Two for Tuesday
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Saturday Matinee: Nationtime
Documentarian William Greaves’s Restored Civil Rights Political Documentary asks, “What Time is it?”
By Jim Tudor
Source: ZekeFilm
In 1972, the mayor of Gary, Indiana Richard Hatcher welcomed a tremendous gathering of African American leaders, intellectuals, activists and speakers to hold the twentieth century’s first and only National Black Political Convention. Luminaries such as Amiri Baraka, Charles Diggs, Walter Fauntroy, Dick Gregory, Isaac Hayes, Bobby Seale, Harry Belafonte, Coretta Scott King, Queen Mother Moore and Jesse Jackson took the stage in a crowded sports gymnasium in the fired-up interest of promoting “an independent national black agenda”. With over 10,000 in attendance, the gathering seeked to bring together differing factions in the cause of Black advancement in America. More to the point, their goal for the three-day Convention was “unity without uniformity”.
The National Black Political Convention of 1972 was a turning point in the struggle for self determination and equal rights.”
“ The convention adjourned without reaching consensus, and some deemed it a failure.”
“But the cry of ‘Nationtime’ reverberates as America continues to wrestle with its legacy of slavery.
So goes the entirely of the opening text viewed at the start of this newly salvaged presentation of documentarian William Greaves’s Nationtime. Tasked with documenting the convention, Greaves and his crew do just that; the final version of this 1972 film a sort of fly-on-the-wall highlights reel of the event. Those who know Greaves primarily for his 1968 meta-experimental Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One now have this chance to view one of the filmmaker’s works which falls more into his bread-and-butter wheelhouse of African American-issues documentary filmmaking.
It is apparent that Greaves had no additional access to back-room goings-on and behind the scenes drama of the convention, which there apparently was no shortage of. Rather, he and his handful of cameramen are relegated to the same level of observation as anyone in ordinary attendance. As a result, the height of tension- a mass exodus of the contingency from Michigan- occurs with little contextualization. (Greaves’s friend, actor Sidney Poitier, provides occasional narration where needed).
In October of 2020, Kino Marquee released to virtual theaters a black and white version of the newly rediscovered and 4K-restored Nationtime. At least, it was a black and white version that critics were given access to, thereby resulting in some incorrect statements that the film was shot monochrome. We know from this subsequent Blu-ray release that that was not the case. The black and white version is not included on the Blu-ray; Kino Classics instead opting to showcase IndieCollect’s extensive color restoration. The valiant result remains quite visibly imperfect, though this is no doubt the very best it can ever look.
Nevertheless, a film that’s mostly podium-bound political and social speeches can only have so much traction as cinema. Roger Ebert famously said that a film isn’t about what it’s about, but rather how it’s about it. If that’s the case, a film like Nationtime cannot fare tremendously well. Yet, there’s no denying the historical importance of the event documented, particularly in today’s tragic post-George Floyd world. Nationtime (originally called “Nationtime – Gary”, for the town it takes place in) is a major, black-organized event as documented by a black filmmaker. That alone secures it all the credentials it needs in this day and age to rightly present as important.
But “important” and “cinematically compelling” are two different things. Though the speakers at the podium are dynamic in their passion, there’s rudimentary catch-as-catch-can quality to Greaves’s film. It’s an unfortunate showing of seams that often renders the film challenging to stick with.
An informal count reveals that Greaves had no more than five cameras in play, each shooting color film stock. According to a notation at the end of the film, Nationtime was restored in both color and black and white. The latter was apparently an attempt to conceal the irregularities in the footage from one camera to the next. The amateur-esque variations in film stock, lighting, and perhaps exposure are apparent throughout, and unlikely successfully concealed simply by removing color. (Per David Greaves’s audio commentary recollection, he was given some bad advice from Kodak to use a red filter on his own camera, likely contributing to why the finished film was deemed something of a lost cause at the time. Thankfully, today’s color correction technologies have undone that specific gaffe).
The end result is what it is: an ultra-low budget effort financed by Greaves himself. Greaves’s son David, who worked closely with his father and was also there, recalls that outside financing was never secured, though the filmmaker had no intention to not document the event. According to one story on the new bonus features, William Greaves continued manning his camera during Jesse Jackson’s dynamic speech even when he had run out of film, so enraptured he was in that moment.
Indeed, the raw enthusiasm of being there and capturing “the happening” of it all shines through the vast imperfections of the film. Greaves’s knack for knowing and grabbing quality b-roll when he sees it is absolutely apparent. Through the rough-hewn assembly of it all, apt cutaways of engaged faces and fist-waving crowd enthusiasm are the flourishes that shine.
Through it all, in the face of all the racial progress in America that’s yet to be made, Reverend Jesse Jackson’s impassioned call and response of “What time is it?” “Nationtime!” resonates anew for a country still in great need of working things out in terms of equality and corrective justice.
Watch Nationtime on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/nationtime-sidney-poitier/17616062
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: Once Within a Time
By Sheila O’Malley
Source: RogerEbert.com
Beatrice Loayza’s fascinating New York Times article “When Did the Plot Become the Only Way to Judge a Movie?” examines films that eschew linear storytelling, films more interested in mood and emotional tones than plot points, breaking free from the “tyranny of story.” The article was fresh in my mind when I watched Godfrey Reggio’s whimsical-terrifying doomsday-fable “Once Within a Time.” Clocking in at 51 minutes, the film is all mood, all rhythm, with a kaleidoscope structure and undulating ever-shifting visuals in a constant state of flux. It’s not a “story” so much as a tone-poem collage about technology, knowledge, innocence/experience, and the potential end of the world. Maybe something new will be born from the ashes, although considering the evidence that something may very well be a monster.
It all started in the Garden of Eden, when curious Eve ate the apple, and “Once Within a Time” starts there, too, in the gentle framing device that opens it. An audience sits in a darkened theatre, a red velvet curtain rises, and the “show”—i.e., human life on the spinning planet—begins. Adam and Eve, holding hands, wander underneath a white cotton-ball tree with red hanging apples. Around them, children play and cavort. The same six or seven children are used throughout: we get to know their faces and their expressions. Behind them, a grand visual drama unfolds, made up of stop-motion animation figures, real humans, found footage, and eerie created images: solar systems, a giant hourglass in the desert, black and white newsreel footage of bomb blasts, spindly trees bending backward. The children look on with wonder, humor, interest, and sometimes concern. They are trying to understand. The apple is a portal to another world, another time. The apple is also directly linked to another 20th-century apple, the Mac apple. The garden path Adam and Eve walk down is made up of iPhone cobble stones. The meaning is obvious.
Technology is a blessing and a curse, yes, but more than that, it’s inevitable. It can’t be stopped. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley wrote one of the most prescient books of all time, her imagination stretching forward 200 years, its warning message still and always relevant. The obsessed maniac Frankenstein doesn’t know when to stop with his experiment. He has to see it through, even if it destroys his mind, his life, and the world as we know it. Mary Shelley saw it all. “Once Within a Time” has almost as bleak an outlook.
Reggio’s celebrated “Koyaanisqatsi,” the first of the Qatsi Trilogy, features a similar cascade of images placed in fluid shifting juxtaposition: power plants and rain forests, rush-hour highways and crashing ocean, pollution and clouds, modernity and its ruins. The images are often beautiful, but the overall effect is anxiety-provoking, sometimes even despairing. What have we done to our beautiful world? Music holds it all together. Philip Glass composed the main score, with additional music by Iranian composer Sussan Deyhim (who also plays a “muse” type character, half-woman, half-tree).
Reggio’s vision has three central figures, symbolic and archetypal, but with shifting meanings. An opera maestro declaims his incomprehensible song to the masses, his figure a towering monolith, his eyes wild and fanatical. Behind him looms the walls of a Coliseum, and his figure is threatening, a demi-god dictator, gesturing and bending the masses to his will. There’s a female figure, a living half-human Yggdrasill (Sussan Deyhim), whose song helps create—or at least sustain—the living world. In the final segment, a “mentor” appears (Mike Tyson, of all people!), who encourages the cowed lost children, acting as a sort of Pied Piper.
Once you leave Eden, of course, you can’t get back in. That’s the deal. At the end of the film, a question is asked in multiple languages: “Which age is this: the sunset or the dawn?” In the atom-bomb-haunted “Rebel Without a Cause,” Plato (Sal Mineo) asks Jim (James Dean) if he thinks the end of the world will come at night. Jim says, “No. At dawn.” Either way, it’s the end.
Watch Once Within a Time on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/once-within-a-time-mike-tyson/17458850
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: The Legend of the Stardust Brothers
The Legend of The Stardust Brothers (1985) review.
By P-J Van Haecke
Source: Psycho Cinema
Introduction
In 1985, the young Makoto Tezuka, son of manga godfather Osamu Tezuka, was approached by the famous musician and tv-personality Haruo Chicada with the question to make a movie for the soundtrack he had created for a non-existing movie. Makoto Tezuka, which by then had already directed various experimental narratives, accepted and directed what would become his feature-debut narrative.
Review
One day, Kan (Kan Takagi) and Shingo (Shingo Kubota), both singers of rival bands and both vying for fame and popularity, are given an invitation by a representative of the president of the talent agency Atomic Promotion, Minami (Kiyohiko Ozaki).
The following day, having arrived at the agency, they meet the innocent and charming Marimo (Kyoto Togawa), a girl who has, driven by her desire to force an audition with the president, been caught trespassing several times. Ultimately, in order to make Kan and Shingo agree to Minami’s proposal,she gives up her desire to become a singer, instead settling for a role as president of their fan-club. But as Kan and Shingo become stars, the will soon learn that fame always comes with nasty side effects.
The Legend of the Stardust Brothers is not just another over-the-top narrative about fame and the side-effects that often go together with fame, e.g. jealousy and addiction. The Legend of the Stardust Brothers – and this is amazing – still manages, even though the narrative is envisioned as pure entertainment, to evoke (intended or unintended) a political message against uniformity (Narra-note 1). This message, which might be more relevant today than at the time of this narrative’s release, is specifically important for Japan as such, as the concept of harmony still dictates much of the social fabric. One can formulate the ultimate message of the narrative as follows: In order to combat the political forces focused on disciplining society into uniformity and obedience, diversity and the freedom of expression – subjectivity as such – are our only weapons.
The Legend of Stardust Brothers – see the visuals framing Minami’s first song – also criticizes the system of agencies as well as the blind desire for fame that drives many young people. Besides evoking the problematic power agencies have – a problem persisting up until this day – it also underlines the naivety of people who willingly give up their own agency, their own right to decide. Last but not least, The Legend of The Stardust Brothers questions the often problematic connection between mass media and politics, i.e. media as the mouthpiece of politics, entertainment as crowd-control and political influence.
The Legend of The Stardust Brothers truly deserves the signifier ‘legend’. While the main narrative thread may very well be an approximation of “what truly happened” – as is implied by the very end – the framed and presented narrative is nothing other than the exaggerated and at some times rather absurd version of Shingo and Kan. This absurdity at the level of the narrative is supported by cinematographical absurdity and the energy to be found at the level of the acting performances.
The cinematographical ‘absurdity’ is especially sensible at the level of the effects. While the various cheap special-effects betray the limitations of the budget ‐ and may even cause some frowns – these effects have after 33 years also attained a certain charm. We would even say that the cheapness of various effects help emphasizing the craziness and absurdity of the narrative as such. But these so-called cheap effects should not detract the spectator from those effects that blend fluently into the narrative fabric, e.g. the colour divide in the opening song, the fun practical horror effects, the animation sequence, and the instances of stop-motion. As a matter of fact, it has to be applauded that Makoto Tezuka, in full knowledge of the limitations of his budget, realized, in a rather bold fashion, his cinematographical vision without much compromise.
In Makoto’s framing, it is very easy to realize that, at various instances in the narrative, visual composition took preference over cinematographical continuity. In the catchy opening song, there are some compositional choices – choices deliberately braking the continuity – that have no other effect than heighten the fun. In other words, they function successfully as tongue-in-the-cheek visual puns.Furthermore, many of the visual effects – the effects we mentioned above – applied in the later narrative can be seen in the same way, as visual elements focused on fun.
There is a certain youthful energy that supports the entire narrative, an energy that emanates from Shingo Kubota and Kan Takagi and – as mentioned before – gets empowered by the bold way the narrative is framed as such. It is especially this energy, paired with those moments of charming comedic over-acting – over-acting often function of the amateurism of the concerned actors (see for instance Kiyohiko Ozaki’s performance) – that turn The Legend Of The Stardust Brothers into a 100 minutes long crazy roller-coaster of fun and musical entertainment.
The music of The Legend Of The Stardust Brothers is utterly fantastic. Besides creating the fun eighties vibe that persists throughout the narrative, the infectious songs allow the spectator to enjoy a wide range of genres popular in the eighties. It is also evident that the music genres have also dictated the performances as such – ISSAY’s performance for instance brings the style of David Bowie wonderfully to live.
The Legend of the Stardust Brothers is one of those rare narratives that has become better by aging, instead of turning ugly and sour. While the ripeness of the narrative is not able to beautify all its faults, the pure fun oozing from the narrative and the performances secures the enjoyment the spectator can extract from this energetic and truly irresistible legend. In other words, the time for this narrative to become, thanks to the release of the DVD/Blu-ray by Third Windows Films, a cult-classic has finally arrived.
Narra-note 1: This concerns the revelation of Kaoru’s father. For more information, one can read our exclusive report of our meeting with Makoto Tezuka.
Watch The Legend of the Stardust Brothers on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/the-legend-of-the-stardust-brothers-shingo-kubota/17400468
Changing Relationships
As much as Danielle’s support motivated me and as fortunate as I was to have it, I couldn’t help but question whether I deserved it. Before the crash I was well aware that my job pulled in less income than her’s, so I compensated by doing chores she was less inclined to do such as vacuuming, fixing things, taking out the trash and recycling, anything dealing with technology, etc. I also took pride in providing at least a sense of security and stability. Now I’ve become a liability and source of instability, no longer being able to contribute economically other than disability claims and needing a lot more resources to sustain my health.
Just as my role in my marriage was altered, I thought about how all of my relationships would be fundamentally changed. I regretted never deepening any of the numerous workplace friendships I formed over the past few years. There were many coworkers I genuinely liked but never spoke to at greater length than sharing short anecdotes or trading compliments and pleasantries either because of social awkwardness or perceived lack of time. Now I know I should have made time because I’ll miss even those brief interactions and it’ll be just a matter of time before we fade out of each other’s lives.
I’ve never had a huge circle of friends but felt close to all of them, though I could have done more to express it. I’d make an effort to show up when invited to get-togethers and even organized my own, though in recent years such occasions became less frequent. I assumed most friends had become too busy with major life changes such as new jobs, new homes, kids, etc. When I saw all of them come out in support after my injury, I felt intense gratitude as well as regret for not reaching out more before.
Seeing my mother in Neuro ICU and the hazy memory of my father in Trauma ICU, while comforting, also reminded me of how relatively frail they now are compared to my childhood memories of the 70s and 80s. This should have been the time I started doing more to help them instead of needing more of their help. The same could be said for my in-laws, who continue to do so much to help Danielle and me despite having health issues of their own.
As an escape from the guilt and regret associated with others, my thoughts drifted further inward.
After the Crash 