The 45th New York Film Festival was host to two very poignant political films that we saw – Ed Pincus and Lucia Smalls’ ‘’The Axe in the Attic,’ a brilliant verite documentary on the post-Katrina diaspora, and ‘Redacted,’ the Brian de Palma pseudo-documentary set in war-torn Iraq.
‘Ax in the Attic’ was screened on the first weekend of the festival, and was very poorly attended at the screening we saw. Most of the audience consisted of stalwarts of the New York documentary community, and the house seemed to be barely half-full. That was a shame. This film not only heralded the triumphant return to documentary filmmaking for Ed Pincus, whose 1965 documentary ‘Black Natchez’ (which was screened at the 1966 New York Film Festival) is a pioneering work of political documentary filmmaking (and will be released, finally, on DVD in the coming year), but also captured a different side of the experience than the phenomenal Spike Lee documentary project, ‘When the Levees Broke.’ The Pincus-Small film is a very tightly woven piece, running just under two hours, that is both a comic road movie of two stereotypical northeastern liberal documentarians in the bayou, as well as a searing indictment of our nation’s infrastructure – both human and political.
‘The Axe in the Attic’ begins with Lucia Small explaining how stunned she was at the Katrina disaster; she started videotaping her t.v. screen, and finally got around to calling Pincus to join her on a road trip to capture the suffering of those displaced by the storm. Their visits to refugee camps (displaced persons camps, perhaps more appropriately) in Alabama and Louisiana are heart-wrenching, and their visits to a family in Pittsburgh, who experienced their first snow, and another family in Austin, Texas, capture the fractured nature of the post-Katrina experience: no one knows whether there will be a place to return to in the future. Pincus and Small are back-and-forth throughout the film regarding the ethics of “getting involved” with the events and the people they film, including Small’s conscience battle over giving money to a refugee camp victim. The two make for an unlikely documentary couple that could become a parody reality show, particularly given the colorful characters they document (one fellow is filmed on the site of his former trailer, along with his former wife, who is also suffering from the storm). Pincus and Small are comic in their dialogue amongst each other; their decision to turn the camera on themselves is a rare, bold move and it pits them in the story of northeasterners trying to connect with fellow countrymen who are, in effect, without a country. Lucia and Ed’s arguments are at the crux of the documentarian’s struggle to remain neutral in any story. This becomes impossible in ‘The Axe in the Attic:’ the filming that the two conduct over a six-month period is heroic.
Unlike ‘When the Levees Broke,’ the effect of ‘The Axe in the Attic’ is raw and live. Lee’s masterpiece, with a much larger budget, and the benefit of a Terence Blanchard score, seems slick and polished by comparison. Yet, the effect of that work is obvious: there are no words for what the pictures captured describe. Here, there is no obvious conclusion. Are the filmmakers inserting themselves into lives, challenging the fragile balance of a destroyed landscape, or are they creating a document that is paramount to democracy itself? As Spike Lee said in an interview last year, his goal was to create an unending series of follow-ups, similar to Michael Apted’s ‘7 Up’ chronicle, of the post-Katrina situation. The reason here, is clear: there are untold thousands of stories from Katrina that will help tell the story of this tragedy and Pincus and Small are, in essence, the troubled conscience of a nation that watched, helplessly, as the pictures rolled into CNN and onto their t.v. screens.
The Lower 9th Ward is pictured as a no-man’s land that is the place to which some of Pincus and Smalls’ subjects return, and a political battleground, in which local activists prevent homes from demolition while trying to fend for themselves. The overwhelming sense of despair amidst a Faulkneresque setting of con men and wayward types is potent. The duo have great subjects for their film and they also have the good fortune to capture some jaw-dropping moments, including the visit to a FEMA center in Texas that later disavows any knowledge of the visit by the claimants.
Video footage shot by some of the victims is included, and this is user-generated content of the most valuable sort: rare footage of a disaster and the hopeless reactions of the locals. Horrors are recounted on-camera, too, and there is enough displacement that the viewer feels – with no sense of comfort – the pain and loss embodied by Katrina’s wrath and the government’s sheer negligence. The film concludes with a postlude of where the subjects are today; some having returned to New Orleans, most others sure never to return. Looming, always, in the background of the film is the Bush administration’s pathetic response to a tragedy that, while always feared in the Gulf region, created a replay loop of the 1927 flood, which sent many blacks north to points, including Chicago (Chicago blues, if not born from this flood, was certainly informed heavily by it).
Subjects, white and black, rage at the government’s criminal negligence, in a way that places the viewer inside the context of a road trip, and not in a political cycle. New Orleans was the linchpin of our success in the War of 1812, with Andrew Jackson emerging victorious and, finally, securing our nation from foreign invaders. That New Orleans should languish as a place “to which we can no longer go” is a sign of 21st century American rot and defeat; a strong counterpart to both 20th-century American “can-do” spirit and a sign that our treasure is wasted in another hell-hole (Iraq) and not spent with any purpose in our own land.
Speaking of Iraq, Brian de Palma has overcome the ‘Black Dahlia’ disaster of 2006 in making a strong comeback bid. The always provocative de Palma has never been without some back-story, and ‘Redacted’ played at the festival with the background of broadcast blowhards shouting (in tinny voices) whispers of “treason,” whether they bothered to see the film or not (Bob Dole, then running for president in 1996, decried a film that he hadn’t seen; in that case, if was ‘Trainspotting,’ for those keeping score).
More people have heard of the ruckus created by this film, or seen the IFC video that had made the online video rounds, in which De Palma gets into a shouting match during a New York Film Festival director’s talk session with Magnolia Pictures president Eamonn Bowles over the issue of the film’s final scene, in which still photos of Iraq atrocities are “redacted” with black ink marks over victim’s faces. This clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDNWXgM9F70) is brilliant theater; pitting de Palma, presumably, in an artiste’s spat with Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment, ‘Redacted’ is a brilliantly subversive film that plays off the current war’s ironic circumstance as the most-photographed and most-videotaped conflict that, simultaneously, is the most silenced war. This irony is brilliantly cross-cut between the various uses of video in this war, from U.S. military internal footage to embedded journalists footage, to Iraqi news footage, French documentary footage, Al-Qaeda “insurgent” online video postings of terrorist acts against American troops, and online video rants (most notably from a “teenage” woman whose tattooed, silhouetted figure frames her barely coherent rant).
The U.S. Marine Corp platoon’s documentarian, Pvt. Salazar, is a cherubic figure who utters the film’s richest ironic joke: that he enlisted as a way to get into film school. His “thesis film” includes shots of his cut-up mates reading (a West Virginian aesthete who reads John O’Hara’s ‘Appointment in Samarrah’ as a way to acclimate himself with the territory he is supposedly defending); playing cards; fighting, and being dressed down by their commanding officer. The film sets its action in the Samarah region, following a platoon that has just learned that its tour has been indefinitely extended, and shows the individual soldiers already melting. The boredom captured in the checkpoint missions and the quotidian back-and0forth in the village is numbing. The crux of the film is a rape of a 15-year-old girl and the subsequent murder of her family members that is captured on film. This scene is bookended by security camera footage that captures the proponent’s desperate dialogue to justify the actions and then cover them up. One of the most chilling moments of the film is the iChat session between the ultimate whistle-blower of the platoon, Maloney, and his presumably Marine veteran father. His father order shim to quash any mention of the actions, saying “we don’t need another Abu Ghraib here.” The de Palma film casts Iraq as a failed ‘Appointment in Samaraah’ and an extended riff on the 2004 expose of the Abu Ghraib prison: abuse, torture and inhumanity without any purpose is the way of semi-existence in Iraq. The inquiry that follows the atrocity is perfunctory, at best, and sums up the Bush administration’s laissez-faire “stuff happens” attitude to incompetence, indifference, and outright brutality on the part of ill-trained, over-stretched, and overwrought U.S. troops.
De Palma’s coup de grace in ‘Redacted’ is showing Pvt. Salazar setting up a direct-address shot on a tripod, only to have the camera capture his own capture, at the hands of masked figures swooping him into a van. Salazar later dies, literally, for his art, as the insurgents videotape the be-heading of Salazar, in Shakespearean form. Salazar’s camera is later commandeered by his mates who, as a drunken tribute to their fallen comrade, turn the camera on each other. The instigator of the rape, Reno Flake, is captured on tape essentially confessing to his crimes by virtue of his family’s lawless streak. He is later shown in a videotape of his interrogation, which finally convicts him. The cast of ‘Redacted’ is fantastic; this is very tight ensemble acting in a picture that deserves greater review (its box-office receipts are staggeringly low).
EPILOGUE: That Ed Pincus, who is a well-known figure to us film-student types, should return after almost 30 years to the documentary front-lines is a sign of a trend both positive and troubling: that a 69-year-old former leading lion in documentary filmmaking should be forced to get off his couch – and not a 27-year-old, as Pincus was in 1965 – to tell a story that is one of the great American tragedies of our time is both laudable and laughable. Where are today’s up-and-coming verite filmmakers? And what will it take to get them to express themselves (other than on YouTube)? Pincus literally left the documentary scene after, ironically, being terrorized by a disturbed subject of ‘Black Natchez,’ a civil rights worker who threatened him and, later, murdered Allard Lowenstein, U.S. Congressman, in his Manhattan office. After years as a successful recluse, establishing a flower and bulb farm in Vermont with his wife, Pincus returned to the filmmaking fold. Pincus confessed to me after the film that he had only been in New Orleans once previously, while making ‘Black Natchez’ (obviously a mad-cap weekend that did not include interviewing subjects for a film…), and he seemed to suggest, in several ways, that we would be seeing and hearing more from him soon.
