Tag: documentary

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Finding Vivian Maier

Few took notice in 2009 when 83-year-old Vivian Maier died in Chicago. She was known in her neighborhood as a batty lady who sat on a park bench and watched the world go by. But she would have been shocked, or least darkly amused, to know that events were already in motion that would make her the posthumous toast of the art world.

A year earlier, photography collector and local historian John Maloof, who was looking for images of Chicago landmarks, had bought some boxes of undeveloped film and negatives at a storage-space auction. When he printed a few samples from the film, he was astounded at what he saw: incredible images of ordinary people on the street. But when he searched the internet for the name of the woman he found on some envelopes with the hoard of photos, he found nothing. It was only after he found her death notice a year later that he had his first lead as to the identity of this mysterious artist.

The documentary Finding Vivian Maier expertly traces Maloof’s investigation into the photographer whose work is being compared to the father of photojournalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson. And like Van Gogh’s missing ear, her backstory, or rather, lack of backstory, adds to the experience of her art. Van Gogh made wildly expressive paintings, so the fact that his passion (or mental illness) led him to cut off his own ear adds to the works’ mystique. Anonymity made Maier, a street photographer who teased beauty from random people who mostly didn’t know they were being photographed, a disembodied mind, absorbing and reporting from reality. But the similarities don’t stop there. Van Gogh sold one painting during his life and only became world famous after his demise. Maier left behind more than 100,000 photographs but never showed them to anyone. The very act of taking the photographs, “the decisive moment, ” in Cartier-Bresson’s words, was enough for her.

Self-portrait of the artist: Vivian Maier

Maloof uncovers many details about Maier’s life. She worked as a nanny and housekeeper for well-to-do families on the East Coast and Chicago for decades. She briefly worked for talk show host Phil Donahue in the 1970s, and he remembers her in the film as smart and “not crazy.” But as the investigation deepens and the stories pile up, it becomes clear that she was more than just eccentric. Despite her nomadic lifestyle, she was a compulsive hoarder, which is why her work still existed to be discovered. Even though she was a loner, she sought out company from people in the slums of mid-century Chicago to the cottages of the Hamptons. Those who knew her agreed that she had a dark side, hinting that she could be incredibly mean and borderline abusive to the kids in her care.

But the detective story in Finding Vivian Maier wouldn’t be compelling without the hundreds of incredible images that flash across the screen. Maier’s work is at once compassionate and cynical, bringing out the good in the people whom the world ignored and subtly pointing out the injustices and excesses of America at the height of its golden age. In a way, Maier was ahead of her time. She was a devotee of the selfie. Had she been born 50 years later, she would have expertly wielded her iPhone and amassed a huge following on Flickr and Instagram. The trolls of the web would have only confirmed her worst suspicions about humanity. But because of the accident of birth and a chance discovery, she is instead a legend. It is an irony she might have appreciated.

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Film Features Film/TV

Very Extremely Dangerous

CREDIT: Rogues Gallery

When Robert Gordon was writing his seminal 1995 book It Came From Memphis, a name kept popping up amid the wide cast of musicians and freaks who populated the city’s music scene. “I knew around here he was a legend,” Gordon says. “A great talent who kind of got on the wrong side of the law, liked it, and stayed there.”

Jerry McGill had done one rocking single on Sun Records in 1959, and had reportedly been a crony of Elvis, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings before disappearing in the 1970s. Years later, when Gordon was working on Stranded In Canton, a documentary he edited together out of the raw, chaotic video footage of the Memphis underground shot by William Eggleston around 1973, he found some scenes with someone who was said to be McGill brandishing a gun and playing Russian roulette with art provocateur Randall Lyons.

Rogues Gallery

Jerry McGill (right) with a rouges gallery of Memphis musicians in the 1970s.

Gordon had filed the story of the missing rockabilly outlaw with the rest of his extensive collection of Memphis music history, never really expecting to find out what happened to him. “Then Jerry popped up on the internet,” says Gordon.

Jerry McGill

It was 2010, and McGill, now 70 years old, had just gotten out of prison, and Irish director Paul Duane wanted to meet him. “Paul is a guy who is drawn to characters, like I am,” Gordon says.

Duane got a grant from the Irish Film Board and flew to America to shoot a documentary about the outlaw that would become Very Extremely Dangerous. “They trust him to turn a really out-there idea into a good film. I’m not sure they expected as out-there a film as this one,” Gordon says.

Three days before the cameras rolled, McGill was diagnosed with lung cancer. “He bared his soul. He was staring into the face of death,” Gordon says. “He said, ‘Ask me anything’. So we got these great true crime stories.”

Word spread McGill was back in town, and a recording session sprang up at Sam Phillips Studio with Roland Janes and a host of Memphis all stars, and a gig was scheduled for the Hi-Tone. But Duane and Gordon, tagging along with the cameras, soon discovered they had gotten more than they bargained for. What they thought was going to be a story of redemption turned out to be a film vérité ride-along through the Memphis netherworld with a genuine hard drinking, hard drugging man who always seemed one shot of rotgut away from epic violence. “What none of us could know when we started this project was that we were catching a 70-year-old outlaw on what he thought was going to be his last great tear,” Gordon says. “There were times when we thought Jerry had a death wish, and we were being careful to not go with him when he finally took himself out.”

With Duane flying back and forth from Dublin to Memphis and Gordon acting as producer and often camera man, Gordon says they captured a once-in-a-lifetime story. “It was a really interesting combination of me, the local, and Paul, the outsider. It took his distance to see this. In the beginning, Jerry was charismatic, but there are lots of charismatic people. It took Paul’s vision from afar to see that there was more going on here, and we needed to persevere. This movie is made out of our perseverance. That’s what happens in a documentary. All of the sudden, the movie is not about what you thought it would be about. So you have to enter the editing room and find out what it’s about.”

One day, when the duo picked up McGill to take him for a doctor’s visit, McGill demonstrated for the filmmakers how to prepare and inject prescription opiates while the camera, and the car, rolled. “When he shot up in the back of the car, I couldn’t believe it,” Gordon says. “Every time I would go out with him, it would be a new surprise, until I kind of thought I had seen it all. That just goes to show you how naive I was.”

Very Extremely Dangerous screened at Indie Memphis in 2012 and will soon be released on DVD by Fat Possum Records along with the film’s soundtrack, a retrospective of McGill’s work with some Memphis legends, including Jim Dickinson and Mud Boy & the Neutrons. “Jerry’s album is really great,” Gordon says. “To me, it’s got some of the best Mud Boy and & the Neutrons performances ever. When I heard them, I was shocked that something this good had never made it out of the box. If the only thing that this movie accomplishes is to bring attention to the album, it was all worth it.”

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Film Features Film/TV

Stop Making Sense

What makes a great concert film? Is it a big event with dozens of stars, like Woodstock or Wattstax? Is it chancing into horror, like Gimme Shelter? Is it a gathering for a noble cause like The Concert For Bangladesh? Or is it a heartstring tugger like The Last Waltz?

Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense makes the argument that the key to greatness is catching a group at just the right time. In December 1983, Talking Heads were riding a wave of creativity that had started at CBGB’s in 1977. Rhode Island School Of Design dropouts David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Frantz, along with former Modern Lover Jerry Harrison, were the art rock center of the punk movement. Their tour in support of Speaking In Tongues incorporated all of the band’s advances into a loose narrative stage show inspired equally by Japanese Noh theater and Twyla Tharp modern dance. Demme shot three shows over one weekend in Los Angles with eight 35mm cameras and edited together the mountain of footage into something that is not quite narrative, not quite documentary, and not quite rock show. Byrne is scarily committed to his onstage persona, the wide-eyed, borderline autistic geek, an alien reporting on the human race through twisted, polyrhythmic songs that stretched the definition of punk and Western pop music. Demme treats him like a leading man in a musical, making brave choices like holding on a single shot of Byrne for four minutes of “Once In A Lifetime” and not showing the audience until the very end of the film.

In Byrne’s book How Music Works, he downplays the myth of musical genius in favor of the genius of scenes — groups of artists who push each other to greater heights. Stop Making Sense is the perfect meeting of musicians at the peak of their power and a director finding his voice. Catch it on the IMAX screen Thursday, October 23rd at 7pm to see what it looks like when all of the pieces come together perfectly for an artist.

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Senna

Do you have one of those movies that has been sitting in your Netflix queue forever? You don’t remember how it got there, or why you wanted to watch it in the first place, but either you never bothered to delete it or you checked the info periodically and said, “Oh yeah. That’s got so-and-so in it.” Or “Uncle Jack thought we would like that,” or something similar. Well, I have several dozen of those movies on my Netflix queue. Maybe it’s a form of digital hoarding, but I wouldn’t know, since none of my long-term queue sitters is a psychologically manipulative reality show like Hoarders.

For me, one such hoarded movie was the 2010 documentary Senna. I don’t know how I heard of it or how it got into my queue, but I do know it had been there for a long time. Way before that time I got obsessed with Universal and Hammer horror movies and littered my list with The Mummy Returns, Black Sabbath, and The Invisible Ray, Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna had been staring at me with his steely eyes as I flipped by him on my way to my complete rewatch of all seven seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. (It still holds up, by the way). Maybe it was supposed to be part of my research into the Antenna documentary, but once that was over, I never wanted to watch another documentary in my life. But recently, once my filmmaker’s PTSD had abated a little bit, I finally decided to watch Senna. I wish I hadn’t waited so long, because it is brilliant.

Director Asif Kapadia chose to make the film without any talking head interviews, narration, or recreations. Instead, the story is told through vintage footage of Senna’s races and contemporary interviews with the driver, his family, and his rivals. There are a few interviews that were obviously done for the film, but they are only voice overs. Everything on the screen dates from either Senna’s childhood or his time on the track from 1984 until his death behind the wheel a decade later. Kapadia is able to do this because Senna, while not well-known in the NASCAR-obsessed United States, was, at his peak, one of Formula 1’s biggest stars. He was a national hero in his native Brazil, and almost everything he did, both on and off the track, was filmed. The amount of footage Kapadia and his 13-member editing crew, led by Chris King and Gregers Sall, had to work from is mind boggling, but they succeeded in organizing it all into a comprehensible and propulsive 106 minutes.

Senna’s interest in racing began in go-karts before graduating to the big show at age 24. He was personable, good looking, and immensely talented, which made him an instant media darling. He was also completely obsessed with racing and focused his entire life around winning the Formula 1 World Championships. This made for thrilling narratives for the fans but left his personal life seeming hollow. In 1988, he was asked to join the prestigious McLaren team, where he and his teammate Alain Prost dominated the sport, and he won his first championship. But in his second season with McLaren, jealousies flared, and he and Prost slid from friendship into bitter rivalry. In the final race of the season, Prost, who was slightly ahead in Formula 1’s confusing points system, deliberately rammed his car into Senna’s, taking them both out of the race and claiming the championship for himself. The next year, Senna thirsted for revenge, and he got it at great personal cost.

Kapadia’s remarkably clear direction traces Senna’s personal development from fresh-faced idealist fighting the Formula 1 bosses, to successful superstar to cynical competitor. At 33, he was an elder statesman of his sport; at 34, a martyr to its dark gods. Kapadia’s race sequences, culled from hundreds of cameras, are both coherent and thrilling. Senna’s career spanned a time of major leaps in video technology, so the steadily improving images trace the passage of time. Since miniaturized in-car cameras were developed in the late 1980s, Kapadia lets the damaged tape of Senna’s final lap play out in full, its encroaching video noise becomes symbolic of the dissolution of a life played out on camera.

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Charles Lloyd: Arrows Into Infinity

In one of the first scenes of the 2012 documentary Charles Lloyd: Arrows Into Infinity, recently released on DVD and Blu-ray, the saxophonist tells a radio interviewer, “I’m a Pisces, the water sign . . . When I was born, when my mother was pregnant, there was a big flood in Memphis. This thing was set up for me to come.” The quote is followed by a few bars of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” It may seem an odd way to begin a film about a jazz saxophonist, but Lloyd is nothing if not enigmatic. With him, a change was always sure to come.

Born in Memphis in 1938, Lloyd attended Manassas High School and earned his chops playing with the likes of Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King. His parents would put up Duke Ellington and Billy Eckstine when those stars passed through town. Lewie Steinberg, the original bassist for the MGs (that’s him you hear on the 1962 recording of “Green Onions”) says, “The first dollar I ever made was with Charles Lloyd, bless him.”

Charles Lloyd

Lloyd eventually moved to New York where, during the 1960s, he managed crossover success that few have experienced in any genre. Having first migrated from blues to jazz, he then ventured into the pop and rock worlds. San Francisco bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were eager to play on bills with him. “He captivated all of us,” says John Densmore, drummer for the Doors.

Pianist Herbie Hancock calls Lloyd a “jazz rockstar.” Lloyd played both jazz and pop festivals and was the first jazz artist to play live at the iconic Fillmore Auditorium. His 1966 album Forest Flower, recorded live (without his knowledge, he intimates on camera) at the Monterey Jazz Festival, is still considered one of the great jazz LPs of all time.

By the ’70s, Lloyd, a deeply spiritual man, had had enough of the music business and the demands it placed on him. He simply walked away and, like Greta Garbo and J.D. Salinger, became famously reclusive on a plot of land in Big Sur, California. “You can’t shoot an arrow into infinity if you’re always in motion,” he says in the opening scene. “You have to pull the bow back, then the arrow can fly.”

Directors Jeffery Morse and Dorothy Darr, who is Lloyd’s wife, do a masterful job of capturing the artist’s life in motion. There are beautiful shots of him walking along forested roads and surf-beaten beaches as well as in recording studios and onstage — all environments where Lloyd flourishes.

Through Darr’s personal connection, it’s obvious she knew the questions to ask and of whom to ask them. Interviews with the likes of Hancock, the Band’s Robbie Robertson, producer Don Was, and Darr herself give us an intimate look at a man who flew through the air like an arrow before going away to recharge.

He came back to the world in the late ’80s after a near-death experience that is mentioned, though not expanded upon. “I came out of that, and I rededicated myself to this beautiful tradition,” he says.

With the help of longtime friend, jazz drummer Billy Higgins, he began recording and touring again. In one of the film’s most touching scenes, Lloyd wraps a blanket around his old friend’s shoulders as Higgins, suffering from liver failure, nears the end of his life.

This is an important film as Lloyd is a bridge between the music’s architects – Ellington, Basie, Coltrane, Bird – and today. “It’s the wisdom of the ancients with modernity,” Lloyd says of today’s jazz. “It’s arrows into infinity.”

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Film: Take Me To The River

It is said that all art aspires toward musicality, and no form comes closer than film. The linear flow of moving images naturally mirrors the aural motion of music. When the sound era dawned, the very first thing filmmakers did was turn their cameras on Al Jolsen and let the music do the talking.

Perhaps because of the two media’s similarities, many directors are also musicians. Such is the case with Martin Shore, a drummer from San Diego who toured with Cody Dickinson’s Hill Country Revue. Shore’s day job is as a film producer, and Take Me To The River, his directorial debut, is the latest music documentary to take on the question, “What makes Memphis music so special?” Guided by North Mississippi Allstars’ guitarist and son of legendary Memphis music producer Jim Dickinson, Shore gathers a who’s who of Memphis music legends together to make a record while the cameras roll.

The problem facing the directors of all music documentaries is how to balance the story and the music. It’s a simple problem of arithmetic: Unless you’re Martin Scorsese and HBO gives you three hours to tell George Harrison’s story, you have a limited amount of time to work with. Without the music, it’s hard to care about the story; but give the story short shrift and you lose the reason the audience is there in the first place. In Take Me To The River, Shore errs on the side of the music, and this is probably wise. The epic sweep of the Stax story has already been told in Robert Gordon’s Respect Yourself, so Shore constructs a series of vignettes from footage of the recording sessions interspersed with interviews with the musicians.

This approach makes for some magical moments. Al Kapone chats with Booker T. Jones as the legendary keyboardist drives his van around town. The Hi Records backup singers the Rhodes Sisters recall how Willie Mitchell used to exclaim “God the glory!” when they hit a note he liked. Frayser Boy, who wrote the Academy Award-winning flow for “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp” admits to Skip Pitts, who played guitar on Isaac Hayes Academy Award-winning “Theme From Shaft,” that he has never recorded with a live band before. Pitts refuses to even look at a chart before launching into the Rufus Thomas song “Push And Pull.” The magnetic and eternally young Mavis Staples changes the song at the last minute, and then soothes her collaborators’ nerves with a few well-placed smiles and a stunning vocal performance. William Bell tells the story of David Porter writing “Hold On I’m Comin” while an amused Porter looks on. Narrator and Hustle and Flow star Terrence Howard becomes completely overwhelmed by emotion after recording with the Hodges brothers, including a frail looking Teenie. Bobby Blue Bland teaches Lil P-Nut to sing “I Got A Woman.” And finally, Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads produces a session with Snoop Dogg and the Stax Academy Band pulling together more than a dozen musicians to cut “I Forgot To Be Your Lover” in less than 30 minutes.

It’s fun to be a fly on the wall in these recording sessions held in historic spaces, and the camaraderie and respect between the players is evident. The talent, discipline, and instincts on display are amazing, because, as the indomitable Deanne Parker says, these musicians came of age in a time when “we didn’t have any technology to make you sound better.”

Take Me To The River never answers the question of why this city produces so much great music. But then again, no one else has ever been able to put a finger on what Charlie Musselwhite calls “that secret Memphis ingredient you can’t write in a book.”

Take Me To The River
Playing Friday, September 12th
The Paradiso

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Kidnapped for Christ

When director Kate Logan was a film school freshman, she set out to make a documentary about the Christian youth camp Escuela Caribe. The young Evangelical thought she was making a feel-good movie about the camp, which brought troubled teens to the mountains of the Dominican Republic. But what the 20-year-old film student found during her seven weeks at the camp would shock her to her core and begin a seven-year saga that would culminate with Kidnapped For Christ, the 2014 Outflix Film Festival’s opening film.

Escuela Caribe is part of a chain of similar camps that promise parents that they can change their teenagers’ behavior for the better — for a hefty fee. But the reality is much uglier than advertised. The film opens with kids’ stories of being kidnapped from their beds in the middle of the night by unknown thugs and taken, sometimes in chains, to the airport against their will, often while their parents looked on. Once out of the country, they are subjected to a program of brainwashing that will be familiar to anyone who has ever read about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Escuela Caribe had been in existence for 35 years by the time Logan spent her fateful six weeks there, and at some point in the past, the place had gone from Bible study camp to Stanford Prison Experiment. Committing your child to a work camp is a pretty extreme measure for a parent to take, but none of the kids Logan interviews seem messed up enough to warrant it. There’s Beth, who claims she is there to cure panic attacks; Tai, whose offenses seem like nothing more than run-of-the-mill teenage hellraising; and David, a 17-year-old honor student who was shipped off after coming out to his parents as gay.

Kidnapped for Christ

Kidnapped for Christ is like a more paranoid version of Morgan Jon Fox’s landmark documentary This Is What Love In Action Looks Like. As stories of brutal abuse at the camp proliferated, Logan’s vision of her project changes until she makes a fateful decision to become involved in the story by attempting to rescue David from the camp. The story’s unexpected twists and turns make it one of the more satisfying, and harrowing, documentaries of the year.

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News

Previewing the Withers Documentary

More than 100 people came to the National Civil Rights Museum Thursday night to see a preview of the Ernest Withers documentary that will air on CNN on Sunday, February 20th.

John Branston says the film, from what he saw, pulls no punches. Read more at his City Beat blog.

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A decent doc on a subject that deserves better.

More than 50 years since rock-and-roll first started to break down social barriers, that ostensibly revolutionary form still has considerable boundaries for more than half the population. Don’t think rock-and-roll is too much a boys’ game? Spend some time listening to rock radio and think about how many female voices you hear.

There was a time, a decade or so ago, when those obstacles seemed to be falling fast, when the rise of alternative rock brought with it a progressive impulse that helped launch impolite female rockers from Bikini Kill to Hole.

The Portland, Oregon-based Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, the subject of the documentary Girls Rock!, looks back fondly on that time. In fact, most of the camp counselors are riot-grrl-influenced musicians (most notably Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein and Gossip vocalist Beth Ditto) whose careers leapt from the shoulders of alt-rock goddesses such as Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, and the Breeders’ Kim Deal.

A straightforward examination of one weeklong camp session, Girls Rock! plops viewers down amid a gaggle of girls, ages 8 to 18, who come together for a week to form bands, write songs, and then perform them at a camp-closing concert. The film follows the exploits of campers such as Laura, a 15-year-old Korean death-metal fan from Oklahoma City; Amaka Amelia, an 8-year-old guitar-wielding tyke tyrant; Misty, a 17-year-old bass player overcoming self-esteem problems; and Palace, a precocious, shrieking, 8-year-old vocalist.

Laura laments her female friends back home, who brag about all the male friends they have in bands. “Why don’t you start your own band, super genius?” Laura asks, derisively. “That’s better than having a boyfriend in a band.”

Ultimately, the camp is less about music than about fostering a healthy process for friendship and creativity. It functions the way healthy subcultures do: as a safe haven for exploration; as an incubator for ideas.

Unfortunately, Girls Rock! isn’t quite as interesting as its subject. Like so many documentaries, it thrives on what it’s about more than how it’s about it. As we meet these girls and learn a bit about their lives outside camp and then follow them through the process, the movie evokes Spellbound, the recent spelling-bee doc that was similarly conceived but far better organized.

The Southern Girls Rock & Roll Camp will be throwing a post-screening party Friday, April 18th, at 10 p.m. at Murphy’s. The Red Mollies, Those Darlins, Audra Brown, and Girls of the Gravitron will perform. Tickets are $7 or $5 with a ticket stub from that night’s 7 p.m. Girls Rock! screening. For more info on the Southern Girls Rock & Roll Camp, which is offering summer sessions in both Murfreesboro and Memphis, see sgrrc.org.

Girls Rock!

Opens Friday, April 18th

Ridgeway Four

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News

Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines Issues Call to Protest Convictions of West Memphis Three

Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks is the latest celeb to take up the cause of the West Memphis Three — Damien Echols, Jesse Miskelley, and Jason Baldwin — who were convicted for allegedly murdering three eight-year-old boys in 1993.

Maines writes on the Dixie Chicks website: I’m writing this letter today because I believe that three men have spent the past 13 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

On May 5th, 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas three 8 eight-year-old boys, Steve Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore were murdered.

Three teenage boys, Damien Echols, Jesse Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin were convicted of the murders in 1994. Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley received life sentences without parole, and Damien Echols sits on death row.

I encourage everyone to see the HBO documentaries, Paradise Lost and Paradise Lost 2 for the whole history of the case.

I only discovered the films about 6 months ago, and … I immediately got online to make sure that these three wrongly convicted boys had been set free since the films were released. My heart sank when I learned that the boys were now men and were still in prison. I couldn’t believe it.

I searched for answers as to what had been done and what was being done to correct this injustice. I donated to the defense fund and received a letter from Damien Echols wife, Lorri. She is a lovely woman who has dedicated her time and heart to her husband. I was glad to hear that after so many years of fighting for justice it looked like things were finally happening. Below, I have written what the DNA and forensics evidence shows. I hope after reading it and looking at the WM3.org website, you will know that the wrong guys are sitting in jail right now, and feel compelled to help.

Go the Dixie Chicks website to read the rest. And to read a Flyer story on the WM3, go here.