In 1985, when Don DeLillo wrote his acclaimed novel White Noise, it was considered an absurdist comedy. When you’re watching Noah Baumbach’s 2022 film adaptation of White Noise, you will have moments of startling deja vu. What was considered over-the-top crazy in 1985 is now just stuff that happens in everyday life.
DeLillo’s “hero,” if you want to call him that, is Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a prominent professor of “Hitler Studies” at a Midwestern liberal arts college. Both he and his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) are on their fourth marriages, so their four children live in an extremely mixed family. Luckily, the kids seem to get along well, bonded by their shared love of televised disasters. Plane crashes, floods, fires — the deadlier the better, says this household of typical viewers.
But disasters are only fun to watch at a safe remove. When they’re actually happening to you, it’s a different story. A few miles from the Gladney residence, a drunken trucker accidentally rams his tanker into a train full of chemicals. At first, Jack doesn’t believe the “airborne toxic event” is going to be a problem. Desperate evacuations to grubby refugee camps is something that happens to people in Haiti, not affluent Midwesterners. Even the frantic call from a National Guard truck to “evacuate immediately!” is an annoyance because it comes in the middle of dinner.
Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle deliver performances that hit a little too close for comfort in this absurdist comedy.
For those of us who just lived through the pandemic, the Airborne Toxic Event feels like prophecy. The authorities can’t even agree on what to call it at first, and the name they settle on is comically ambiguous. The ever-changing signs of exposure to the toxic cloud include vague things like “unexplained deja vu” — when Steffie (May Nivola) experiences tingling in her extremities, Heinrich (Sam Nivola) accuses her of experiencing “outdated symptoms.” Even the anticlimactic end of the event seems familiar. One day, everyone is just allowed back to their homes, and not much else is said about the whole affair.
For his 11th film, Baumbach has taken on an extremely high degree of difficulty in adapting a beloved, but prickly, literary masterpiece. He leans heavily on Driver, who delivers with his usual intensity. You might not think “team teaching a college class on the parallels between Hitler and Elvis” sounds like good fodder for a cinematic experience, but Driver and Don Cheadle, who plays Jack’s frenemy professor Murray, make it riveting.
Gerwig and Baumbach are a couple, and judging from Lady Bird and Little Women, she is every bit his equal as a director. (Her $100 million Barbie movie drops next summer.) Babette gets pushed aside, in favor of Jack’s comically exaggerated narcissism. During her big scene, in which she confesses her drug addiction and affair, a stunned Jack can only repeat, “This is not Babette’s purpose.” DeLillo intended Jack to be an affectionate parody of the many “white guys who teach college” protagonists of literary novelists like Raymond Carver and John Irving. But after the Trump era, his unexamined selfishness seems uglier, and less funny.
Even though Jack and Babette’s lives continue to become more surreal and more complex, the film never really matches the energy of the A.T.E. I often quote the Hitchcock adage that mediocre books make the best movies. Works of literary genius that depend on wordsmithery usually get lost in translation. (Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is the exception that proves the rule.) Baumbach’s White Noise is dense and wordy. He creates some unlikely thrilling moments. I’m not sure what it all means, or if it holds together, but I do know that I’m still thinking about it, and I want to watch it again.
David Harbour as Violent Night’s Santa Claus punches first, gives gifts later.
Santa Claus, that personification of Christmas beloved of children everywhere, comes with his own group of accessories and symbols: the red cap and coat, white beard, round spectacles, flying sleigh pulled by magic reindeer, and Skullcrusher, his hammer.
Not familiar with Skullcrusher? That’s because you haven’t seen Violent Night yet. Skullcrusher isn’t likely to join the Santa pantheon alongside his bag of toys for good little girls and boys, but, in the right hands, it is capable of meting out more punishment for the naughty than a simple lump of coal.
Those hands belong to David Harbour, most recognizable as Stranger Things’ Sheriff Jim Hopper, the reluctant stepdad of human weapon Eleven. He also whipped his dad bod into shape to play the Red Guardian in Black Widow, so playing an ass-kicking Santa is in his wheelhouse. When we first see him as the Bearded One, he’s knocking back beers at an English pub, commiserating with the other Santa tribute artists about the kids these days. Santa’s over the greed that has taken over his season, but he’s kept going only out of duty to the kids on the nice list. When he leaves through the roof access, it dawns on the staff that he’s the real thing.
Meanwhile, little Trudy Lightstone (Leah Brady) is on her way to Christmas at grandma’s house. It’s the first time her estranged parents Jason (Alex Hassell) and Linda (Alexis Louder) have been together in a while. The situation is even more fraught because the wealthy Lightstone family is more toxic than Presidents Island. Grandma Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo) is a predatory capitalist with a foul mouth and no time for sentiment. Alva (Edi Patterson) can’t hold her liquor as well as her mother, and her boyfriend Morgan Steele (Cam Gigandet) is only there to try to convince Gertrude to fund his movie idea.
When Santa slips into this expensive snake pit, he is distracted from his gift delivery duties by expensive sherry and a massage chair. He is awakened by gunfire. A criminal mastermind who goes by the name of Scrooge (John Leguizamo) has arrived to steal all the well-stuffed stockings hung from the chimney with care, not knowing that crunk Santa was already there.
Director Tommy Wirkola has made action hay out of fairy tales in the past, with Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, and a two-fisted Santa Claus is not that far-fetched: The real St. Nicholas was a fourth-century Christian bishop famous for punching out the heretic Arius during the Council of Nicaea. In Harbour, Wirkola has found a twisted kind of muse. Together, they riff on that classic holiday film Die Hard, with Santa crawling through the air ducts instead of John McClane. As Harbour mugs his way through some half-assed, John Wick-style fight choreography, he imbues burnt-out Saint Nick with his signature gruff charm. It’s a real movie star performance, and without it, the whole film would collapse into nonsense.
Conan O’Brien said that the key to great comedy is mixing smart and stupid in just the right ratio. Violent Night’s gross-out slapstick juxtaposed against the trappings of Christmas (Scrooge’s henchmen are named Sugarplum and Gingerbread) achieves a kind of action comedy alchemy. It’s not a holiday classic like Die Hard, but it is a decent temporary remedy for the mandatory holiday cheer.
The Invaders gained prominence during the 1968 sanitation workers strike
In the summer of 2020, as protests against police violence spread in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, many Americans got a glimpse of what it was like during the height of the Civil Rights era. There was righteous anger, a sense of purpose, and a shared commitment to justice — but there were also bitter disagreements over which tactics were most effective, and a tug-of-war between those who believed state violence must be met with citizen violence, and those who believed nonviolent resistance was the only way. The newfound camaraderie of the street protests came with a frisson of suspicion — is one of us a Fed, reporting our plans and movements to the same law enforcement agencies whose methods and priorities we’re protesting?
All of this will sound familiar to anyone who saw The Invaders when it debuted at Indie Memphis in 2016. The film that director Prichard Smith and writer/producer JB Horrell made, tells the inside story of the Bluff City’s own homegrown Black Power group. Vietnam veteran John B. Smith founded The Invaders when he left the army after his tours of duty. The group aligned themselves with the militant rhetoric of groups like the Black Panthers. The Invaders first gained prominence during the sanitation workers strike of 1968, and then infamy when they were blamed for the riot which overtook Dr. Martin Luther King’s final march in Memphis. Later, the group’s claims that they had been the targets of a spying and smear campaign by the FBI’s COINTELPRO unit were confirmed.
Juanita Thornton
(In the spirit of full disclosure, this columnist worked briefly as a writing consultant on the film, but has no financial stake in the project’s success.)
“I don’t think there are enough stories looking at some of the inner pockets of the Civil Rights movement,” says Smith. “There are the main stories that you hear about the ministers and Dr. King and whatnot. But I would venture to guess that there are many, many more stories like The Invaders that should be told just to give a wider understanding of the whole situation. I think it will continue to be relevant. I think you could argue that if it came out in the middle of the George Floyd protests, that would have been the most relevant time it could have come out. But that’s not how it panned out.”
During the film’s 2016 festival run, which featured a stop at Doc NYC, The Invaders producers, including Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer, made a deal with a distribution company to help get the film out. But later, Smith says, they asked, “When you say ‘Help,’ does that mean you’ll help us pay for these licenses for all the different archival stuff that we had to license?’ And they basically came back and said, ‘No, we can’t help you with that.’ So from there we were kind of treading water, spinning our wheels.”
With The Invaders in limbo, Smith got a job with New York filmmaker Sacha Jenkins, whose documentary Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues played at Indie Memphis 2022. “I happened to be on the subway train with him, on our ways away from work, and he was like, ‘Hey what’s up with that Invaders thing?’”
Jenkins showed the film to rapper Nas, who signed on to do a new voice-over for the film. “He actually showed up in my office and was like, ‘I’ve never heard of this story! It’s so great! I can’t wait to get this out!’” recalls Smith. “He actually said — and this just threw me — ‘I was having dinner with Colin Kaepernick last night and all I could talk about was The Invaders.’”
Memphis hip-hop superstar Yo Gotti came on board as executive producer to help get the project over the finish line. Now, The Invaders is set for release via video on demand (VOD), which means you can buy or rent it on streaming services or storefronts such as Apple TV, Google Play, and Amazon Prime Video. Smith says a wider release may be in the offing next year. For Smith, the release is the final milestone on a long journey. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he says. “I guess it teaches you patience. There’s the things that you can control, and the things you can’t. Try not to sweat too hard the things you can’t because they will eat you up.”
Percy Norris and
“Big” Robert Stewart in The ’Vous
The 25th Indie Memphis Film Festival concluded last Monday with a film that made a case for the importance of the 1970 Blaxploitation wave, and a film that proved its point. Is That Black Enough For You? is the first movie by Elvis Mitchell, a former New York Times film critic and cinema scholar turned documentary director. Mitchell traced the history of Black representation in film from the era of silent “race” pictures and D.W. Griffith’s pro-KKK, proto-blockbuster Birth of a Nation through the foreshortened careers of Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge to the wave of low-budget, Black-led gangster, adventure, and fantasy films which started in the late 1960s and crested with The Wiz. Films like Superfly and Coffy, Mitchell argues in his voluminous voice-over narration, presented the kinds of rousing heroes that attracted film-goers while the New Hollywood movement presented visions of angst-filled antiheroes.
Blaxploitation films also introduced a new kind of music to films and the concept of the soundtrack album, which was often released before the movie itself in order to drum up interest. The prime example was Shaft, which featured an Academy Award-winning soundtrack by Isaac Hayes. Mitchell introduced the classic with Willie Hall, the Memphis drummer who recorded the immortal hi-hat rhythm that kicks off Hayes’ theme song. Mitchell revealed in Is That Black Enough For You? that Hayes had been inspired by Sergio Leone’s score for Once Upon a Time in the West, and the score he penned for Shaft still holds up, providing much of the detective film’s throbbing propulsion.
The winners of the competitive portion of the 2022 film festival were announced at a hilariously irreverent awards ceremony Saturday evening at Playhouse on the Square. After a two-year hiatus, Savannah Bearden returned to produce the awards, which were “hosted” by Birdy, the tiny red metal mockingbird which has served as the film festival’s mascot for years. But amidst the nonstop jokes and spoof videos, there were genuinely touching moments, such as when Craig Brewer surprised art director and cameraperson Sallie Sabbatini with the Indie Award, which is given to outstanding Memphis film artisans, and when former Executive Director Ryan Watt was ambushed with the Vision Award.
The Best Narrative Feature award went to Our Father, the Devil, an African immigrant story directed by Ellie Foumbi. Kit Zauhar’s Actual People won the Duncan Williams Best Screenplay Award. The Documentary Feature award went to Reed Harkness for Sam Now, a portrait of the director’s brother that has been in production for the entire 25 years that Indie Memphis has been in existence.
The Best Hometowner Feature award, which honors films made in Memphis, went to Jack Lofton’s The ’Vous, a moving portrait of the people who make The Rendezvous a world-famous icon of Memphis barbecue. (“We voted with our stomachs,” said jury member Larry Karaszewski.) The Best Hometowner Narrative Short went to “Nordo” by Kyle Taubken, about a wife anxiously waiting for her husband to return from Afghanistan. Lauren Ready earned her second Indie Memphis Hometowner Documentary award for her short film “What We’ll Never Know.”
In the Departures category, which includes experimental, genre, and out-of-the-box creations, This House by Miryam Charles won Best Feature. (This House also won the poster design contest.) “Maya at 24” by legendary Memphis doc director Lynne Sachs won the Shorts competition, and “Civic” by Dwayne LeBlanc took home the first trophy in a new Mid-Length subcategory.
Sounds, the festival’s long-running music film series, awarded Best Feature to Kumina Queen by Nyasha Laing. The music video awards were won by the stop-motion animated “Vacant Spaces” by Joe Baughman; “Don’t Come Home” by Emily Rooker triumphed in the crowded Hometowner category.
Best Narrative Short went to “Sugar Glass Bottle” by Neo Sora, and Best Documentary Short went to “The Body Is a House of Familiar Rooms” by Eloise Sherrid and Lauryn Welch.
Some of the Special Awards date back to the origin of the festival in 1998, such as the Soul of Southern Film Award, which was taken by Ira McKinley and Bhawin Suchak’s documentary Outta The Muck. The Ron Tibbett Excellence in Filmmaking Award went to Me Little Me by Elizabeth Ayiku. The Craig Brewer Emerging Filmmaker Award went to Eric Younger’s Very Rare.
The IndieGrants program, which awards $15,000 in cash and donations to create short films, picked Anna Cai’s “Bluff City Chinese” and A.D. Smith’s “R.E.G.G.I.N.” out of 46 proposals submitted by Memphis filmmakers.
LeVar Burton stars in the Reading Rainbow documentary Butterfly in the Sky.
The 20222 Indie Memphis Film Festival is in full effect on Saturday, with a crowded lineup of films from all over the world.
French director Alice Diop has gained acclaim for her documentaries. Her latest film Saint Omer is her first narrative feature. It tells the story of a young journalist covering the trial of a horrific crime who is forced to come to terms with her own traumatic past.
Directors Jack Porter Lofton and Jeff Dailey dig into the past and present of a Memphis institution. The ’Vous is a documentary about Memphis’ most famous barbecue restaurant, The Rendezvous, which has been a hub for culture and tourism Downtown for 70 years. The 2:50 p.m. screening will be preceded by a reception at Playhouse on the Square.
If you’re looking for some snack-sized docs, there’s the Hometowner Documentary Shorts Competition bloc at 3 p.m. at Circuit Playhouse. Five Memphis directors bring stories of courage and shine lights on injustice with these moving and challenging films.
If you grew up in the ’80s or ’90s, odds are you remember Reading Rainbow. In Butterfly in the Sky, directors Brett Whitcomb and Bradford Thomason put the spotlight on LeVar Burton, the beloved host who taught millions of kids to love books. Oh, and did you know he was also in Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Eighty-four-year-old Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski has had a rich and varied career as a writer, actor, and director. His latest film has an unlikely star: a donkey. EO is a reimagining of Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar, which tells the tale of a lowly farm animal’s travails as he is passed from one owner to another. This one’s a real heartstring-tugger.
For something completely different, Indie Memphis has a new program. A subcategory of Departures, which houses the more experimental short subjects, Travels showcases the mid-length films that often get left out of shorts programs. The four films include “Nosferasta: First Bite,” Bayley Sweitzer and Adam Khalil’s story of Oba, a 400-year-old Rastafarian vampire.
The Art of Eating: The Life and Appetites of M. F. K. Fisher is a biography of the legendary travel and food writer who was once called “the best prose writer in America.”
And finally, if your rock doc appetites were not satisfied by Antenna on Friday night, there’s Meet Me In The Bathroom, the documentary about the 2000’s indie rock scene in Brooklyn which produced The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, and Interpol, among others. This is an exciting and well-made doc with some incredible performance footage and a soul-bearing interview with rock goddess Karen O.
Jack Oblivian on stage at the Antenna club circa 1993.
One of my first questions for director Chris McCoy after watching Antenna was what punk rock means to him today. To this, he responded, “I don’t know. What do you think punk rock means today?” Being born in the 2000s, I don’t think I have ever really listened to punk. Not being born in Memphis, I had never even heard of the legends from the Antenna club, until I watched McCoy’s documentary.
The story of the Antenna is told through the many faces of punk rock, including writer and stealth narrator Ross Johnson, director Chris McCoy (who is also the film and TV editor for the Memphis Flyer), editor/producer Laura Jean Hocking, Antenna club owner Steve McGehee, and former Flyer music writer John Floyd. All together, this team took three years to create the documentary. Hocking details the beginning stages of the film where they started “with more than a hundred hours of archival footage. We had 1,100 still images and 88 interviews, some of which were three and four hours long.” Hocking describes her editing process as “a big project that at the time, when I was making it, I had a lot of nervous breakdowns.”
The inspiration behind Antenna was McCoy’s desire to tell “a story about Memphis that needed to be told, that had not yet been told.” This was the story of the Antenna, a punk rock club that stood on Madison Avenue from 1981 to 1995, a forgotten era of Memphis music — specifically Memphis punk rock music. McCoy calls it a “weird mutant strain of music that grabs little bits from a whole bunch of different kinds of music.”
Jimmy Barker at the first Antenna party, 1980.
As such, the Antenna club was “a place where you could be weird,” Hocking says. The club was not your usual Beale Street bar but an eclectic refuge where outsiders, weirdos, gays, and anyone without prejudice could be their authentic selves. Especially in its early days, Antenna’s punk rock spirit made it a place for experimentation, dedicated to the fight against conformity. A specific example McCoy uses is “one of my favorite shots in the movie is the video we found of that dude heckling The Replacements, saying, ‘We don’t care how famous you are!’ That’s the essence of the entire club right there in one moment.”
Between the crime, the poverty, and the political turmoil, Memphis can sometimes seem cursed and hopeless. This is even mentioned with Johnson’s opening line of the film: “Memphis is cursed.” McCoy comments on this idea saying, “I always call Memphis your drunk uncle. I can complain about him and what a deadbeat he is, but nobody else can say something about it.” This spirit is encapsulated in the Antenna’s story, in “the story of those musicians who are still here and who didn’t get the recognition that they deserved,” McCoy says. Indeed, the Antenna club hosted various artists like R.E.M., Big Ass Truck, The Panther Burns, and The Modifiers, but these are just some of the artists that defined the era of punk rock and the resistance against conformity.
Outcasts like Milford Thompson, Melody Danielsen, Alex Chilton, and The Klitz were able to express their true selves to the world. When daytime talk show host Marge Thrasher told The Panther Burns they were “the worst thing that ever came out on television,” bandleader Tav Falco just smiled. The Modifiers took pride in being “the most hated band in Memphis.” They were simply just, being themselves, and any hate or fear simply fell at their feet as they performed. “The attitude was, we dare you to like this music,” says McCoy.
Tav Falco and the Panther Burns on Marge Thrasher’s talk show.
This film is truly a labor of love and takes the audience back to the time where music not only united a community but also created a place to escape from the prejudices of society. McCoy remembers “hanging out at the Antenna from ’89 to ’95, when it closed.” Watching the film, I understood what it might feel like to be transported back to the ’80s, with a front row seat at the Antenna. Hocking says this was intentional. “We wanted you to feel like you’re at the club or hanging out with these people or in a round table discussion with them.”
Framing the film this way makes for a very intimate connection with something that to me, previously seemed foreign. Throughout the film, I found myself identifying with the Antenna crowd and their love for a place that shielded them from the rest of society. Seeing the many faces of punk rock and former Antenna attendees profess their love for the Antenna club, made me wonder if there was anything similar to the Antenna club today. When the film ended, I felt like I had just been to my first and favorite rock concert in my life.
Lisa Alridge singing with The Klitz.
Antenna speaks for itself with its continued and growing popularity even after its premiere 10 years ago in 2012 at the Indie Memphis Film Festival. The film has been awarded the Audience Award, Special Jury Prize, and other various awards at the Oxford Film Festival, and it is recognized as one of the most popular films in the 25 year history of the Indie Memphis Film Festival. Although the film has an immense love among its audience, it cannot currently be released commercially because of issues with obtaining music rights for the 50 different songs present in the film. McCoy and the film’s producers have spent the last 10 years trying to raise money to pay the artists for their songs and give them the recognition they deserve. Despite several investors’ and distributors’ interest in the film, fundraising efforts have always come to a halt and been unsuccessful. Thus, the film can only be caught at film festivals and on rare occasions.
The next screening of this film will be on Friday, October 21st, 8:45 p.m., at Playhouse on the Square during the Indie Memphis Film Festival to celebrate the film’s 10-year anniversary. Tickets ($12/individual screening) can be purchased online or at the door if not sold out already.
(from top to bottom) Scenes from the pioneering 1922 horror film Häxan, Howard Bell’s Jookin, and Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb's Butterfly in the Sky.
These days, it seems that film discourse is dominated by discussions about the future. But while there are real issues facing the unique combination of art and commerce we call cinema, there’s more to movies than just the multiplex — and that’s what Indie Memphis has specialized in for the last 25 years.
“We are kind of in our own lane,” says Executive Director Kimel Fryer. “Indie Memphis is like no other film festival, because Memphis is like no other city.”
Indie Memphis was founded in 1998 by a group of University of Memphis film students led by Kelly Chandler. Known then as the Memphis Independent Film Festival, it attracted about 40 people to a Midtown coffee shop, where they watched student movies projected on a sheet hung on the wall. Nowadays, the annual festival boasts an attendance of more than 11,000, and the organization hosts programming and events year-round, such as the monthly Shoot & Splice programs, where filmmakers provide deep dives into their craft. The Indie Grants program was created in 2014 to help fund Memphis-made short films. The Black Creators Forum began in 2017 to help address the historic racial inequalities in filmmaking. During the pandemic, Eventive, a Memphis-based cinema services company that began as Indie Memphis’ online ticketing system, pioneered the virtual programming which is now an established feature of film festivals worldwide.
“It took 25 years for Indie Memphis to become an organization that reflects the city,” says Artistic Director Miriam Bale. “But each step along the way has added to what makes it special now.”
Memphis Grizzlies superstar Z-Bo in Michael Blevins’ 50 for Da City.Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová in Daisies.Tahar Rahim is a jilted lover in Don Juan.
A New Leader
Kimel Fryer took over as Indie Memphis’ new executive director only a few weeks ago. But she is no stranger to either Memphis or the world of independent film. She’s a West Tennessee native whose mother has taught at Oak Elementary since the mid-1990s. “My mom was always tough on me, and I’m grateful for it because I ended up kind of inheriting that from her,” she says. “In my mind, I’m supposed to reach for the stars. I’m supposed to overachieve.”
Fryer holds graduate degrees in law and business from the University of Memphis and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She has worked for companies as diverse as Lincoln Pacific and Pfizer, and left FedEx to take over the reins of Indie Memphis when Knox Shelton resigned after only a year on the job. The mother of two saw it as an opportunity to merge her professional life with her passion for film. “When I was working for Chrysler, I realized that I had this amazing job that I worked my butt off for,” she says. “It was a great company with great benefits. But I was depressed. If I wanna be completely honest, it was one of the saddest periods of my life.”
Growing up, Fryer had tried her hand at writing, and she had been involved with theater and band programs in high school and college. In Detroit, she found a new outlet for her creativity when she volunteered as casting director for filmmaker Robert Mychal Patrick Butler’s Life Ain’t Like the Movies. “The independent film world is very visible in Detroit,” she says.
When she landed Coming 2 America star Paul Bates for a role in the film, Butler promoted her to producer. “I said, ‘What is a producer?’ He said, ‘You’re kinda already doing it.’”
Fryer wrote and directed her own short film, “Something’s Off,” which will screen at Indie Memphis 2022. She says she got her acceptance email just a few weeks before she found out she was going to be the new executive director. “I’ve found this career where I could kind of wrap all my skills into one job,” she says. “I could actually be my full self all the time, which is really my dream.
“I’m very eager to learn and eager to meet other people, understand how they do things. But I’m also cognizant of the fact that I am coming back to Memphis, and we’ve always been a different city that has marched to the beat of our own drum. We’ve got to continue that as we continue to grow and strive for greatness in the film community. I’m really excited about what’s next. I believe in Indie Memphis. I believe in the staff. I believe we are headed towards a great film festival.”
The Picture Taker
From the 1950s to his death in 2007, it seemed that photographer Ernest Withers was everywhere. “We keep calling him a Zelig-like figure or like Forrest Gump,” says Phil Bertelsen, director of Indie Memphis 2022’s opening night film The Picture Taker. “He was at every flash point in Civil Rights history, and then some.”
Ernest Withers, courtesy of the Withers Family Trust.
Withers was a tireless documenter of Black life in the South. His work even appeared in publications like Jet and the Chicago Defender. “Some of my favorite photos of his are street portraits — the photos he took of everyday people just going about their daily business,” says Bertelsen.
“I think what made him almost like a father figure in Memphis was the fact that he recorded his community’s lives literally from birth to death,” says producer Lise Yasui. “He left behind an estimated 1.8 million photos. They are of every major event in every family’s life — as we say, it’s celebrations as well as sorrows. He locked that into their histories and made sure that they had these records of the lives they lived. Those photographs are really beautiful. They have an intimacy that can only come from someone inside the community.”
Three years after Withers’ 2007 death, Commercial Appeal reporter Marc Perrusquia revealed that the trusted photographer had been a paid informant for the FBI. The news came as a shock to many in the community, who saw it as a betrayal of the Civil Rights activists who had trusted Withers. “When you go behind the headlines and the surface of it all, you recognize that there’s a lot of nuance and complexity to that choice that he made at that time,” says the director. “What we attempted to do with the film is to try to understand that time, that choice, and the man who was at the center of it all.
“I think it could be said, without question, that Ernest was a patriot who believed in the hope and promise of this country,” continues Bertelsen. “Don’t forget he was a fourth-generation American war veteran.”
Withers was far from the only one talking to the FBI — their reports refer to him as source #338. “I had the privilege and the workload of reading as many of the FBI files as we could get our hands on,” says Yasui. “They tell a story that’s pretty intense and really detailed in terms of names, places, affiliations, and friendships — everything down to personal gossip. The other thing that you have to understand is they are FBI records written by FBI agents. So there’s not a single document in the 7,000+ pages that I’ve read that is a direct quote from Ernest himself. It’s always through the lens of his FBI handler. That’s not to say that what he wrote was not accurate, but it’s filtered through their agenda, which was to root out radicals who were allegedly inside the Civil Rights movement. …We heard testimony that he basically kept people from harm’s way because he knew what he knew. But at the same time, he damaged the reputations of people by informing on them. It was a double-edged sword that he was wielding.”
Ironically, it’s people like Coby Smith, a member of the Memphis-based Black Power group The Invaders, prime targets of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, who defend Withers in The Picture Taker. “He was a man of great reputation and appreciation,” says Bertelsen. “In fact, we were hard-pressed to find anyone who had anything negative to say about him, even after it was shown that he informed on them.”
For Bertelsen and Yasui, this is the end of a six-year journey. “We are so grateful to the many people of Memphis who helped us get this story, especially the family who really took a leap of faith by trusting us with his images,” says Bertelsen. “They’ve had to face some very painful revelations about their patriarch, and they’re still facing them. I think it shows a certain amount of grace and trust and understanding. There are a lot of ways you can interpret this story, and they haven’t shied away from the truth. They told us they learned things about their dad that they didn’t know before, through this film. That’s very gratifying to us.”
The Poor & Hungry
In 2021, Craig Brewer directed Coming 2 America. It was his second collaboration with comedy superstar Eddie Murphy, and the biggest hit in the history of Amazon Studios.
In 2000, the biggest job Brewer had ever held was a clerk at Barnes & Noble bookstore. That was the year his first feature film, The Poor & Hungry, premiered at Indie Memphis. “I still feel that it was the biggest premiere that I’ve ever been to, and the one with the highest stakes,” he says. “Winning Best Feature for 2000 is still the greatest award I can ever remember winning in my life. … The festival back then was a beacon. It was the North Star. We were all making something so we could showcase it at Indie Memphis. It’s something I hope is still happening with the younger filmmakers today. I had another short that year called ‘Cleanup In Booth B.’ It was a big, productive time for me. But it was also the first time ever to see my work being shown in front of people at a movie theater.”
Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, which premiered at Indie Memphis Festival in 2000, will return to the festival.
The Poor & Hungry is the story of Eli (Eric Tate), a Memphis car thief who accidentally falls in love with one of his victims, a cellist named Amanda (Lake Latimer). The characters’ lives revolve around the P&H Cafe, a legendary Midtown dive bar which was run by the flamboyant Wanda Wilson, who plays herself. To call the black-and-white feature, shot with a handheld digital camcorder, “gritty” is a massive understatement. But Brewer was able to wring some striking, noir-like images from his cheap equipment, and the film features a series of great performances, most notably Lindsey Roberts’ stunning turn as Harper, a lesbian street hustler.
“I think what I got right on it is something that I tried to carry over to Hustle & Flow, which was, how do you create characters that, if somebody were to just describe them to you, you would say, ‘I don’t think I would like them’? But then, when you start watching them in the story, you find that you not only love them, but you want them to succeed, and you feel for them when they’re in pain.”
Made for $20,000, which Brewer inherited when his father Walter died suddenly of a heart attack, The Poor & Hungry would go on to win Best Feature at the Hollywood Film Festival, defeating films which had cost millions to produce. It got his foot in the door in Hollywood and earned him the opportunity to direct his second feature film Hustle & Flow, which was nominated for two Academy Awards, winning one for Three 6 Mafia’s song “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp.”
The Poor & Hungry will return to the festival where it premiered as part of Indie Memphis’ 25th anniversary celebration. “When I look at it now, I view it as an artifact of a time in Memphis. There are so many places that aren’t there anymore. The P&H Cafe that it’s named after is no more, and Wanda has left this planet in bodily form but remains in spirit. I’m so glad that I captured all that. It’s good to see a Memphis that may not be there anymore. But most importantly, I hope people come see it because it’s the movie that I point people to when they say that they want to make a movie but they think it’s impossible. Well, I made this with just a small camcorder, a microphone, four clamp lights, and a lot of effort.”
Hometown Heroes
It’s a bumper crop year for the Hometowner categories, which showcase films made here in the Bluff City. In addition to anniversary celebrations of Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry and this columnist’s punk rock documentary Antenna, nine features from Memphis filmmakers are screening during the festival.
Jookin is Howard Bell IV’s story of an aspiring dancer caught up in Memphis street life. The ’Vous by Jack Porter Lofton and Jeff Dailey is a documentary about the world-famous Rendezvous restaurant. Ready! Fire! Aim! is Melissa Sweazy’s portrait of Memphis entrepreneur Kemmons Wilson, founder of Holiday Inn. Show Business Is My Life — But I Can’t Prove It by G.B. Shannon is a documentary about the 50-year career of comedian Gary Mule Deer. Michael Blevins’ 50 for Da City recounts Z-Bo’s legendary run as a Memphis Grizzly. Cxffeeblack to Africa by Andrew Puccio traces Bartholomew Jones’ pilgrimage to Ethiopia to discover the roots of the java trade. United Front: The People’s Convention 1991Memphis is Chuck O’Bannon’s historical documentary about the movement that produced Memphis’ first Black mayor. Daphene R. McFerren’s Facing Down Storms: Memphis and the Making of Ida B. Wells sheds light on the Black journalist’s early years in the Bluff City. The Recycle King is Julian Harper’s character sketch of fashion designer Paul Thomas.
Bartholomew Jones in Andrew Puccio’s documentary Cxffeeblack to AfricaJack Oblivian in the Memphis punk rock documentary Antenna
On opening night is the Hometowner Narrative Shorts Competition. In recent years, this has been the toughest category in the entire festival, where Memphis filmmakers stretch their talents to the limits for 10 minutes at a time.
Janay Kelley is one of eight filmmakers whose works were chosen to screen in the narrative shorts competition. A junior at Rhodes College, she’s a product of the Indie Memphis CrewUp mentorship program, and two-time Grand Prize winner at the Indie Memphis Youth Festival. “This is my first film festival as an adult,” she says.
Kelley’s film is “The River,” an experimental marriage of imagery and verse. “My grandmother told me once that the river that you got baptized in could be the same river that drowns you in the morning. I like that dichotomy of healing and of destroying, of accepting new people into your life and saying, ‘Will you help me or will you harm me?’”
Kelley provides her own narration for the film, which was based on a prose poem she wrote while still in high school. “I take a lot of inspiration from my Southern heritage, especially from the women in my family,” she says.
The visuals reference several Black artists of the 20th century, especially the painting Funeral Procession by Ellis Wilson, which was famously featured on The Cosby Show. Kelley treats the many women, young and old, who appear in the film with a portraitist’s touch.
“Before I started in films, I was really into photography, and you can see a lot of that still in my work,” she says. “I come from a very poor background. There is a specific picture of my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt, and they got it taken at the fair. Back in the day, they used to take people’s portraits there, so some families would get dressed up to go to the fair to get their portraits taken, because they couldn’t afford to get it done any way else. What you need to know about being poor and Black in the South is that a lot of us don’t live long. So some of the stories I’ve heard about my family members, I’ve heard after they have died, and I’ve had to kind of stare at their pictures. I think it comes out of a genuine love of the history of photography, and what it meant for people like me.”
Witchcraft Through the Ages
Indie Memphis’ October spot on the calendar means that it coincides with what Bale calls “the spooky season,” when many horror movie aficionados embark on a monthlong binge watch. For this year’s festival, Bale programed a pair of rarely seen horror classics that have significant anniversaries. The first is Ghostwatch, a British mockumentary which debuted 30 years ago.
In the tradition of Orson Welles’ infamous Halloween radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds,” Ghostwatch was presented as a Halloween special in which real-life BBC journalists Sarah Greene and Craig Charles would broadcast a live investigation of a supposedly haunted house. But their goofy Halloween jokes turn serious when the house’s real ghosts show up and start causing mayhem. When it was first broadcast on Halloween night in 1992, the BBC switchboard was jammed with more than 1 million calls from viewers concerned that their favorite newscasters were being slaughtered by ghosts on live television. “This is a staff favorite,” says Bale.
The second Halloween special is Häxan, which has its 100th anniversary this year. Indie Memphis commissioned a new score for the silent film from Alex Greene, who is also the music editor for the Memphis Flyer. For this performance, Greene’s jazz ensemble The Rolling Head Orchestra — Jim Spake, Tom Lonardo, Mark Franklin, Carl Caspersen, and Jim Duckworth — will be joined by theremin virtuoso Kate Taylor. “We’ve been wanting to work with Alex for a long time, and this was a great opportunity,” says Bale.
Indie Memphis honors the 100th anniversary of the pioneering 1922 horror film Häxan with a new live score from Alex Greene and the Rolling Head Orchestra.
Director Benjamin Christensen based Häxan on his study of the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”), a guide for clergymen conducting witch hunts, published in 1486. Upon its premiere in 1922, Häxan was the most expensive silent film made in Europe. Christensen’s meticulous recreations of witches’ Sabbath celebrations, complete with flying broomsticks and an appearance by a mischievous Satan (played by the director himself), still look incredible. Its frank depictions of the Inquisition provide the horror. “I was shocked by how much of it is framed by the torture of the witches,” says Greene. “It implies that a lot of this crazy behavior they described was just victims trying to make up anything to stop the thumbscrews.”
Released a decade before Dracula ushered in the modern horror era, Häxan is a unique cinema experience. “I think of it as kind of like Shakespeare’s time, when the English language was not as settled in spellings and meanings of words. It was a fluid language,” says Greene. “This film came at a time when the language of cinema was very fluid and kind of up for grabs, which is why you could have this weird hybrid of documentary/reenactment/essay.”
“It’s within the Halloween realm, but not necessarily a horror movie,” says Bale. “That’s part of what’s so interesting about it. There are some silent films that just feel so fresh, they could have been made yesterday. Häxan is one of those.”
The 25th Indie Memphis Film Festival runs from October 19th to the 22nd at the Orpheum Theatre’s Halloran Centre, Crosstown Theater, Black Lodge, Malco Studio on the Square, The Circuit Playhouse, Playhouse on the Square, and virtually on Eventive. Festival passes and individual film tickets can be purchased at indiememphis.org. The Memphis Flyer will feature continuing coverage of Indie Memphis 2022 on the web at memphisflyer.com.
The award-winning filmmakers line up on the 2022 Oxford Film Festival red carpet. (Credit: Joey Brent)
Disfluency by director Anna Baumgarten and The First Step by Brandon Kramer won the top jury prizes at the 19th annual Oxford Film Festival.
The narrative feature jury, which consisted of NPR film critic Tim Gordon, Indie Memphis programmer Kayla Myers, and SAGindie development manager Eliza Hajkova, said of Best Narrative Feature winner Disfluency, “With subtlety and a distinct sense of place, this film thoughtfully explores the nuances of reeling from and beginning the ongoing process of healing from trauma. This deeply empathetic film also manages to assert the possibilities of language outside of the spoken word through showcasing how forms of communication like ASL allow us to be open and embody our truth in ways that our voice may not.”
The documentary feature jury of Jean Anne Lauer, Fantastic Fest programmer; Nat Dykeman, Lake County Film Festival founder; and Rachel Morgan, creative director of the Sidewalk Film Festival, said, “As they advocate at the highest levels of government for the First Step Act, Van Jones and team remind us that everyone has the responsibility to recognize humanity and dignity in each other across the perceived differences and backgrounds that presently serve to divide us. The First Step documents the tenuous nature of coalition building around social justice issues, offering no easy solutions to complex problems, and at the same time refusing to accept inaction as a path forward.”
Winners of the feature film and documentary competitions are awarded $15,000 camera rental packages from Panavision.
The Audience Award for best feature went to Krimes by director Alysa Nahmias. Ashley E. Gibson won the Best Mississippi Feature for The Fearless 11.
In the short film categories, “Bainne” by Jack Reynor won for the best national short, and Nolan Dean’s “Nighthawks” won for Best Mississippi short. The music video award went to “Every Breath You Take” by Emily White, directed by Hunter Heath.
The $1,000 screenplay competition was won by Nando by Luis Agusto Figueroa.
The in-person portion of the Oxford Film Festival was held last weekend. You can access the full schedule of films, including the winners, in the virtual portion of the festival, which runs through this weekend. You can sign up for the virtual festival on the Oxford Film Festival website.
In January 2020, Alex Greene, joined by his jazz band The Rolling Head Orchestra and members of the Blueshift Ensemble, did something extraordinary: They performed original live scores to the silent films A Trip to the Moon and Aelita: Queen of Mars. Back in the first decades of the 20th century, people did it all the time, mostly organists in movie palaces, but occasionally with full ensembles. In the days before sound recording, some more elaborate film productions even came with their own sheet music for the score.
These days, it’s pretty rare, except for groups like the Alloy Orchestra, who have made a career out of performing live scores for films like Metropolis and Phantom of the Opera at film festivals. Just before the pandemic started, Crosstown Arts had commissioned a series of live scores in their new Crosstown Theater, where Greene was artist in residence at the time. “It was kind of the culmination of my residency at Crosstown Arts, and it was great, because they made everything very easy.”
“Very easy” is relative when you’re talking about writing original music for a 12-piece ensemble, including a theremin, that’s designed to sync up perfectly with a moving image. “It’s very different from recording a soundtrack,” says Greene. “You have the whole process of editing to make sure it all syncs up, but in this case, you’re just ‘Once more unto the breach!’ You’re launched into it and by the seat of your pants, hoping you can keep up with the movie, because there’s no pausing … I really wanted it to sync up with the emotional cues of the movie in a very precise way, as if you were watching a film with a pre-recorded soundtrack. That ambition made for a lot more work for all of us.”
Greene and the orchestra’s performance drew raves from the Crosstown audience, and the musician-turned-composer really wanted to jump into the breach again when COVID shut down the theater. He saw a new opportunity at Germantown Performing Arts Center’s new outdoor venue, The Grove, which features a massive video screen behind the stage. “I pitched to them back in January, and we went back and forth a lot about the best time to do it. At the time it seemed like summer was the best bet in terms of COVID, partly because the virus supposedly recedes in the heat somewhat, but also just we assumed once a vaccine became available everyone would be vaccinated by now. In any case, it is an outdoor venue, so even as early as January, we felt pretty safe in moving forward with a big concert like this.”
Greene says when it came time to choose a film, he wanted to “find something dark.” But GPAC director Paul Chandler disagreed. “People are emerging from a very dark year and a half, so let’s do something lighthearted,” Greene says. “I’ve always loved Buster Keaton, so I immediately saw what Buster Keaton films were being distributed by GPAC’s distributor, and the only one was The Cameraman, which I had never seen,” says Greene. “I looked it over and I loved it. I was like ‘Wow, why don’t more people know about this one?’ People know about The General, or Our Hospitality, or Steamboat Bill Jr., but this one is lesser-known, and in a way, that’s better for this kind of project. You’re seeing the film and the music in a very fresh way.”
The Cameraman is considered to be the last film of Keaton’s golden age, where he made incredible strides in big screen comedy and action in the mid-1920s. Keaton, who was used to total creative control, had just gotten a lucrative contract with MGM when he directed and starred in the comedy about a newsreel cameraman trying to impress a female co-worker — and failing spectacularly. It would be the last film Keaton fully controlled. Afterwards, MGM executives clamped down on the auteur’s perceived excesses; later, Keaton would say signing with MGM was the biggest mistake he ever made.
Green wrote the new score for the same band who played in January 2020: Carl Caspersen on bass, Mark Franklin on trumpet, Tom Lonardo on drums, Jim Spake on reed instruments, John Whittemore on pedal steel, and Jenny Davis and Delara Hashemi of the Blueshift Ensemble on flute, Jonathan Kirkscey on cello, Jessica Munson on violin, and Susanna Whitney on bassoon. “Once again, I have this wonderful theremin player from Florence, Alabama, Kate Tayler Hunt, who used to be the concertmaster at the Shoals Symphony. An injury prevented her from continuing as a violinist, so she pivoted and put all her conservatory training into the theremin. She has a very precise ear, and unlike a lot of people who play theremin for texture or sound effects, she can play melodies very accurately, and that just takes it to a whole other level.”
But before the players can bring the magic to The Grove, Greene has to write it down. “I’m scoring as we speak!” he says. “It’s really incredible, it’s a new thing to me. I started doing it in earnest with last year’s live score. Sure, I would write chord changes and lead sheets for my jazz group, but to actually score every note that everyone plays in a 12-piece group, and then to hear them execute it almost perfectly in the first rehearsal … it’s breathtaking!”
The audience will get to see Alex Greene and the Rolling Head Orchestra with the Blueshift Ensemble and Kate Tayler Hunt’s live score of Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman at The Grove at GPAC on Saturday, July 10 at 7:30 p.m. Greene says he hopes there are many other opportunities in the future to breathe new life into silent classics.
David (Julian Hilliard) wrestles with a demonic waterbed in The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.
Ed and Lorraine Warren were a pair of good, old fashioned American hucksters who teamed up as investigators of the paranormal. He was a self-taught demonologist, and she a medium. They ran a museum devoted to occult and paranormal artifacts out of their home in Monroe, Connecticut, which began with a creepy doll named Annabelle, which was allegedly possessed. They made a name for themselves investigating the New York haunted house case that inspired the 1979 frightener The Amityville Horror.
The ’70s provided the perfect environment for the Warrens’ brand of Roman Catholic-flavored scary stories, thanks to the huge popularity of The Exorcist. One could argue that it was William Friedkin’s 1973 film, not Jaws, that heralded the beginning of the modern blockbuster era. Friedkin’s technique is unstoppable. The arresting combination of the innocent-looking Regan, played by Academy Award nominee Linda Blair, and the deep voice of the foul-mouthed demon who possesses her, is just one example of the tricks that have been endlessly lifted from The Exorcist. But it’s the story’s mining of the deep history of Christian paranoia about demons and witchcraft that helped it resonate so deeply with audiences.
The Warrens rode the wave of Exorcist-inspired interest in possessions and hauntings to investigate more than 10,000 cases over their career. They achieved another level of fame in 2013 when director James Wan adapted the story of one of their more lurid early investigations into The Conjuring. Wan, who these days is working on his Aquaman sequel, served up watered-down Friedkin to spectacular results. The Conjuring turned into a seven-film, $2 billion franchise for Warner Bros.
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as freelance demonologists Lorraine and Ed Warren.
The Devil Made Me Do It, the eighth film in the series, is helmed by Michael Chaves, who directed the sixth installment, The Curse of Llorona. The story cold opens with Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) attending to young David Glatzel (Julian Hilliard), who shows all the Friedkin-inspired signs of possession: a foul mouth, horrible contortionist moves, and the classic blood shower. When the young priest arrives and things get heated, the demon causes Ed to have a heart attack. As he’s fading from consciousness, he sees David’s brother Arne (Ruairi O’Connor) implore the demon to “take me instead!” Protip: Don’t say that to a demon, unless you’re willing to take on a new, very messy tenant in your head.
David is saved, but Arne starts getting mysterious spirited visitors. Then, when partying with his girlfriend Debbie (Sarah Catherine Hook) and his creepy landlord Bruno (Ronnie Gene Blevins), David blacks out and stabs Bruno 22 times. The Warrens insist that David is innocent by reason of demonic possession, an unorthodox defense anywhere outside of the Salem Witch trials, and set out to discover why these pesky demons are making this wholesome white family do bad things.
The Devil Made Me Do It resembles nothing more than an overly long, particularly lame episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After finding a “witch’s totem” in the crawlspace of the Glatzel home, they consult a former priest named Kastner (John Noble) who went a little crazy investigating the pseudo-satanic Ram cult. Then, there’s lots of standing before Ed’s conspiracy theorist yarn wall looking for connections that can only loosely be called “clues,” before settling onto a hypothesis that involves, you guessed it, a witch.
Like all the Conjuring movies, this one is allegedly based on a true story from the Warrens’ archives. But what does “true” really mean with unreliable narrators like these? The Warrens’ brand of demon mumbo-jumbo plays into the need for people to have someone else to blame for the evil that men do. It’s not harmless: In the ’80s, the Satanic Panic ruined thousands of people’s lives searching for child-abusing devil cults that didn’t exist. You can see the echoes of it in the pseudo-religious overtones of the Q conspiracists, who paint their political opponents with accusations of devil-worshipping pedophilia. But there’s no need to resort to demonic possession to explain heart attacks, child sexual abuse, or a drunk guy murdering his landlord who he thought he was coming onto his girlfriend.
Yes, the Warrens made it up, but so what? Made-up stuff makes for good movies, and truth be told, I would be down with all of it if The Devil Made Me Do It wasn’t such a frightful bore. Wilson and Farmiga are phoning it in at this point, and, with the exception of Hilliard, who conjures a few sparks as the young possession victim, they’re the best actors on the screen. The visuals are lazy Exorcist retreads, and why does it seem to be so hard for big budget movies to get a decent sound mix these day? The Devil Made Me Do It is dreadful, but not in a good way.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is now playing at multiple locations, and streaming on HBO Max.
