channel and they can request to see it that way.  Meantime, given the nature of the cinema business these days,  in a few months – once I have the time to do so – I will be placing all my work on a Vimeo channel, to view for pay per the new Vimeo set-up.  However miniscule in the “real world” I do know there’s an audience for my work, and this will make it available for those who do wish to see it.

Heroic USSR-style sculpture of cinema-workers on Jeonju “Cinema Street.”

In another week and some I’ll head back to the USA, greeted more or less by a blank slate:  having called off the American essay film, and having screwed up the festival politics of a ticket to Europe, it appears wandering the west, or perhaps hunkering down to catch up a a large backlog of footage, fotos, and other things is in order until (and if) some screenings in the east draw me there, or an invitation for Narcissus Flowers, flies me to Japan (to stay a month).  Wait and see.  Though now that I think of it I did set in motion the wheels to shoot a feature in Port Angeles in September….  silly me!

Prologue to a Future [2: Forensics]

FBI photo of backback alleged to contain pressure-cooker bomb (note white patch)Suspect #2: “Black Hat.” (Note lack of white patch.)Suspect #2: “White Hat.”Two The Craft mercenaries, lower frame, within yard of bomb site.The Craft mercenary with full backpack (note: white patch, earplug)

Same The Craft operatives at explosion; man at right no longer has backpack.

The Craft mercenaries; note again, no backpack on same man.

Mercenaries disappear

Meantime after a massive manhunt, in which the entire city of Boston and surrounding areas were subjected to a total lock-down and martial law, one alleged “terrorist” is dead, killed in an alleged shoot-out and run over by his brother according to the police.  The other, a 19 year old young man, severely wounded, is seen exiting the boat in which he’d take refuge, with no gun in hand or suicide vest; he was then shot several times while the police claimed he had attempted suicide by shooting himself in the mouth.  The owner of the boat reported it appeared to be riddled with holes “like a Swiss cheese.”

Meantime the FBI has now admitted it had contacts with the now dead Suspect #1 (Black Hat), and has quickly concocted stories of his recruitment as an Islamic jihadist.  His mother says they had him under surveillance for 5 years.  The mass media after attempting to utterly ignore the presence of The Craft operatives all around the bombing site have now been told, owing to the considerable evidence, that these were “normal” National Guard forces assigned to such events (curiously wearing a private mercenary company’s clothes, and whisked away by the FBI shortly after the bombing.)

The “official” story of the Boston bombing is more full of holes than the official versions of 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination.  It is the nature of our corporately controlled media that anyone raising questions regarding “official/authoritative” versions of events will be labeled as a tin foil hat wearing nut-case, etc., or if possible, simply ignored, as in an old-style Soviet tactic of making a “non-person”of dissenters.  From “magic bullets” to buildings collapsing on their own (WTC#7), and on through myriad lesser State lies, America has a considerable history of governmental malfeasance in the name of “patriotism.”

There are far too many “strange things” present in the Boston Marathon bombing, not least the servile behavior of our press which seems merely to parrot the government line while such obvious anomalies are present.  Were it not for the internet it is clear all these things would be simply erased from view.  The question is what purpose and for whom was this bombing intended to serve?

Dead men don’t talk.

Some sources:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/contractors-at-boston-marathon-stood-near-bomb-left-before-detonation/5332069

http://www.mediaite.com/online/fbi-website-shows-hi-res-photos-of-boston-marathon-suspects/

http://www.fbi.gov/news/updates-on-investigation-into-multiple-explosions-in-boston/updates-on-investigation-into-multiple-explosions-in-boston

Prologue to a Future

      

Hot on the heels of the US Senate’s failure to pass any kind of gun-control measures, and President Obama’s comments on it, arrived, in the midst of what normally would be a joyous event – the conclusion of the famed Boston Marathon – a percussive note which has riveted the nation’s attentions a whole week:  the bombing in Boston.  In this event, for some days the “suspects” remained unknown and hence, “on the loose,” though at one point the forces of the law announced they had a suspect, and promptly withdrew it, raising for some certain suspicions.  At a later point the FBI named its suspects, two Chechen brothers, and Boston and surrounding areas were then put in lock-down, with residents told to stay locked in their homes as an invading force of highly militarized police – city, State, Federal – fanned out in search of their quarry.  Here is the FBI announcement, which interestingly insists that only its photographs are to be accepted as accurate and real.   The mainstream press largely accommodated this request, and parroted the official line.  On the internet another story was unfolding, in the exchanges of Reddit, 4chan, or Infowars, and replicated across the political spectrum from far right to far left.  In the case of the former, the Boston bombing was another false-flag set-up, staged to lay the ground-work for a governmental confiscation of guns which had been, at least for the moment, politically defeated.  In the latter, it was something similar, but to lay the groundwork for the imposition of martial law at some future point.  The mainstream press, with Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post providing the exception, hewed to the official governmental line.  And as usual, their pundits cranked out the appropriate levels of outrage and “reasonableness,” sticking to the comfortable and safe “middle-of-the-road.”   Amidst all this tumult, naturally, many truths were swept under the rug, disappeared, ridiculed, or otherwise dismissed.

Ignored by press and television news were many things, among them the presence of a number of militarized persons from a private security agency, TheCraft, whose members sported black backpacks much like that which the FBI said had contained a bomb, and who had clustered around the finish-line area where the bombs exploded.  Immediately following the bombing, these people gathered around a very high-tech vehicle close to where the attack had occurred.   To my knowledge the Boston Marathon organization has not said it had hired TheCraft for security, nor has anyone else explained their presence.  Sure a “story” will be forthcoming.  The motto of TheCraft, as seen on their “skull” patch, is “Despite what your Mama told you, violence does solve problems.”  I don’t know who these guys are, or why they were there, but they look and sound and seem to act like some form of American fascists.  I await the explanation for their being there, or more likely, their erasure from the “story.”

While the nation was totally focused, with the assistance of the mass media, on events in Boston, the Congress passed by unanimous consent a new little law, which rescinded previously passed law, which forbade members of Congress from using their information for “insider trading.”  President Obama promptly signed the measure into law.  Likewise the House passed on Thursday, April 18, a law (CISPA) designed to clamp down on the internet and give the government access to all internet communications.

Meantime the citizens of Boston, and at a distance the entire Nation, were treated to a full-scale example of a state-of-siege, while highly militarized forces in helicopters, tanks, and large groups of highly armed soldiers and police combed the city, looking for two suspects, one a 19 year old boy.  While asserting these were heavily armed and dangerous, the forces deployed were in all cases incredibly disproportionate to the reality.  But, perhaps, the point was not really to capture these two suspects, but to impress upon the populace the extent of the forces which could be brought into play, perhaps for some other rather probable and likely future event, such as the failure of the economy to generate jobs, or the collapse of the dollar.  Perhaps…

 

Frightened into a supine compliance, Boston became a deserted place.  Of course one could say having heavily armed uniformed persons outside your window, and having been ordered to accept a 24 hour a day curfew, it was only common sense to obey.  I think this is a refrain we have heard in 1930-40′s Germany, in the USSR, and many other places.  What struck me was the seeming absence of complaint, and the utter lack of a sense of proportion to the supposed danger.  Two young men did not close down the city of Boston; rather the “authorities” – Federal, State, and city, working in collusion – closed down the city, and in a manner absolutely out of keeping with the purported threat.  Clearly something else was at work here.

The FBI in short order “got their man.”  Though this perhaps has another meaning.  They have admitted to having, in 2011,  interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev supposedly at the request of an unnamed “foreign power,” (later revealed to be Putin’s Russia), and was supposedly found to be harmless.  Though his mother seems to see it otherwise, and says the FBI had been in contact with him over 5 years.  Naturally these little discrepancies have lit up the internet, though the mainstream press seems disinterested.  As they were in 9/11.   So, rather than question the very dubious official version – with one man dead, and the other now allegedly severely wounded but unable to talk – we are instead treated to that ever so American celebration of our togetherness, grit, and other wonderful traits that make us so exceptional.  And our heavily militarized police are being placed on pedestals for “protecting us.”

I am not a conspiracy theorist – the worst epithet tossed at anyone who does not go along with the “official” story promulgated by our government or other supposed “authorities,” though “nut-case” and others work just as well.   I am though willing to look at facts and figures and images directly, and to sift through them to see what appears to be valid.  I am also willing to listen to the rhetorical talk of ideologues, and to try to figure out the what and why of their behaviors.

In the case in Boston I think the story is far from over, though I am equally sure that both the government, and its compliant corporately owned mass media system will not be too interested in pursuing the matter much further, aside from in patting us all on the back for being so cooperative as a major American city, the veritable birthplace of the American revolution, was placed under martial law on the flimsiest of pretexts, and very likely, once and if the entire story is exposed, an utterly false pretext.   One that should recall other now infamous phrases: The Gulf of Tonkin, WMD, and the myriad other fraudulent claims made by our supposedly democratically elected officials, in order to prompt the nation to do what they wish us to do.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

Addendum:  (I will be adding URLs to interesting looks at the whole Boston bombing etc. as time goes along.)

http://www.juancole.com/2013/04/fathers-sons-chechnya.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-fbis-big-miss-boston-bombing-fugitive-shot-dead-was-on-radar-two-years-ago-8581570.html

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/chechen-terrorists-and-neocons#.UXMRPV5Slto.facebook

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/20/how_boston_exposes_americas_dark_post_911_bargain/

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/04/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-is-found.html

Obits: Talkin’ ’bout My G-G-Generation….

Annette Funicello

People try to put us d-down (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)

Just because we g-g-get around (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)

Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)

I hope I die before I get old (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)

.

.

The last months, traveling the western US, I’ve somewhat consciously sought to see as many of my old friends who are around this region as I could.  Consciously since it is likely I may well soon decamp for some distant place, perhaps never to return.  Consciously, as in many cases – my own included – the clock is running down, and this might be a last chance to see them, either because I or they will no longer be.  Such are the thoughts which the diminishing of time – as well as of muscle tissue, sight, energy and the blossoming of liver spots, lack of hair, and the other vicissitudes of aging – impose.  Seeing some old friends, I am struck, as surely they are likewise with me, by how much they have aged.

Annette Funicello was in the first Mickey Mouse Show, which began in 1955.  I am sure that while Uncle Walt would be appalled at the thought (or perhaps perversely pleased) that Annette was the jack-off queen for a generation of suppressed 1950′s boys – she had visible tits and exuded a sensuality the other girls on the show lacked, she was our go-to girl.  I know because I asked friends if she were their fantasy of choice while pounding the meat – the restrictions those days being far more stringent than today.  Back then Elvis was cropped above the waist for some modest gyrations on the Ed Sullivan Show; today Lady Gaga can virtually lap-dance on your face and no one seems to raise an eyebrow.  But time indeed marches on, heedless of our wishes, and steadily grinds our bodies to bits.  Even those of stars, large and small, of the silver screen.  Annette dropped from social sight some time ago, a victim of time and MS.  She died today in Bakersfield, CA., 100 or so miles north of where I write in the San Fernando Valley where she once graced a sound stage, wearing the Mouseketeer ears with which the Disney Corporation made its global mark.  She was seventy.

Maggie Thatcher, dead at 87Les Blank

The day before, on Sunday, April 7, Les Blank also joined the list of no-longer-here, hot on the heels of Roger Ebert, about whom I wrote only a few days ago.  Les was 77.  I met – and nothing more – Les a few times out on the festival circuit.  He was a well-known documentary filmmaker, a figure in the Bay Area film and cultural community, much liked by everyone I knew.  If I believed in such things, I’d imagine a raucous New Orleans wake going on now in his honor, for a life well spent.  But I don’t believe in such things, and know his spirit is now but a stiff piece of soon to disappear flesh, with everything that made him – like all of us – what we are in any way notable for, gone.  Sic transit gloria.

Les last year, being “honored” in Berkeley

I will in another place try to get around to writing a bit more deeply about this process of aging – of watching one’s family and friends grow fat or gaunt, hobbled by infirmities, ravaged by disease, and finally slipping off into death, whether done with grace or rage or indifference.  It is, to say the least, an interesting process, one which our culture seems to do its best to avoid confronting except in a frantic effort to escape it.  Our medical system, our consumerist life-style, our shallow public philosophy of life in general sends us in flight from speaking of it, or contemplating it outside the dumb legal necessities which property imposes.

Today there was an article by Susan Faludi published in the New Yorker, on my long-ago friend Shulamith Firestone – an article prompted by her death in August 2012.  I’d tried to provide some information for Susan, not just about what little I could remember about Shulie back in 1964-67, but also things trying to give her a little sense of flavor to the tenor of the times, so I suggested she see a few short films made back then, one of which, unknown to me, was based on a real-life friend of Shulie’s — who had committed suicide while I was in prison.  Reading the article, for the first time in a fair while, I wept – for Shulie, her sister, and many others, including myself.  I wept for all the needless pain inflicted on us all, and which in turn provokes us into inflicting pain in our turn.

Shulamith Firestone

This Be The Verse

    They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
      They may not mean to, but they do.
    They fill you with the faults they had
      And add some extra, just for you.

    But they were fucked up in their turn
      By fools in old-style hats and coats,
    Who half the time were soppy-stern
      And half at one another's throats.

    Man hands on misery to man.
      It deepens like a coastal shelf.
    Get out as early as you can,
      And don't have any kids yourself.
            - Philip Larkin 

Roger and me

  Roger Ebert, 1942 – 2013

I can’t find it in the digital chaos beneath my fingers, but somewhere is a copy of what was my first review, of my first film, Portrait, edited about this time in 1963, after hitch-hiking from Italy to London.  Last year the Eyefilm archive in Amsterdam made an archival print of it (which I haven’t seen, though thanks to the internet the woman who was the subject of the film, Matilde, who was then a 12 year old child, connected with me for the first time in 35 or more years).  The review was in the Chicago Sun-Times, I imagine in 1967, shortly after I’d been released from prison, from a screening of it along with some other Chicago “underground” films at the Aardvark Theater on the near-north side.  It was written by a young, newly-hired critic, Roger Ebert.  Of course neither of us knew then what life’s trajectory would bring to us.  Now we know what Roger’s life would be; last word is still out on my own.

Aardvark Cinema, Wells St., Chicago

Roger, as everyone knows, went on to become a rather famous film critic, with a nationally syndicated television show, Siskel & Ebert,  broadcast for some decades. He also wrote books.  Along with his partner, Gene Siskel, he was a kind of power in the film business – able with a thumb up or down to significantly shift the box office figures for some films.  While I have never followed such things, I understand that Ebert tended to stick his thumb on the scales in support of smaller, so-called “independent” work when they came into sight.  He certainly did for me.  Back in 1990, when I’d finished All the Vermeers in New York, operating without a press agent and the other accoutrements of the biz (and an inept partner), I wrote Roger personally, reminding him of that first review and asking him to take a look at the film, and possibly review it on the Siskel & Ebert show.  He did, and it was reviewed, garnering 2 thumbs up.  I am sure the marginal BO it did was largely owing to that. It ran 6 months in Chicago.  [In Los Angeles it got 7 favorable reviews and opened on the day of the Watts riots, with closed cinema's the following week.  It never ran there - a nasty little twist of fate.]   I am certain that most people who meet me and tell me I am “famous” heard of me through Roger.

Sometime later, he also reviewed, though not on television, my film Frameup.  To my knowledge that’s all he ever saw of mine.  I had a few very brief exchanges with him in the last decade, things not important, though if memory serves me correctly (?) not so long ago I wrote him a note saying I admired his courage in the face of his situation in life.  And, quite recently, Tweeting, he expressed support for Mark Rappaport and my efforts on Mark’s behalf.  To say, he wasn’t by any measure a friend, or even an acquaintance, but only that our lives distantly crossed paths, from long ago.

From that perspective I just wish to note that as his condition narrowed his physical means, it seemed to open his soul.  Unable to speak, he spoke, in a sense, even more, using his blog and Twitter.  And his subject broadened from mere film to life itself.  Seriously maimed by his cancer he did not draw behind a curtain, but stepped forward, and, offering an example for others, showed himself publicly – in no way as “victim” or unfairly chosen in life’s lottery, but as someone who learned from the adversities which visited him.   And in some very real sense he was transformed from being just a film critic, however “important,” into a kind of performance artist.  His life became his art.  And he was very effective at this, however conscious or unconscious a decision it was.

As a filmmaker, while it is what I do, I honestly don’t think films, or their making, and all the things which surround this, is very important.  It is just another thing humans do these days.  It is as important as what your plumber does, or what an air traffic controller does, or what the barista does, or what anyone else does – no less, no more.  And in my view it is the same for a critic – what they do is not important, certainly no more so than what they critique.  So it is interesting that what life inflicted on Roger – the terrible and tragic medical state which was imposed on him – coerced him into becoming something far more than a critic, into becoming what he admired and wished to be, into being an artist.  In this, he became our fame-besotted time’s hunger artist.

In his last posting, several days before his death, with a certain wit, while enumerating all the things he planned to do, he signaled his complete awareness of his circumstance with his title, A Leave of Presence.  Mr Ebert is no longer present.  I am a firm atheist, and Roger has gone the same place we all go – to oblivion, the synaptic magic which energizes us in life, deleted.  Stepping, as he did, publicly, articulately, and in a manner passionately, towards his own erasure, was his greatest act as a human and artist.  We should be thankful for the example.

Spring Suckers

Returning from his Nashville put-on (or was it really?) of the globe’s cultural gate-keepers, Trash Humpers, middle-ager enfant terrible  Harmony Korine has returned to grace our silver screens once more after his haut culture detour of Mister Lonely, shot in France. That was his largest film with a budget of $8.2 million; it received mixed reviews and earned a whole $386,915 in its first 9 months – proving that fame trumps economic wisdom nearly every time, whether in the hiring and firing of Wall Street CEOs or lame Hollywood.  This time around it is a less well-budgeted affair (5M) of candy colored fame-drenched T&A, celebrating one of America’s more mindless traditions, the Florida suck and fuck fest of “Spring Break.”

With Trash Humpers Korine managed to certify that the hoity-toities of the film festival world would program a piece of unmitigated pure shit if a famous name came attached to it, and hence his willfully idiotic and stupid work displaced doubtless many a far more interesting, serious or artful work from being seen by audiences, so that festival programmers could imagine themselves so so hip and with it with today’s misguided aging would-be youths.  He also conned the former doyen of the Village Voice critics into calling it Korine’s “masterpiece.”  [See this  and this or this.]  Mr Korine is 40 years old this year, though one would be very hard-pressed to figure that out from his films.

With Spring Breakers Mr. Korine jumps again into the juvenile cess-pool of mindless American adolescence, though with some ham-handed seeming intent to critique it with labored voice-overs trying to introduce a slight distance or hint of discipline.  These though, as with an early-on professor’s discourse on racism in America being trumped by sexual innuendo and drawings of cocks, are readily dismissed, and aside from being embarrassingly klutzy seem a post-facto lay-over intended to induce the stupid (critics) into imagining there just might be something serious going on here.  From my cursory glances at the writings of said critics, it seems they took the bait.

We are instead introduced into lamely acted improvisations around a few of America’s itch points, with inept send-ups of religious fundamentalists, of compulsive texting, and boys-will-be-boyz and girlz-will-be-gurls in the form of an endless avalanche of gyrating crotches, booties, boobies, and guys spewing beer-ad cum all over the place.  This is done with similarly MTV-style gyrating camera movements from the myriad second-unit guys sent out to memorialize the parade of youthful T & A cavorting on the beaches and balconies of St. Pete.    As in Korine’s other works, the evident lack of anything one might call “style” becomes its style, duly celebrated by our writers who seem to have lost their minds to Harmony’s cum-on.  In his earlier Gummo and Julien Donkey Boy, which I liked, though each was grievously flawed in one manner or another, I found myself wondering if what was interesting and good in those was just lucky accident, or conscious – the later films have confirmed my hunch it was serendipitous.

I won’t summarize the Breakers’ story – which in fact I did not see, since I left after about an hour of mind-numbingly boring editorial cover-up trying frantically to disguise the emptiness on the screen, which was about 40 minutes after the inept spectacle in front of me had my eyes glazed with tedium.  I am not a prude, and the only thing really offensive I was watching was the utter lack of anything one might mistake for art, for any cinematic anything, or for any meaningful social satire/critique or anything else that might warrant one’s time.   Like Trash Humpers, this film was itself real trash.   That it was funded, received press attention, distribution and the nod of (some) critics, merely underlines the demise of any kind of seriousness in our (film) culture.

The “story” was as uncredible as the nubile young actresses supposedly out to break the Disney-bondage in which the biz had locked them  – this would be their breakout into “mature” little stars.  Well, forget it girls – while perhaps you can shake your booties and jiggle the jugs, you apparently can’t act your way out of a wet paper bag.  Though I do sympathize that the direction was probably no help at all.  Korine’s endeavors to elicit any conviction at all to his juvenile cartoon set-ups, resulted in the usual improv vice of actors repeating the same lame lines again and again, as if saying “but it wasn’t supposed to be like this” or “just look at this stuff” 20 times would improve on aging.  It doesn’t – it merely proves there’s a vacuum between the ears of the actors, and in this case also the director.  Were it not for his “fame” Korine’s film would have slipped straight to the now defunct DVD or on-line streaming owing to its Z-grade level “acting.”  (Particularly painful in the broadbrushed “nigger” scenes which I am sure our critics have nimbly found some virtue in aside from blatant racism – I am no PC person, but the presentation of black brothers in this film is pure white-racist propaganda.)

An hour in it was rather clear where this stultifying film was heading, to a grand denouement shoot-out of some kind, emblematic of its utterly one-note level.  That some allegedly serious critics imagined this as some kind of critique of the one-note culture it was all about is a very missed boat.  That they cooed about the pastel candy coated coloring, and the ever-so-lame little video fucking around injections that attempted to spice the boredom of it all suggests that watching too many movies can be dangerous to your mental health.   Irritated at being gulled into spending some bucks on this, Ryan, who joined me in the nearly empty Long Beach cinema we saw it in, went and asked for a refund.  He got it, and was told a lot of other refunds had been issued for the film.  Perhaps Harmony can retire to Nashville and grow up a little.

Ah, but in our corrupted society, like a 20 times failed CEO, he’ll surely be back, doubtless to be lauded by the culturati.

Twenty thumbs down.  Suck it, Harmony !

Chained Relations (Redux): #9

In the last week a number of things have happened regarding, as Mr. Carney has chosen to call it, “L’Affair Rappaport.”  What has happened is that Mr. Carney has finally come out from behind his veil of silence, and spilled his verbose self onto a new blog of his own making, Inside Boston University.  Here, in his inevitably obsessive and long-winded manner, he excoriates BU, and Mark Rappaport (and in a quasi-aside, myself).  In doing so, he repeatedly pulls the rug out from underneath himself and his myriad and repetitive arguments.  While I can’t in any way prove it, it would appear that this exercise in self-revelation on his part has been elicited by the very public exposure on the internet of his actions of which he complains, and the subsequent pressures applied by Boston University.  Without these it is easy to imagine that he would have sat tight, figuring Mark’s original internet letter would rapidly disappear in the endless chatter of the net and life.  His veil would work. However, that isn’t what happened, as his loud lament about being “cyber-bullied” makes clear.  Instead, his actions and behavior have been revealed, and his employer, Boston University, has in turn also been pressed to deal with the matter, and has brought his behavior under examination within the institution.

In his self-published letter – all 12,000 words of it – Mr. Carney repeatedly contradicts himself, and, in plain spoken English, lies.

In his first deposition, dated July 12, 2012, this is the story which Mr. Carney tells, to a court, for a legal deposition:

On August 27, 2012, to the same court, this is the story Mr. Carney tells, about the same material:

In his self-published blog posting of March 13, 2013, Mr. Carney goes to great lengths to describe the difficulty of his searching for, cataloguing, “archiving” and restoring the materials he claims were “gifted” to him by Mark Rappaport.   Here is a picture of those materials, taken in Carney’s lawyer’s office.

For those unfamiliar with such things, the stack to the left has 3 16mm reels, one in a can which holds a 1,200 foot reel; the two standard fiber boxes appear to contain reels of 800 feet.   The boxes below these might contain papers or perhaps magnetic sound recording tape, probably perforated for mixing.   The stack in the middle has another single reel fiber container for what would appear to be a 1,200 foot single reel, and below it is another fiber case, likely for two 2000 foot reels – a print of a feature-length film.  The three more modern tan plastic cases below it would contain double reels of 16mm film, again features.  The white container has half or 3/4 inch video tape, transfers of Rappaport’s films from 16mm to tape.  You should now be able to figure out what’s in the final stack: some more 16mm reels, a video tape, and another box of either papers or tape.  The entire assortment, arranged slightly differently, would fit in a size 2 x 2 x 2 feet:  8 cubic feet, or something that could readily fit in a rather small closet.

Rappaport’s view from seeing this photo, and from what Mr. Carney has written in these affidavits, is that Carney had never even opened the boxes, and hence had not “catalogued” them until required by the court.   The boxes are the same that the material was sent in.   Mr. Carney’s description of the “chaotic mess” etc. is belied by the evidence; his story of having discarded materials, given some away was belied by the itemized list he finally presented which included everything Rappaport had sent to him for safe-keeping.    For his alleged services in storing, archiving, cataloging and “restoring” these items, Mr. Carney requested a payment of 27 thousand dollars as his price to return Rappaport’s property.

In ordinary English Mr Carney has convicted himself of lying in these two documents; in legal language, as noted above, he has committed PERJURY.  In the context of the American legal system and the context of these depositions, Mr. Carney committed a CRIME.

The nature of this forcefully suggests that Mr. Carney’s cavalier attitude with “the facts” is normal in his life, and that little or nothing that comes out of his mouth can be trusted to be “true.”    In his lectures and his writings on his BU blog, Mr. Carney natters often and at length about honesty, integrity, and such things.    In his letter, while he loudly complains about the lax standards of contemporary journalists, he states, regarding myself, numerous utterly untrue things.  He claims I was married to Teresa Villaverde, the mother of my daughter, Clara Villaverde Cabral Jost.  We were not married.  Hence, also contrary to his claims, we were not divorced.  Clara was kidnapped by Villaverde, from her home in Italy, in violation of Italian law (which legal authorities demanded her return under the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, which law Teresa Villaverde had also violated).  Mr. Carney seems to think that speaking in public of these things, and attempting to secure my daughter’s safety, and Portugal’s compliance with the law, is something amiss.  Mr. Carney’s version of my view on 9/11 is similarly askew:  I at no time have said or written that there were no “terrorists” involved in 9/11; what I did write is that there is rather convincing evidence that figures in the Bush administration knew the attack was coming and allowed it, to use for their own purposes.  See the PNAC document, along with much other evidence regarding this event.  I am far from alone in having profound doubts about the official story of 9/11.  Disingenuously, Mr. Carney, who used me to post his diatribe on BU, and in process wrote me admiring emails, citing my willingness to speak out in public as a virtue, now inverts this and resorts to ad hominem attacks sourced in his own very false “information.”

Mr. Carney, in his behavior towards Mark Rappaport, and in his false statements, above, and in his ever-so-lengthy posting, has done little but discredit himself, and destroy whatever reputation he once had.  In my view he has utterly disqualified himself as a person who should be teaching in a supposedly first rank university, much less a lowly community college: he is a hypocrite of the first order, and offers no example for impressionable young students.   Were he a person of the least character he would resign his teaching post; and were he a person of inward intelligence, he would seek medical help for the psychological monsters which control him.

On a more pleasant note, I’d like to pass along word that Mark Rappaport’s book, The Movie Goer Who Knew Too Much is available from Amazon. Here’s what Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote about it:

“On the flyleaf of my copy, Mark wrote, “Maybe next year en anglais.” Five years later, that dream is fulfilled, and those who’ve been able to sample this wonderful book in magazines like Film Quarterly and online locations such as Rouge can now have access to all of it.”— Jonathan Rosenbaum

And a few other views:

” And Art is proof of Bishop Berkeley’s dictum, that to be is to be perceived. The vast crews responsible for the creation of a film, from director to assistant’s assistant, need, in order for their creation of shadows to exist, the eye of the beholder. Mark Rappaport’s extraordinary gift is not only that he is able to see creatively, to bring critically into being what he sees, but to be able to put this vision into words, so that we too, on the other side of the page, can perceive what he, on this side of the screen, has so keenly perceived. The ancients knew that we require guides when venturing into the realm of shadows. Mark Rappaport is one of these rare enlightened and enlightening spirits.”
—Alberto Manguel
“Mark Rappaport has created a new and very personal form of film criticism in which fiction is a driving force. The world of cinema becomes a place of constant permutations and improbable encounters: Marcel Proust’s path crosses Alain Resnais’ in Marienbad; the actor in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and the star of von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress, Marlene Dietrich, become lovers during the filming of Ivan at the studio. Cinema itself undergoes a metamorphosis and is re-born in these imaginative essays. These essays, some originally published in the film journal, Trafic, are not merely a collection but are actually a book.”
—Raymond Bellour

Avant Ho!

By happenstance I am in Ann Arbor now, and last night attended the opening night party and screening of the Ann Arbor Film Festival.  It is their 51st anniversary since George Manupelli began it way back then.  One year older than my film-making.   For some decades it reigned supreme as a festival championing the avant-garde and experimental work, both in the US and the world.  Back in 1989 I won “Best of the Festival” award with Plain Talk and Common Sense (uncommon senses).    If memory serves me correctly (sometimes it doesn’t) at some point in the late 90′s, as digital video was beginning to take hold (I started with it immediately as it came out, in 1996) I think I had an exchange with the festival – as I also did with the Berlin Forum – about their unwillingness to accept digital video on an equal footing with celluloid.  I pointed out to both Ann Arbor and the Forum that, like it or not, digital was the wave of the future, and that especially for those in the experimental/avant-garde/political realms they tended to champion, if only for economic reasons, people would use it in lieu of film.  I did so, but I also did so for aesthetic reasons.    Since that time neither festival has seen fit to accept one of my films, though I did send them, and the Forum people now can’t even bother to reply to a letter.  Even though the kind of work I do, is, well, right up their allies.   Seems there are thin-skins running these things.

Michigan Theater, home to the Ann Arbor Film Festival

I do admit to having said, in cold public print, on the basis of a few visits both to Ann Arbor, as a spectator, and also the EX-is festival in Seoul, where I was on a jury some years ago, as well as other festivals that show such work, like Rotterdam, that for the most part the “avant garde” has degenerated into the “derriere garde.”  And as well it has been academicized, which almost always results in prompt rigor mortis.  You can’t teach “avant garde” but that is what many film and art schools do, and the result is young people churning out re-makes of what was once avant garde, and is now old and when done, pure cliché.  Witness the computer made scratches, frame flares, and celluloid dirt software which these nostalgists sometimes use.   Similarly the basic aesthetic of most such films is firmly rooted in an avant-garde running from the 20′s to the early 70′s and is seldom anything more than an endless regurgitation of these.  Just like the visual arts world.  [Last night at the party a woman who I'd met some years ago here, came up an commented on my acidic comment on the Austrian A-G filmmaker whose name I forget, who makes 35mm government-funded so-called avant-garde films in a sort of Hollywood gloss big money manner; and apparently I'd commented on her own animated film which had shown and I'd said, in a public forum, "what's it doing here." Me and my un-PC mouth.]

So last night, after the party subsided – a party which I joked to my friend Markus Nornes seemed to indicate they should change the festival’s name to “The Geriatric Festival,” given all the white-hair, paunches and grey-beards which seemed to be the majority in attendance – we went to the movies.  On filing into the wonderful Michigan Theater, itself a perfect example of once-upon-a-time nostalgia, the audience on a quick scan appeared to have a median age of perhaps 50.  Not too many young people (though some) and a preponderance of pretty damn old people – like myself.  So after the formal festival opening comments, the films rolled.  Of a program made up of eleven films, each running from 2 to 30 minutes, I have to say there wasn’t one which I would call “experimental” or “avant garde” in any meaningful sense.  Each was either an exhausted re-run of films I have seen 100 times (pixillated this, smashed and mashed filmic detritus as “style,” or run-of-the-mill animation, usually a bit on the messy side.)  As well there were a few nicely made documentaries, one of them being I thought the best film of the evening, never mind being neither experimental or avant in any way.  It was titled, after the robotic surgery tool which it expertly, in a documentary sense, showed being worked, da Vinci.   A formalist documentary in a similar manner to Geyrhalter’s excellent Our Daily Bread.

Da Vinci, by Yuri Ancarani

And, since I am here in an academic setting, perhaps I should do a dry little dissection of our dear old “avant garde” and why, perhaps, it is due for an autopsy.  In the last decades, whether in the arts, or in politics, or economics (as if they could be separated from one another !), there has been a profound shift to the “right,” towards conservatism:  money calls the tune, be it in the corporate sponsors of the Ann Arbor Festival (or others), or the hallowed halls of academia, or the glossy glamor laden galleries which deal with so-called “art.”  Within the academic world where theories are spun to explain everything, however incorrectly, and where the rapid flow of fashion would embarrass a cat-walk in Paris, the 60-70′s tilt to the left morphed into deconstructionism and settled nicely in post-modernism.  It signaled a kind of exhaustion, a tossing up of the priests’ hands as it was exclaimed, “well dang, it’s all relative.”  A kind of perverse inversion in the ivy halls of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values, wherein there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, and political correctness renders all such inclinations, well, “wrong.”  The PC police charge in at the least hint of a real opinion or suggestion that, well, the emperor is wearing no clothes.   In quick turn culture and art become a pastiche of the past, a mix-down of what was, and this is fobbed off as “the new.”   The near-shopping malls which greet one on exiting a major or even minor museum make the point: we consume, therefore we are.  Post-modernist “thinking” feeds the maw of this machine perfectly, while within it, it is imagined it is a critique.  Thus, the festival here will in the same breath present one of the grand old men of the American avant garde, Pat O’Neill, while at the same time feating Ken Burns.  Go figger.  It fits exactly with an item I read a week or so ago, in which the San Jose Cinequest Festival, which on its first outing in the early 90′s anointed none other than myself as their first “maverick” this year feated Harrison Ford as their newest “maverick” and in their listing of other such named souls, now a roster of mostly Hollywood names (J.J. Abrams, Kevin Spacey, William H. Macy, Gus Van Sant, Spike Lee, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jackie Chan, Sir Ian McKellen, Edward James Olmos, Robert Wise, Alec Baldwin, and Sir Ben Kingsley),  they seem pointedly to have deleted mine.  I seem well on my way to becoming a good old USSR-style “non-person.”  Silicon Valley pays their bills and it appears their concept of a “maverick” has been similarly plasticized.

So, to calm my soul after these observations, in a few hours I will go see, again, Nathaniel Dorsky’s recent film, August and after, which is decidedly not an experimental or avant garde work, as Nathaniel, after a life-time of work and development, knows exactly what he is doing and how to do it, and why he is doing it.  He makes very very high grade “art.”

Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and after

And then, along little cinema notices, I’ll add that I accepted invitation from Jeonju festival not only for The Narcissus Flowers of Katsura-shima, but now also for Coming to Terms.   More on this later.

[After seeing Nathaniel's film, which makes 18 minutes seem like more than 30, not because it is boring, but because it makes "seeing" so intense, and expands time in doing so.  Then saw what seemed to be a film-essay by Luke Fowler, Brit, The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott, which was about academic historian EP Thompson, of fame large enough I knew of him.  For a while the modest, conservative, quirkiness held me, but then the flare-outs, once signifiers of an admission/consciousness of the material of the medium one was using, and other A-G clichés began to tire and their meaning as a pathetic nostalgia took over, and the Anglo-voiced academic discourse began to whither into the actual retro-grade exercise in some kind of not-very-interesting peculiarly English masturbation.  On reading the catalog notes now I see that my friend Peter Hutton did some of the camera work.  Also cited in the catalog notes is mention of Raymond Williams, a fellow left-leaning academic along with Thompson.  My friends of the now-defunct Cinema Action - Ann and Eduardo Guedes (the latter deceased some years ago), and Schlacke Lamche - made a much more effective and interesting film on Williams, So That You Can Live, back in 1982.  It's aesthetics, while hardly "avant garde" were more radical and meaningful that Fowler's exercise in faux avant-gardism.]