Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance

In the summer of 1990, war almost erupted in a small town in Canada — over a golf course. The Mohawk Nation squared off against the Canadian police and army in a land dispute that traced back to the 17th century, when the French first tried to seize the area surrounding the island of Montreal.

The documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance presents a no-holds-barred account of the tense stalemate between the two sides that dragged on for months and nearly resulted in a full-scale battle. The movie is directed by Alanis Obomsawin, a Native American filmmaker who belongs to the Abenaki Nation. She and her crew stayed with the Mohawks through the entire confrontation, even after 1,000 Canadian troops surrounded their camp with guns and barbed-wire fences.

The basic issues of the confrontation seemed, at first, straightforward. The Mohawk village of Kanehsatake owned land that bordered the Canadian town of Oka. The folks of Oka wanted to expand a golf course, and that meant building on tribal land. The mayor of Oka, Jean Ouellette, decided to handle the affair in the old-fashioned way — he simply proceeded to take the land, without talking to the Mohawks. Not surprisingly, the Nation got mad.

In retaliation, the Mohawks erected a barricade across the dirt road that led to the golf course. Increasingly violent confrontations took place between members of the Nation and police, resulting in the death of an officer and the seizure of the Mercier Bridge by Mohawk warriors.

When the Quebec Human Rights Commission attempted to intervene, Canada's government knew it had a major problem on its hands. Technically, the Mohawk Nation is accepted by the Canadian government as a separate political entity from Canada. However, the administration of the conservative prime minister at the time,Brian Mulroney, didn't want to admit it. So,for all practical purposes, Canada and the Mohawk Nation entered a state of war.

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance successfully captures the pain, panic and confusion that dominated the events of 1990. Obomsawin is clearly concerned with the Mohawks' view of the confrontations, but she presents a clear and balanced understanding of both sides' perspectives. She also conveys the degree to which each side was miscommunicating with the other. (After a while, the townspeople of Kanehsatake and Oka wouldn't even speak to each other.)

Forbidden Love

"The whole world was full of stupid myths about women."

That comment is made by one of the interviewees in the documentary Forbidden Love. Stupid, pulp-mentality myth about lesbians — and women in general — is what the film successfully exposes in its recreation of cheap novels and sexual realities from the 1950s.

Produced for the National Film Board of Canada, Forbidden Love is a fascinating study of the pop culture and poignant realities of that eta. It begins with the lurid gay novels that filled paperback racks during die waning years of the Eisenhower age. Interspersed between the close-ups of melodramatic book covers are interviews with women who survived the mentally -— and sometimes physically — violent repression of the period. And guess what? Those women are still queer, and quite happy about, thank you very much.

The 1950s was a seriously screwy decade. The fact that these women, or any lesbians, survived it intact is a great tribute to their sheer fortitude.

Frosh: Nine Months in a Freshman Dorm

Lots of people have been telling us about the sorry state of the current generation of young folks. The documentary Frosh is one of the few films that have actually taken the time to talk with them, not at them. Frosh has no social agenda or cultural axes to grind. Instead, it reaches for a sympathetic overview of new college students who are about to undergo that awkward transition from teenage angst to an uncertain adulthood.

Videotaped during the 1990-91 academic year at Stanford University, Frosh opens with a picture post-card presentation of fresh faces, blue California skies and parents practicing their last rites of familial grasp. But once the luggage is unpacked and the final goodbyes are made to departing station wagons, the freshman students begin zeroing in on each other, discovering both common pursuits and just how different they are from each other. They don't realize it, but they've just taken the first steps toward realizing how little they actually know. This is called “the college experience.”

Since cultural diversity is virtually the motto of Stanford, the young men and women who reside in the freshman dorm represent a wide sampling of racial and social backgrounds. Nick, the resident bi-sexual, has a deft ability to disarm the concerns of the more conservative dormies. Shayne is the good-girl-from-a-Catholic-background who discovers feminism. Brandi, who's from a very proper, upper-class African-American family, initially has problems understanding Monique, a black woman from Oakland who has to deal with a crackhead mother and a mostly absent father. Then there's Cheng, a Chinese-American man from Ohio who's solidly Midwestern. (This group sounds like a cast for a TV sit-com.)

But Frosh isn't concerned with a parade of one-liners. The filmmakers (Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine) stick with these people through nine months of rap sessions, beer blasts, paper writing, and test cramming. A few of the kids end up either dropping out or transferring to easier schools. They all undergo changes, especially in the ol' ego department.

What's most refreshing about Frosh is its direct and honest approach to college life. We've been bombarded by such mediocre films as PCU, Threesome, and With Honors, in which the average student age is 30 and the main area of interest is hormonal.

Not that sex is far from the thoughts of many of the students in Frosh, but it's obvious that they're still trying to figure it out. Several of the men conduct a hysterically funny debate about why it's called a blow job, while another guy simply pines for a nice girlfriend.

Now, that's college as I remember it.

The War Room

See Bill run. See Bill stumble. See James Carville and George Stephanopoulos jump to the fax machines to perform heavy duty CPR. It’s all in a day’s work for the pair, who were the head honchos behind Bill Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, which is the elusive subject matter of The War Room, a documentary by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.

The subject is partly elusive by choice. The filmmakers weren’t given access to the inner sanctum of the Clinton campaign until after the New York State primary. Furthermore, neither Carville nor Stephanopoulos was dense enough to allow a film crew total access to every private meeting held during an election year in which mud flew like rain during a downpour.

The War Room does capture some of the outrageous high points of one of the most bizarre election years ever to unfold. There’s Gennifer Flowers doing a press conference that starts to play like a warm-up for Howard Stern’s show. George Bush goes on the attack, but winds up sounding more like an irate Chihuahua than the pit bull image he was trying to project. H. Ross Perot enters the race. Then he’s out. Then he’s in. Then he’s…ah, the heck with it.

Through it all, Clinton’s staff broke the world’s record for speed, as they zipped out corrections, refutations and their own brand of dirt and gossip. They were wired into the information superhighway and were determined to reinvent the techniques of electoral politics.

What The War Room captures best are the personality differences between Carville and Stephanopoulos. Amid the typically frantic state of the campaign headquarters, Craville cruises like a hungry shark caught snacking between meals. Maybe it was just the insistent munching of candy giving him a sugar rush, but Carville is repeatedly presented as carrying on like a tightly strung lunatic. Stephanopoulos has his moments of boyish enthusiasm, but most often he’s the calm center to Hurricane Carville’s storm.

There are a few surprises in The War Room, and its main weakness is that the actual campaign was more surreal than it appears on film. But it offers a good feel for the hardball maneuvers and idiotic scrambling that make up our political system.

The Panama Deception

The award-winning video documentary The Panama Deception is highly controversial: some of its assertions have been indirectly attacked by the U.S. Congress House Armed Services Investigative Subcommittee. Right-wing newspaper columnists – and a few liberals – have called it propaganda. And the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences gave it an Oscar this April for best documentary film.

The Panama Deception takes on the “official” line about the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. Dubbed “Operation Just Cause,” President Bush and the U.S. military insisted that the invasion was a necessary police action taken to arrest Manuel Noriega for drug dealing.

According to the U.S. government, the invasion successfully reinstated democratic rule in Panama, causing only minimal casualties in the process. The U.S. Army claimed to have ended Panama’s role as a banking center by the Colombian drug cartel. (The Army also had to admit that its troops couldn’t tell the difference between cocaine and tortilla flour.)

These facts are disputed by a wide variety of sources. Many human rights organizations have placed Panamanian civilian death toll at anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 people. Mass graves dug by the U.S. Army are still in the process of being discovered and searched. The largest ghetto in Panama City was destroyed by invading U.S. forces.

And, as many reporters have recently pointed out, drug-dealing and money-laundering are still big business in Panama. The only difference, according to some, is that Noriega ran a tighter ship.

But The Panama Deception goes even further. It argues that the invasion was a calculated plan to renege on the Panama Canal Treaty negotiated by President Carter and former Panamanian leader Gen. Omar Torrijos. It also suggests CIA involvement in the mysterious plane crash that killed Torrijos – and helped bring to power “The Company’s” good pal, Noriega.

The director of The Panama Deception is Barbara Trent, who previously produced Coverup: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair. Trent is an activist, and her documentaries make no claim to objectivity. In a sense, the propaganda charge is true – Trent is fully intent on arguing her case.

And much of the video is thoroughly convincing. With eye-witness interviews and rarely shown footage of the actual invasion, Trent exposes the basic brutality that has become a substitute for diplomacy.

In spite of its occasionally shrill tone – found mostly in the over-bearing narration by Elizabeth Montgomery – The Panama Deception is a hot and critically important piece of work.

Road Scholar

America is a big country. It’s a young country. It’s diverse. It’s a little crazy. That roughly sums up what Andrei Codrescu discovered during his cross-country journey in the documentary Road Scholar.

Codrescu is no Tocqueville, and his observations on American culture lack the critical perception of his 19th-century French counterpart. (Of course, Tocqueville didn’t drive a Cadillac, and Codrescu does – score one for Andrei.)

Codrescu is a Romanian-Jewish writer who came to the United States in the 1960s. He’s the author of numerous books of poetry and critical essays, but he’s probably best known as a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. His thick Transylvanian accent is immediately recognizable; so is his detached, slightly off-center sense of humor.

Though he didn’t know how to drive, Codrescu was persuaded to load up a film crew in a bright red Cadillac (convertible, naturally) and take a spin from New York to San Francisco. Born to be semi-wild, the Beat poet of Bucharest took the bold step of attending driving school.

Road Scholar opens with Codrescu graduating to the open freeways of his adopted land. For the rest of the film, he takes us on a meandering cruise from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, searching for the American utopia.

What he finds is a non-cohesive culture, a landscape of radically divergent communities that have shared aspirations, but very little common social ground. It’s as if the whole country was spinning in hundreds of different directions at once.

Even such basic forces as god, sex and money keep turning up in wildly different ways. The closet that Codrescu comes to the conventional “American dream” is a perfectly preserved, 1950s-era McDonald’s hamburger stand in Chicago.

Surprisngly, Codrescu also discovers that religion – albeit in widely diverging forms – is one of the main links that connects our disparate country. He stays briefly at a Mennonite community in upstate New York, he passes through enclaves of New Mexican Pueblo Indians, Sikh immigrants, die-hard hippies and New Age practitioners. He even meets a black gospel choir whose members combine singing with roller skating. (Yes, they call themselves the Holy Rollers.)

More than anything else, Road Scholar becomes a cockeyed spiritual quest. (Although, ironically, one thing Codrescu couldn’t find was an open church.)

Ultimately, Road Scholar offers a whimsical tour of a delightfully and deliriously perplexing land.

High Lonesome

For many people, bluegrass music is associated with rural fear and loathing.

That’s certainly the way it plays in the movies. Just think of the twanging guitars underscoring the mayhem in Bonnie and Clyde, or the musical duel that precedes the murderous river trip in Deliverance. In addition, bluegrass can invoke every bad hillbilly joke ever told. It’s practically become synonymous with the image of slope-browed, inbred cousins slithering out of trailer courts with their shotguns at the ready.

But as the documentary High Lonesome reminds us, bluegrass is one of the liveliest and most vital forms of music in our culture. Its influences reach all over the map, and it’s flexible enough to adapt to most anything thrown at it. In that regard, bluegrass is much like jazz – which is appropriate, since jazz is one of its sources.

High Lonesome centers on the career of Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. During the 1940s, Monroe and his band helped to popularize country music through their numerous radio appearances, and the group was once home to such legendary performers as Mac Wiseman (who narrates this film), Earl Scruggs, Lester Flatt and Jimmy Martin. In 1993, Monroe was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award for his contribution to music.

Monroe’s head was never turned by his long career in the recording industry, however. He comes across as a down-home mountain boy who clings to his roots. One of the most memorable images in High Lonesome is a visit Monroe paid to his boyhood home. The dilapidated frame house had been gutted of everything – everything, that is, except for the obvious value that Monroe himself placed on its tattered walls and shattered windows. He’s proof of the old saying that you sing bluegrass from the heart.

Monroe and his boys are integral to High Lonesome, but the group is only one runner in the movie’s swift race through the long history of bluegrass music. Rolling back to the original Scot-Irish immigrants who brought their ancient folk tunes to the hills of Kentucky and West Virginia, the documentary traces the crazy quilt development of Appalachian music. Its influences were many: black workers, brought in by the railroads, introduced the region to ragtime and jazz. The movies shared the Western songs of Gene Autry. Radio, meanwhile, suddenly opened backwater hamlets to a world of music. Bluegrass soaked it all in like a thick slab of bread dipped in gravy.

Then came the great northward journey, as the good ol’ boys loaded up their heaps and headed for the much-ballyhooed factory jobs up yonder. Routes 25 and 23 became the near mystical paths to such “paradises” as Chicago, Cleveland and Columbus. Not only did bluegrass music come with them, it even took on a new – and eventually more mournful – urban tune.

It’s this strong understanding of both the musical and sociological importance of bluegrass that makes High Lonesome such a good documentary. But being good doesn’t mean it’s dry. High Lonesome is a lot of fun – hell, you can even dance to it.

Gay Cinema Comes Out of the Closet

There’s always been a gay cinema – but, like much of gay and lesbian culture, it’s been largely unknown and virtually invisible.

But within the last decade, gay cinema has gone from being an underground presence to holding a lead position on the art house and film festival circuit. This weekend, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which sparked the gay rights movement, three of the most acclaimed – and, in some cases, the most controversial – gay documentaries of the past year will be presented in an inadvertent marathon of the New “Queer” Cinema.

Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness, Sex Is… and Fast Trip, Long Drop are radically divergent works, but they share a common defiance of a decrepit taboo on gay and lesbian culture that still simmers behind the right-wing cultural wars of the ‘90s.

A few pockets of society still decry the very existence of gays and lesbians, let alone the expression of their various lifestyles. Not surprisingly, this position has been historically supported in many aspects of our society, including the movie industry. Section Two, line four of the Motion Picture Production Code (adopted in March, 1930) simply states: “Sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden.” Though the word “perversion” was changed in 1961 to “aberration,” the extensive and exclusionary meaning of these few words banned the subject of homosexuality from the American screen for nearly 40 years. Or at least it tried. The Production Code policy was a form of tyranny that was occasionally overcome by filmmakers’ cleverness and the industry’s stupidity.

During the 1930s, such foreign films as Maedchen in Uniform and Vampyr were able to slip lesbian subplots under the low radars of the censors through a combination of vague suggestiveness and difficult symbolism. In Hollywood, Marlene Dietrich got to wear men’s clothes and kiss the ladies in Morocco, as long as it was a ploy to attract Gary Cooper’s attention. But it took the B movie Dracula’s Daughter to extensively breach the code, as the title femme fatale expressed a surprisingly strong interest in bohemian lifestyles and other women.

But the gay subterfuge of old Hollywood was never more than a slightly subversive crack within the stonewall of straight mainstream pictures. It wasn’t until the American experimental movement of the 1950s that some major fissures surfaced in the national sexual zeitgeist. The overt homosexual subject matter that dominated the movies of such avante-garde filmmakers as Kenneth Anger, James Broughton and Jack Smith forced the issue to the forefront through a combination of shock (Scorpio Rising and Flaming Creatures) and lyrical artistry (The Golden Position).

Despite their limited audiences, these experimental movies gradually influenced Hollywood. “The mainstream always co-opts what is fashionable in the avante-garde,” observes Melodie Calvert, Assistant Curator of Media at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Scorpio Rising, in part, became the inspiration for the drive-in hit The Wild Angels, which in turn helped to promulgate the leather-and-chain biker look.

The emergence of the gay rights movement in the ‘70s created a political agenda as well as a sudden sense of public visibility that helped to pave the way for such ground-breaking documentaries as The Word is Out and Gay U.S.A.. The idea that being gay was a social statement struck like a lightning bolt in dim parts of the film industry. Such independent-themed features such as Lianna and Deserts Hearts were mild at best, but they succeeded in making their subject viable at the box office.

“But in the early ‘80s, there still weren’t that many gay features around,” explains Calvert. “It was with the AIDS movement that the gay community became very active and, in the process, they made the independent circuit more open to gay film making.”

Ironically, the grim threat of the modern plague also served as the catalyst for a flurry of tightly focused and increasingly audacious films and videos. The new queer cinema is a mix of forces that, literally, are composed of the most elementary factors – life and death. That a positive message can be found in the struggle is the theme of Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness. The movie profiles the long-term AIDS survivors who were the subject of a recent photo book, Living Proof, and who discovered that testing positive doesn’t mean that one’s attitude must be negative.

Sex Is… goes for the nitty gritty through graphic footage and surprisingly candid interviews. It covers a range of gay male experiences from monogamous bliss to bath house orgies, and takes a risk of getting stuck on director Mark Huestis’ fascination with S&M technology. But Sex Is… also takes a valiant stand in defense of life over death as it offers a vivid chronicle of gay life before and after the virus.

The most interesting and complex of the three is the video Fast Trip, Long Drop by Gregg Bordowitz. Its wild mix of experimental visuals, angry satire and psycho-drama role playing gives Bordowitz ample room to vent against everything from his HIV status to the medical community, TV talk shows and his family. Bordowitz is determined to do a number on your head, but he has a point and he makes it well.

Aileen Wuornos: the Selling of a Serial Killer

When Paddy Chayefsky wrote the script for Network in the 1970s, he thought he was being satiric. He didn’t have much faith in the integrity of television news, but he was only half serious when he presented it as a crazy cross between mass psychosis and a money-grubbing medicine show. The movie’s wild exaggerations and outrageous jabs have, however, become the standard operating bull of modern tabloid TV. This horrifying evolution is one of the chief points examined in the documentary Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer.

Directed by Nick Broomfield for the BBC, Aileen Wuornos… focuses on the quaint American habits of random murder and mass merchandising. Broomfield is a British filmmaker well known for his confrontational approach to social issues in such documentaries as Behind the Rent Strike and Tattooed Tears. He’s also dealt with feminist issues, ranging from women in the military (Soldier Girls) to prostitution (Chicken Ranch). It’s not surprising that he was drawn to the Wuornos case, any more than the fact that he wasn’t interested so much in her crimes as in the money-fueled media stampede ignited by the case.

In case you need a factoid refresher, Aileen Wuornos is the confessed killer of seven men in Florida. Billed by the FBI as America’s first female serial murderer, Wuornos is currently sitting on Death Row for slayings that she contends were acts of self-defense. Raised by an abusive father (who was eventually jailed for raping a child), Wuornos turned to prostitution as a teenager and spent several decades plying her trade along the humid byways and in the sleazy bars surrounding I-75.

Once arrested, Wuornos became a virtual celebrity. A Current Affair and Inside Edition circled ‘round her trials like vultures at a roadkill fest, and the TV movie Overkill was hurriedly produced in order to beat the theatrical competition. Wuornos was a hot media property, and Broomfield became determined to discover the means by which multiple homicides are hyped into gory star status.

The characters in his story include investigating police officers, some of whom were overtly involved in promoting (and profiting from) the various film projects. There’s Wuornos’ attorney, a would-be folksinger who tells bad jokes and has a possible vested interest in getting his client sent to the electric chair. Then there’s the born-again Christian step-mother, a local horse-breeder who adopted Wuornos during her first murder trial. She repeatedly refers to Wuornos’ lawyer as their agent, and wants $25,000 before she’ll talk to the camera.

It’s a circus and even Broomfield has a hard time walking the thin line between documenting exploitation and joining the bidding melee. The easy allure of checkbook journalism is what makes Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer so fascinating to watch. After all, we’re all susceptible to the crass call of hard cash.

Secuestro: A Story of a Kidnapping

Kidnapping isn’t simply a crime in Columbia – it’s a business. A very big business, as demonstrated in the documentary Secuestro: A Story of a Kidnapping. Directed by Colombian and first-time filmmaker Camila Motta, Secuestro focuses on her own family’s tumultuous experience when her sister, Sylvia, was grabbed off a street in Bogota in 1985 and held for ransom.

Sylvia was finally released, but only after several months of anxiety and hard-boiled negotiations between the kidnappers and Camila’s father, a businessman who was forced to bury familial feelings behind an icy wall of financial dickering.

A similar degree of cold-bloodedness is used by the filmmaker in constructing Secuestro. Though Motta is detailing an event that’s obviously left deep psychological wounds in her family, she rarely belabors the point. It’s not until late in Secuestro that we realize just how close her father is to a total emotional breakdown. Through most of his conversations with the kidnappers (we hear the actual tapes), he plays a penny-pinching jerk who seems more concerned with cutting a cheap deal. As horrifying as this sounds, his behavior was critical to his daughter’s survival – the kidnappers expected him to bargain fiercely and would have distrusted him if he’d done otherwise.

The kidnappers, meanwhile, were busy cutting their own deals. The gang’s leaders were promising people good pay in exchange for help with the job. (In the end, however, they left their business partners with nothing but chump change.) And during the protracted ransom negotiations, they discussed selling their victim to another kidnapper in order to score a quick profit. The film even implies that the gang had a financial portfolio on the Motta family. Despite some vague political allusions, the criminals were more versed in the Wall Street Journal than The Communist Manifesto.

It’s the filmmaker who brings the politics into Secuestro. Interlaced through the movie are references to the culture of violence that’s existed in Colombia since the beginning of the European conquest of the Americas. Motta argues that this has left a political legacy in which it’s viewed as acceptable for one group to brutally suppress others in order to achieve their wants and desires. The connections between conquest and kidnapping are simple: if the haves can do it, then so can the have-nots.

This crazy pattern of violence is Secuestro’s real subject matter, and Motta is chillingly accurate in her presentation of a culture drenched in the blood of a stolen land.

And Motta isn’t just talking about Latin America. She now lives in New York. It’s the entire Western Hemisphere she’s concerned with.