For a "State of Cinema" address delivered to a well-heeled crowd at the San Francisco International Film Festival, you might expect to hear about overall trends and innovations, where to look for the next hot national cinema, industry developments or new talent. Instead, B. Ruby Rich, who spoke before a screening of Suite Habana, came prepared to talk about film festivals as microcosms of true democracy.
In her words: "I have begun to think of film festivals as the last refuge of democracy in this increasingly controlled and manacled world of ours, the last place where a true participatory discourse can prevail and where persons of deep-seated convictions and open minds can come to exchange views, surrender control, and be changed forever by what goes by on screen."
Conspicuously absent from the screening of Suite Habana, a new Cuban documentary, was its director, Fernando Perez (Life Is To Whistle). Thanks to Homeland Security policy, Perez was not allowed to enter the country to attend the US premiere of his own film. In this light, not to draw attention to the tatters of American democracy would be a whitewash.
B. Ruby Rich met with GreenCine afterwards to talk about queer cinema (it's over), Three Kings (re-release it!), the larger purpose of film festivals (to confront the other), and the American movie business (capitalism on steroids).
You say a slew of Hollywood movies released this fall have been about revenge, specifically, 21 Grams, Mystic River and Kill Bill. This troubled you; you said that they represented a kind of cinematic fundamentalism. Can you explain?
I was riffing off a piece I had written for the London paper The Guardian on films of revenge. At that time, I had put Kill Bill into that [category] and it really troubled me that all three of these films were setting people up for vigilante justice, or actually, vigilante injustice in which innocent people are going to die or the wrong person is going to get killed. It's not necessarily that all these films had this in mind, but I think that the success of the films has to do with the mood in this country at the moment. The reason they resonated with people was for that reason.
[This goes] all the way back to the time right after 9/11, when the US made such a fatal wrong turn from having the world's sympathy to earning the world's enmity with Afghanistan. In that fall and winter, when that was happening and we were going so the wrong way, In the Bedroom came out. That was an indie film seemingly about something different, but it was also about vigilante justice. In this case you could say that grief was short-circuited by anger and the desire for revenge. The way it broke out of the usual tiny market position and broke into such wide release had everything to do with the way this country is directed down this road of revenge against its better interests. And literally, like the film, is selling out its soul.
Now I think something even worse is happening with this season's releases. Not just this winter, but the recent success of Lord of the Rings, Master and Commander, Seabiscuit. [Note: Rich identifies these films as part of a whole new generation of lad movies: "You don't see women in any of these except to keep the home fires burning."] I don't think it's just nostalgia because we don't necessarily remember those events. But it's going back to the past and into mythology and fantasy in order to feed this idea of triumphalism that is not playing out that way in our real lives. It's terribly dangerous and it makes me almost feel almost physically ill to think about these films.
You say that every town should have a festival and that they should become as commonplace as the newspaper. What would that look like?
Film festivals are almost as numerous as newspapers, at least in the US. Still, I know that's a little bit fanciful to say. In fact, when you look at the demographics of a major film festival, who has the money to go, who feels welcome? But then there are all these film festivals about specific communities - Latino, Jewish, Asian American. And they are about constituting community. Even at this one [SFIFF], there might not be class diversity there, but there is an ethnic and racial diversity, because people are coming to see the films from their parts of the world and meeting each other, at least in the lobby. If more people met in the lobby, maybe life would be better.
What would the world look like? Well, back when the US was a functional democracy, there were town meetings. There were communities. There would be screenings and dialogue, and then there could be arguments in a public place like there were at my speech. I think that's great when there is open discussion.
Wait a minute. Democracy is not functionally dead on the floor. People still caucus. What about caucusing?
No, it's not completely dead. It's just in some intensive care unit somewhere and I don't trust the nurse. [laughs] I think it's a model. The main thing to me is, there has to be a way to move Americans past headline caricatures and mainstream media stereotypes. One of the few places where that happens is in films from other parts of the world. Films in other genres, films being made by people who aren't Americans themselves and can understand that the world is not some kind of reflecting mirror stashed on the United States' vanity table. That it's really, fundamentally different with different customs and that they are not crazy or evil.
I spent the 1980s as a bureaucrat. I ran the film and video program for the NYC Council of the Arts, giving out taxpayers' money for nonprofit events of all kinds. And funding things from Film Forum, to the NY Film Festival, to production. I funded She's Gotta Have It. I funded Elia Suleiman's first movie, which was a short.
And I used to fund this exhibition in upstate New York in a small-town public library. This woman who ran it had a little 16mm and a small auditorium. Early in life she had been in the Peace Corps and she'd never lived in such a small town. She said to me, "These people don't see the world in this small town. They don't travel. I have seen the world; they won't do that, and I have to bring it to them." And she showed international foreign films with subtitles and created an audience and gave people an idea about the world and about film.
It always stuck with me as an example of what people don't usually acknowledge, because it's considered a low-level way to think about film. People usually talk about genres and cinematic craft and trends. But there's a part of film that is really important for just opening up people's minds in the way that travel does. Especially if you consider those statistics we've been seeing of how few people have passports. [Fewer than 40 percent of Americans.]
I just wrote this essay for an anthology called Subtitles [edited by the filmmaker Atom Egoyan and the Canadian scholar Ian Balfour] on the subject of the foreignness of foreign films, and one of the things that struck me was this American resistance to subtitles. I interviewed all these distributors and asked them, "Don't you think it's about American xenophobia? And that's why we have this foreign policy, because Americans don't want to acknowledge other languages?"
"Oh no," they'd say. "People just want a good time. They want to relax when they go out to the movies. They don't want to work to read subtitles."
"So they prefer to see films that are dubbed?"
"Oh no, Americans hate dubbing. They will never accept that. They're smarter than that."
Ok, so they prefer to go see films in one of the many foreign languages they know? If only - we know this is a monolingual country. So what does this mean? They won't read subtitles. They won't speak or read foreign languages. They won't accept dubbing. They don't want any reminder that the universe everywhere in the world is not an English-speaking universe. They don't want to be faced with limitation of their selfhood. They don't want to ever encounter the other.
You mentioned that in this political climate, Three Kings should be re-released. Why?
Given that The Battle of Algiers could be re-released and that [Jonathan Demme's remake of] The Manchurian Candidate is now in progress - at this very moment being edited - why isn't anyone releasing Three Kings?
Tell us about the film class you're teaching.
I'm teaching Film Studies half-time at UC Berkeley. Every year I teach a survey class on the modern documentary from the invention of sync sound up to the present. It starts with Primary, the documentary about the Kennedy/Humphrey primary. I also start with Harvest of Shame, the clunky old Edward R. Murrow TV special. We talk all about why it was rejected, because it was so stagy and fake. They argue that it's retrogressive and diminishes the audience. In fact, what I argue is that when we gave up that, we gave up politics. That genre had very strong progressive politics. That documentary, Harvest of Shame, about migrant workers and how they are exploited, was supposed to be broadcast on network television on Thanksgiving Day, but they bumped it to the next day.
When you go to cinema verite, all of a sudden nobody has an opinion because the camera just does it. Wiseman, Pennebaker, the Maysles, all of them. It's very neutral. They're not there. Somehow the film makes itself and it's just the camera. So you get pure objectivity. Not true. But what's interesting is the same moment is still an era influenced by McCarthyism, where it's really dangerous to have political opinions. What people always leave out when talking about cinema verite are newsreel collectives and the super political films being made all over the country with an agenda. Newsreels were also documentary.
I also show my class Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer, made in Paris in 1960 to 1961. This was a sad year because Rouch died last month in a terrible accident while on his way to an event for a retrospective of his films. To me, he is the god of documentary. Rouch didn't believe in being a fly on the wall. The French believe in being a fly in the soup. They believe in film being catalytic. I play with a lot of that and a few different kinds of hybrid forms. I march the students through the decades.
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