Material in A Time To Stir
http://www.laweekly.com/2008-09-18/film-tv/at-last/
Biblical proportions
By Scott Foundas
Tuesday, September 16th 2008
The most vital movie I ended up seeing at this year's Toronto
International Film Festival didn't have its first screening until the
festival's final day and is, in the words of its own creator, not a
movie at all but rather a piece of "visual history."
At more than four hours, it also isn't finished yet, with more than
an hour of introductory material reportedly already assembled in the
editing room and additional footage still to be shot. But even in its
current form, Paul Cronin's A Time to Stir strikes me as a major film
about the American Left, its splintering and factionalizing, and its
still-flickering embers.
Cronin takes a single subjectthe April 1968 occupation of Columbia
University by radicalized members of the Students for a Democratic
Society and the Student Afro-American Societyand proceeds to map it
from nearly every conceivable angle. Amassed"carved out" might be
more accuratefrom more than 100 hours of new interviews plus
thousands of archival images, the film begins as a minute-by-minute
account of the occupation as told by the occupiers (including former
SDS leader Mark Rudd and former SAS leader Bill Sales, both of whom
attended the Toronto screening). Cronin then folds in other voicesa
lot of themincluding the faculty members who found themselves caught
between a rock (the intractable students) and a hard place (the
ineffectual campus administration); the journalists (including NPR's
Robert Siegel, then an anchor at Columbia's WKCR radio station) who
reported from the scene; those students who eventually took to
protesting the protestors; and the police officers who, one week
after the unrest began, brought the bloody curtain down.
Coming on the heels of so many shallow, nostalgia-tinged portraits of
'60s radicalism (including the Oscar-nominated The Weather
Underground), Cronin's film is remarkably astute and tough-minded
about the complex dogma of revolutionary movements: the divergent
personal, political, and (especially in the case of Columbia) racial
agendas; the razor's edge between liberalism and imperialism; the
oft-misguided impetuousness of youth; the indifference of the masses.
But where does A Time to Stir go from here? To DVD? To marathon
screenings in underground cinemas? To every high-school classroom in
America? Wherever it ends up, this is a film that demands to be seen.
Cronin's massive Venn diagram of conflicting and congruent ideologies
could be viewed as an apt metaphor for Toronto itself: a giant
celluloid campus where, the further one strays from the red carpet
and the overhyped Hollywood premieres, the likelier one is to find
encouraging signs that the festival programmers haven't entirely
forsaken art in favor of commerce. Night after night, sold-out crowds
jammed into the screening room at the Art Gallery of Ontario (by no
means the festival's smallest venue) to see new work by both
éminences grises and bold new voices from the cinematic avant-garde,
including the latest films by Jean-Marie Straub (Le Genou
d'Artemide), Nathaniel Dorsky (Winter, Sarabande), and Jennifer
Reeves, whose dual-projection When it Was Blue is an alternately
euphoric and unsettling visual symphony of earthly creation and destruction.
Among more narrative fare, German director Christian Petzold's
Jerichow stars Petzold's regular actress/muse, Nina Hoss, as the
beautiful trophy wife of a Turkish-German fast-food vendor, who finds
herself increasingly drawn to the brooding ex-soldier who comes to
work for the couple as a driver. A loose reworking of The Postman
Always Rings Twice done in Petzold's signature coolly detached style,
this is a taut, brilliantly acted thriller, void of any inessential
details, in which the characters simmer with violent passions but the
movie itself rarely breaks a sweat. Yet, here in Torontoand in
Venice the week beforeJerichow, like most of Petzold's previous
movies, screened to barely a whisper from most in the international
press. And this is a filmmakerone of the most exciting to come from
his country since the heyday of the New German Cinemawhose name
critics should be shouting from the rooftops.
Finally, in a category unto itself, there was Birdsong, another
minimalist (but hardly stark), naturalist fable from Spanish director
Albert Serra, whose spare, soulful Don Quixote riff, Honor de
Cavalleria, received a brief U.S. theatrical release last year. For
his second feature, Serra has turned his attention to another
hallowed talethe birth of Jesus and the ensuing pilgrimage of the
three wise menand filmed it in the same wonderfully idiosyncratic,
deadpan style, with nonprofessional actors improvising in a mix of
Catalan and Hebrew against the majestic deserts and forests of the
Canary Islands, and an actual lamb cast as the Lamb of God. Joseph
complains about the heat. The wise men stop to empty sand from their
shoes and, in the film's most beguiling scene, talk about their
dreams. When an angel appears, the resolutely material image is like
something out of Dreyer. The recipient of one of the more contentious
post-screening Q&A sessions I've ever witnessed in docile Toronto,
Birdsong prompted one aggrieved viewer to ask Serra, simply, "Why?"
But after 90-odd minutes of this fearlessly original, sometimes
transcendently beautiful filmand 10 days of too few such visionsI
would've thought the answer was obvious: "Why not?"
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