Editor’s Note: I’ve decided to begin posting some reviews of films screening at Hot Docs 2009 early, hopefully helping anyone attending make some decisions about what to see.
Paris 1919 is screening on Friday May 1 at 7:00pm and Sunday May 10 at 11:00am at the Isabel Bader Theatre.
Paris 1919 (Director: Paul Cowan): Having read the book by Margaret MacMillan on which this documentary is based, I was a little dubious upon hearing that director Cowan would be using re-enactments to create the atmosphere of the Versailles Peace Conference. But wisely, he chose to use these strictly as atmosphere, letting the archival footage and especially the strong narration by Canadian actor R.H. Thomson carry the weight of the story.
In the early months of 1919, the world, weary of fighting, gathered in Paris to hammer out a peace accord. But the Great War ended in an armistice, not a surrender, and so there was much at stake for all the parties. The old empires had collapsed and into the vacuum stepped a man promising self-determination for all the peoples of the world. US president Woodrow Wilson offered his own version of Obama-like hope, especially to the smaller nations of the world who had heretofore been the pawns of imperial powers. The defeated Germans also hoped that Wilson’s steady hand would deliver peace with justice. Alas, it was not to be.
Instead, Britain and France were determined to bleed Germany dry for war reparations. Both countries had suffered enormously, especially France, and they had little regard for the sufferings of Germany. Voters in both countries were putting enormous pressure on their leaders, David Lloyd George of Britain and Georges Clemenceau of France, to bankrupt Germany as punishment for her guilt in starting the war. In contrast, Wilson was obsessed with the idea of establishing a League of Nations, a body that would arbitrate disputes between nations in the hope of preventing war. His idealism and naivete were soon challenged, and gradually he made many compromises in order to secure support from the other leaders for the League.
The end result was disastrous for Germany and ultimately for Europe and the world. Maps were redrawn displacing millions of people, assets were seized and monetary damages demanded. The German delegation went home angry and humiliated. In the years that followed, the German people’s resentment was ripe for exploitation and rising nationalism soon engulfed the whole country, leading to Nazism and another world war.
Cowan’s film couldn’t have encompassed all the various negotiations that went on at Versailles, and huge chunks of MacMillan’s book are simply passed over, including the fate of countries like Poland and Turkey. But he captures the essence of the power struggle between the leaders, and makes some great choices in the re-enactments. By focusing on minor characters like Harold Nicolson and especially economist John Maynard Keynes, we get a real feel for what it was like for the bureaucrats labouring in smoky rooms to untie the Gordian knot of European grievances, especially when they felt their leaders were pursuing the wrong course.
I think the best compliment I can pay to Cowan’s film is to say that it left me wanting more, and for that, I will return to Margaret MacMillan’s excellent book, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World.
Official web site of the film
(8/10)
Tagged as:
#hotdocs09,
history,
war,
worldwar1
Hunger (2008, Director: Steve McQueen): I’ve been finding it very hard to formulate my thoughts on this film, but as I said to my wife as we walked out of the screening last night, I’d be very surprised if anything else I see at TIFF this year could be better. Director McQueen is a visual artist who is well known for his video installations, but this is his first feature film. Hunger won the Camera d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and I expect it to win many more awards once it’s released theatrically.
The film portrays the events surrounding a hunger strike that took place in 1981 in the Maze prison in Belfast, Northern Ireland. By the time the hunger strike had been called off after 7 months, 10 men had starved themselves to death. The first to die was Bobby Sands, 27-year-old leader of the republican prisoners. Hunger begins by showing a few other peripheral characters but about fifteen minutes in settles on Sands (Michael Fassbender), an intense and defiant man who is leading the jailed members of Catholic paramilitary organizations like the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Irish National Liberation Army in a protest to gain separate status as political prisoners. The problem is that they’re facing a British government led by Margaret Thatcher, a woman for whom compromise was impossible. At the beginning of the film, conditions in the prison are deplorable, made even worse by the prisoners’ practice of dumping their urine into the hallways and smearing their cell walls with feces. They refuse to wear prison uniforms and so are often naked, and they refuse to bathe or shave or have their hair cut. In these barbaric conditions, they look like animals and are treated like animals by the nakedly partisan (ie. Protestant and Unionist) prison system.
But far from using words for exposition, the first third of the film is remarkably sparse in dialogue, but intensely rich with images and, especially, sounds. McQueen uses close up shots of a guard’s bloody knuckles, and we can guess how they were bloodied. We hear the terrifying beat of batons on the riot squad’s shields, and we know that violence is in the air. Even in the silence, we can feel the tension of something threatening to erupt at any moment. When Sands is introduced, it’s in a brutal scene of guards dragging him from his cell to be forcibly shaved and washed. He seems unable to just submit to this humiliation and he’s beaten severely. The camera doesn’t spare us any details. We also see in close ups the way that the prisoners smuggle communications in and out of the prison, using their bodies ingeniously to conceal messages. But after this is discovered, there’s another horrific scene in which each prisoner is submitted to a painful and humiliating body cavity search. It’s wrenching stuff, and when Sands decides to start the hunger strike campaign, it’s almost as if he’s decided that it’s the only form of control he has left over his own body.
The middle section of the film is a tour de force of acting and directorial restraint. In one static two-shot that extends more than twenty minutes, Sands and his priest (Liam Cunningham) argue over the morality and efficacy of using a hunger strike to get what the prisoners want. This section felt like watching a play, and the lack of facial close ups forces the audience to find visual clues in multiple places, in posture and gesture and tone of voice. The interplay between the two characters is compelling and by the end, Sands’ determination has grown.
The final third is almost completely free of spoken dialogue. Instead we watch as Sands’ body wastes away and his mind begins to inhabit a different place. To watch this man do violence to his own body in this way is almost even crueller than the earlier scenes, but he reaches a sort of purity of purpose that lives in his eyes, which are blazing until the very end.
Although this is a narrative film, and based on a real story, the way in which the story is told is almost completely different than most other narrative films. Imagery and sound design are as equally important as dialogue and character development. This was completely absorbing and one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theatre. Maybe that’s why I find myself so inarticulately fumbling to try to describe it.
P.S. In a scene that almost derailed the whole experience, a group of about ten women sat in the front rows and were visited before the screening by actor Michael Fassbender, who proceeded to sign autographs and have his photo taken with each of them as they clucked and screamed and giggled incessantly. My wife and I couldn’t figure out what was going on until at some point in the post-screening Q&A it was mentioned that he had also starred in 300. The irony was thick. From a slick blockbuster accused by many of being a thinly-veiled fascist propaganda piece preparing Americans for a war with Iran to a deeply personal film that explored the value of a single life. The women were undoubtedly impressed by Fassbender’s “ripped” body in the blockbuster, and I wonder how they reacted to seeing his “torn” body in Hunger.
Trailer
Here is the Q&A with director Steve McQueen and actor Michael Fassbender from after the screening:
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Duration: 15:37
(10/10)
Tagged as:
#tiff08,
history,
northernireland,
politics,
uk
Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived (2008, Director: Koji Masutani): This film is somewhat awkardly titled. It’s not a re-creation of an alternate timeline where JFK survives. Rather, it’s a carefully-argued essay whose thesis is that, based on the way John F. Kennedy dealt with several military crises early in his presidency, he would not have escalated the war in Vietnam and that perhaps the tragedy of almost 60,000 American dead (not to mention 2,000,000 Vietnamese) could have been averted.
Narrated and written by Professor James Blight of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, who was Errol Morris’ advisor on The Fog of War, Virtual JFK examines six different crises faced by the young president in his abbreviated time in office. Two involved Cuba (the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962), one was European (the construction of the Berlin wall in 1961), and the other three involved Southeast Asia (two confrontations over Vietnam, one over Laos). In every case, Kennedy stared down the hawks in his administration and the military commanders who were advocating war. In every case, his caution avoided catastrophe, most notably in the Cuban missile crisis, which many historians believe was the closest the world ever came to nuclear war. Blight has every reason to believe that Kennedy would have prevailed on the subject of Vietnam as well. What he doesn’t discuss is the possibility that this had anything to do with JFK’s assassination, although that hypothesis has been circulated by more than a few people.
Overall, this was enjoyable and well-argued, but not exceptional. On a personal level, I enjoyed seeing so much footage of Kennedy’s press conferences. His charisma is clearly evident in his good-natured exchanges with journalists, even when he was under considerable stress. It also surprised me how much Kennedy had to deal with in such a short time. The world was going through some major upheavals, and we’re fortunate that Kennedy was guiding a restless America with such a steady hand. This film shows us how much more tragic his death was than we may have believed. Apart from all the usual sentimental stuff about Camelot and the loss of hope, America lost a man of caution who had been a warrior of peace.
Incidentally, some reviewers have complained that the film makes a blunt parallel with George W. Bush and his handling of the Iraq war, but the connection is never made overtly. In the times we’re living in, however, it’s hard not to find a critique almost everywhere we look.
Official site of the film
Watson Institute for International Studies page on the film
Trailer
(7/10)
Tagged as:
#hotdocs08,
history,
jfk,
vietnam,
war
Editor’s Note: I have to make particular mention of
the film’s excellent and comprehensive web site. The directors have done a great job using the web to generate interest and obtain screening dates in cities across North America. As a result of audience interest expressed on the web site, the film will open in Toronto on April 25th and play until May 1st (with a possible extension depending on ticket sales) at the
Carlton Cinema. Check the link the week before for showtimes.
The Singing Revolution (2006, Directors: James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty): My wife and I are big fans of small countries. We will visit Iceland this fall and have taken holidays in Cuba, Slovenia and Uruguay in the past few years. There’s something inspiring about the indomitability of small nations, especially if they’ve been forcefully occupied or dominated by other countries. Estonia certainly fits the bill, and my dream trip is to one day spend a week each in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty are a husband and wife team who have documented the unique struggle of Estonia to emerge from the Soviet Union as an independent nation, and they’ve created a wonderful film.
For most of its history, Estonia has been dominated by much larger countries, and the 20th century was particularly cruel. This country of just over a million gained its independence in 1920 only to be invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939. As World War II raged, Hitler’s armies occupied Estonia as part of their invasion of the Soviet Union, and so there was another foreign occupier. By 1944, though, the Nazis had been expelled by the resurgent Red Army and for the better part of the next half-century, Estonia was occupied by Soviet troops and forcibly integrated into the USSR. But Estonia also had a very strong cultural tradition of folk singing, and despite its small size, possesses one of the largest collections of folk songs in the world. Every five years since 1869, a huge folk singing festival called Laulupidu was held in the university town of Tartu. At these events, huge choirs of 25,000–30,000 would sing on stage at the same time, expressing their unity and pride in their national identity. During the Soviet occupation, these festivals were practically the only allowed outlet for Estonian culture, despite being, for the most part co-opted to promote Communist ideas. At the end of the official program (Communist songs sung in Russian), the choirs were allowed to sing three or four songs in Estonian. At the 1947 festival, Estonian composer Gustav Ernasaks presented a new song he’d written based on a century-old Estonian poem. “Mu isamaa on minu arm†(“Land of My Fathers, Land That I Loveâ€) became the unofficial Estonian national anthem and was sung lustily by the crowds at each festival. In 1969, at the centennial of the festival, the Soviet authorities banned it, but the crowds spontaneously took it up and sang it several times. It’s clear how much singing and this festival meant to the Estonian national identity.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 with his policies of “glasnost” and “perestroika”, the Estonians saw their chance to reclaim their culture and their independence. Political dissidents used music to inspire protest, and by 1991, Estonia had declared independence. Unlike its Baltic neighbours Latvia and Lithuania, there was no violence despite the threat of Soviet retaliation. The Estonian character values patience. As narrator Linda Hunt expresses it, “patience is a weapon, caution, a virtue.” Because of their small size, the Estonian resistance knew it could never triumph by force, and so they carefully navigated a very delicate process and achieved a practically bloodless victory. The film does a good job of documenting these amazing and tension-filled days.
Today, Estonia is a thriving democracy, a member of NATO and the European Union. The music festival continues, and for those who were involved in this still-fresh revolution, it is a place to share their memories with their children. And of course to sing “Mu isamaa on minu armâ€, loudly and without fear.
If I have one small criticism of the film, it would be its microscopic focus on Estonia to the exclusion of the other Baltic Republics. There are a few tantalizing mentions of events going on in Latvia and Lithuania (in particular, a protest where citizens of all three countries joined hands and created a 600km long human chain to protest the Soviet occupation), but it would have been enlightening to see in more detail how these three small countries worked together to take on the entire Soviet Union. Three distinct cultures, yes, but also three necessary allies. Perhaps that story will have to wait for my own trip.
Official Site
Trailer
(8/10)
Tagged as:
baltics,
choir,
communism,
estonia,
history,
music,
politics,
singing
All The President’s Men (Director: Alan J. Pakula): I was seven years old when the Watergate scandal broke in 1972, and I learned about it mostly from reading Mad magazine, believe it or not. Still, 35 years later, I’m not exactly sure exactly what happened, and I seriously believe that nobody under 50 even cares. But what Watergate showed us is that the abuse of power in a democracy is not new, but that stupid and evil people sometimes don’t get away with their crimes. That is, if the media is doing its job.
All The President’s Men was originally a book published by the two men responsible for breaking the story, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, both reporters for the Washington Post at the time of the scandal. Pakula’s film teamed up two of the era’s hottest actors, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, and attempted to dramatize the story of perhaps the biggest political scandal of the 20th century. But though the film scooped four Oscars (including an adapted screenplay Oscar for writer William Goldman), I don’t think it’s aged well.
Audiences approaching the film today with little background knowledge will come away baffled, since the story moves along at breakneck pace, with names being tossed out with no context. The filmmakers may have assumed that in 1976, people would still be familiar with the story, since it occupied the newspapers for months on end. But without that background, it can seem pretty opaque. As well, we learn next to nothing about any of the characters, most notably our intrepid journalists. Worst of all, despite a running time well over two hours, the conclusion of the film is remarkably weak. A final roadblock seems to be wrapped up hastily and the ending disappoints with nothing but a teletype machine informing us of several indictments. There’s not even any archival footage of Nixon talking about the scandal, nor of his resignation.
Despite its obvious weaknesses, I still feel this is an important film, because it inspires the belief that journalism’s function is to empower democracy by speaking the truth to power. It’s outrageous that increasing corporate ownership and consolidation of the media landscape has left our democracy weaker and less accountable. My only wish would be for someone to make a strong documentary about Watergate to educate a younger generation. Maybe they could even recycle some of Mad’s satirical Watergate songs.
(7/10)
Tagged as:
DVD,
history,
politics
