100 years of labor, migration, violence…

The following is the current abstract for a project that is demanding a great deal of my attention these days (sometimes I fear more than I’m able to give?). My partner on the film is my good friend Ian Morgan, who is completing the project for his senior project at Fairhaven College.

We are sponsored in part by the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force and Community to Community Development. We also submitted this to a conference concerned with similar riots that took place in Vancouver less than a week after events in Bellingham, but have yet to hear back.

If anyone is interested in taking a look at the research we’ve been doing for the film, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll email you.

“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” – James Baldwin

In 1907, more than two-hundred East Indian workers in Bellingham, WA were attacked by a mob of white workers. The white rioters broke into the East Indians’ houses and workplaces, stole and destroyed their valuables, and threatened and beat the East Indians until they were forcibly expelled from the city. In the course of one night, an entire community was driven from the town – in the approving words of a local paper, “wiped off the map.” One hundred years later, 2007, hostility towards non-white immigrants in Bellingham continues. Raids and detentions by government immigration agents are ongoing; so are surveillance and harassment from both government agents and groups like the Minute Men. How have the events of 1907 shaped Bellingham as we know it in 2007? What has changed and what remains the same?

We propose a documentary film, presently untitled, centering on Bellingham in 1907, that explores the history of immigration and racial tensions in the Pacific Northwest – history, in Baldwin’s sense, the past as it lives on in the present. Accounts of Belligham’s past, illustrated with photographs and texts, will provide a starting point for a discussion of Bellingham today. Through interviews with local activists working for immigrant rights and immigrants themselves, we will paint a portrait of immigration at present and the possibilities of the future.

The film (or, more accurately, video) is being proposed by Andrew Hedden and Ian Morgan, two college-educated white males hoping to put our access to university resources and our interest in film to use in the greater discussion about immigrant rights in the United States. The film will be completed and debut in Bellingham, WA on September 5th, the 100th anniversary of the Bellingham riots. One version of the film will be roughly forty-five minutes in length, hopefully ideal for community education and discussion, though a longer version may also be produced.

Marker, again

The Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico call their gatherings to build international solidarity “Intergalactic.” For some reason, I like to think this playful allusion to the other-wordly would tickle the fancy of French film essayist and man of the world, Chris Marker. Perhaps it’s my ability to imagine this about Marker that makes me so partial to his films. Here are some further thoughts about Marker I had tucked away, forgotten, and neglected to revive for the May 1st Lucid Screening feature.

Marker’s spent a lifetime devoted to politics of the left, but his reputation - in the US anyway - seems to be solely among film buffs, not revolutionaries. He’s known as the purveyor of the film essay, a style of film making that brings together the documentation of History (see Grin without a Cat), or of everyday life (see his travel films) , or of everyday life as History (Le Joli Mai, or, again, the travel films), with a strong narrative commentary spoken over the images.

Spoken narration has a bad reputation amongst politically committed, anti-authoritarian filmmakers. It’s often derided as the “Voice of God,” dictating the meaning of an image and preventing the viewer from interpreting the situation themselves. Marker’s films demonstrate that this needn’t be an iron rule. The Voice of Marker never approaches dictatorship because it always remains his voice. Even his less personal commentary plies the viewer with poetry, with parable - recalling in my mind the words of Walt Whitman: “I project the history of the future.”

Film is a medium of History. In Marker’s work, this is not only the case because film captures the past. Marker mines images of the past for signs of the future. The history of the future that Marker projects is always a refraction, as through a prism, of the past. “After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion.”

Here is that story, in part, as commentary from Sans Soleil.

In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film I had seen nineteen times. In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film. That summer I had met three children on a road and a volcano had come out of the sea. The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the moon, in this corner of Earth that resembles it. I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction: the landscape of another planet. Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away. I imagine him moving slowly, heavily, about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles. All of a sudden he stumbles, and the next step it’s a year later. He’s walking on a small path near the Dutch border along a sea bird sanctuary.

That’s for a start. Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories? That’s just it, he can’t understand. He hasn’t come from another planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet’s past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.

May Day!

Comrade Sean Burke (Bellingham SDS) getting pumped before Tuesday’s May 1st Immigrant Rights Solidarity March, organized by Community to Community Development.

This is actually a really bad photo to illustrate an inspiring march full of over several hundred Latino immigrants and their allies, but its the only photo I managed to get before we all started moving. I spent most of the day videotaping for a documentary film I’m helping to produce (more on that someday).

For better pictures of the day, check out Not in My County (pics look like they might be down at the moment).

There’s some godawful corporate press here that reports the day to be “uneventful” because nobody tussled with the MinuteKlan knuckleheads. Also, at the height of the march, there were twice the number reported in the headline.

For reports on May 1st marches across the country, check out Indymedia’s coverage, or deleteTheBorder.org. In Los Angeles, the LAPD assaulted the crowd with rubber bullets and tear gas; more on that here.

—

I spent the night before the march working hard on a Chris Marker feature for Lucid Screening. I was up ridiculously late, and have this regretful “morning after” feeling about the reviews I did. I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing lately, and feel it tends to be both verbose and repetitive. For writings done in the wee hours of the morning, the Marker bits are all right, but something is telling me I need to work on my shit.

—

And for those that might be wondering, Karim Ahmath’s day in court lasted mere minutes. His lawyer requested the trial be postponed until July, and the request was approved. Meanwhile, organizing continues at Western Washington Univeristy to hold the campus police accountable.

Falling Rock, Following Rock

Rock Hudson falls and I want to fall with him.

Until this moment, he has been caring and carefree Ron Kirby: more than your common gardener, a wise tender of trees . Two first names makes the Man, and a Man at that, an outwardly heterosexual Henry David, a Thoreau without a complex. Henry David takes a wife. But 1950s America can’t handle a Man so in touch with all that heaven allows (or so this film would have us believe, anyway). So High Society whispers and suddenly the fiance has had second thoughts.

Time has passed. Ron’s love has now returned to him, but he’s off on the hunt and she can’t find him. As she drives off, Ron gets desperate - he calls her name, and the camera captures Kirby against the sky as if to emphasize his vulnerability. Poor Kirby’s even holding a dead pheasant in one hand, a now useless rifle in the other. He can take flight away, but he can’t take flight himself.

So Rock falls, and he falls hard.

Now the loving can truly begin.

—

Maybe its my self-doubts, maybe I wish sometimes I could just fall off a cliff too. Or maybe I’ve got a new thing for Rock Hudson, or just simpering strongmen in general. Whatever it is, this bravura moment - literally, its over-the-top! - in Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama-rama All That Heaven Allows, which I just watched for the first time this week, is easily one of my favorite film moments of all time. It made me exclaim aloud - “Oh no!!!” - right into my partner’s ear. It’s been a few days, however, and I thankfully think her ear drums have healed.

There is certainly more Rock in my future. I watched Written On the Wind last night, in which Rock plays another Man of Nature - well, a man of peasant stock anyway - with two first names: Mitch Wayne. Wind wasn’t nearly as winning as All That - Sirk never does anything like push Rock off a cliff, though a certain special moment between a sulking Robert Stack and an enthusiastic youngster bouncing on a trick pony is worth looking out for.

Poopie

Isamu: A mess, isn’t it?
Minoru: Fun, isn’t it?

I’m not too familiar with the renowned Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu; all I know about him and his film’s I’ve accrued from watching his Tokyo Story (or at least the 3/4 of it I stayed awake for), and essentially hearing rumors about how he’s made something like 70 films, all of which are incredibly similar in style. Tonight I watched Good Morning (1959), and it certainly fit the rumors about the repetition of style. Not only is this a talkie, color remake of an earlier silent film by him; like Tokyo Story it is filmed completely in still, unmoving camera shots that will move closer for a close up, but never pan, or swivel. But I suspect the sparseness of the style serves to isolate the emotions of the story, which I felt is what happened with Tokyo Story and may be one reason why Ozu is so renowned.

The emotions or feelings at the center of Good Morning are bound up in childhood. In a sense, it’s really just a story about two young boys and their struggle to watch television despite the wishes of their parents. The stillness of the camera emphasizes the rigid walls of the buildings and structures, making the the boys’ neighborhood seem like a labyrinth (I guess Ozu’s known for his interiors - thank god he lived in an age before Trading Spaces). The camera is also placed low to the floor, which - intentionally or not - further emphasizes the boys’ point of view (oddly enough, this works especially in scenes where the boys aren’t even around). These things are apparently typical of Ozu, but they’re especially suited for documenting childhood.

All that and a great many charming fart jokes make for a film that can rightly be called “whimsical” and yet never carries any of the contrivances usually associated with that phrase. Cuteness can be grating, but Good Morning is a guilt-free pleasantry. There’s something smarter in the movie going on too: the very title of the film comes from a rant by one boy about the superficial pleasantries of adults, such as cheap greetings like “Good Morning,” a point well taken when Ozu shows us the economic struggles of the neighborhood fathers or the endless gossip of the housewives. This even as the same boy throws a terrible tantrum over not having access to the most superficial pleasantry of them all: television. In Good Morning, wisdom is clearly a collective effort by all ages, even if it remains within the conventional confines of the family unit.

Plus, the fact that the final image - and the last joke - are scatalogical leaves open the splendid possibility that Ozu’s use of poop might be a subtle critique of enforced family harmony. Not likely, but one can dream…

The Flesh and Blood(shed) of Popular Culture

A friend of mine is due to leave for Iran in the coming weeks, where she plans to stay for several months visiting family. As she awaits her departure, she’s bombarded each day with media from all angles - film, print, politics - that seem custom-designed for U.S. confrontation with Iran.

The latest sour bit of propaganda is the sword-and-shield blood-and-guts dude-fest 300, currently tops at the box 0ffice, which pits its “heroic” Spartans against what it paints as a bloody-thirsty Persian Empire. A review in the Village Voice (”Man on Man Action“) assures me the film is as dumb as it looks, but lack of smarts has never been known to keep away American film-going audiences, nor has it ever kept the US government away from military interventions. In response to the film (and its politics), a petition is circulating demanding that Warner Bros. own up to its ahistorical warmongering.

But war-mongering needn’t be blood-red and blunt to be dangerous. Whether its art film or action film, the same stubborn assumptions keep popping up, as in a recent interview with Abbas Kiarostami, the celebrated Iranian filmmaker who has been in New York City recently for a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. The interview is with that most ostensible of liberal media, The New York Times, and “The interviewer, Deborah Solomon,” observes Zach Campbell, “seems to have one guiding theme–hit home that ‘over there,’ in Iran, those people, those Islamofascist tyrants who presumably control every facet of every citizen’s life, are … well, bad. And how crazy is it that Kiarostami is able to make his beautiful masterpieces in the midst of all that crazy oppressive fanaticism over there?”

It’s not that Iran doesn’t have its political problems - it’s that Iran is not the sum of its government’s vices. As film critic Jonathon Rosenbaum writes, “What Bush is choosing to call `Iran’ is chiefly a narrow-minded fundamentalist like himself, not a complex society of millions of diverse individuals that is every bit as multicultural as the U.S.” This a diversity featured heavily in Kiarostami’s films - from the severe class chasms and urban/rural divides of the informal Koker earthquake trilogy (Where is the Friend’s Home?, …Life and Nothing More, and Through the Olive Trees) and The Wind Will Carry Us; to the various nationalities of the passengers in Mr. Badii’s Range Rover in Taste of Cherry, to the varied ages, classes, occupations and love lives of the female passengers in Ten.

You might say the violence of the State is reflected in the violence of a film 300 - not only in its desire for bloodshed, but in its purporting to represent diverse and complex histories and peoples as the whole they are not. Kiarostami’s films, with their hours of driving, talking, driving, running, talking, and driving some more, are the very antithesis of violence - and perhaps at times, the antithesis of the State as well.

Elsewhere, author Fatemeh Keshavarz discusses similar problems as they exist in popular literature, in a recent interview posted at MRZine. According to Keshavarz, in print media of the past decade, such as the popular Reading Lolita in Tehran, “everything [about Iran] would revolve around religion or politics, and people would be villains or victims… I felt like saying to people, ‘This picture is full of holes! That is not about me! The culture I grew up in has its flesh and blood just like yours. It has good and bad things just like every culture. Shake my hand and you will feel it!’ ” Her own book, Jasmine and Stars, aims to rectify these oversights.

I recently read Seymour Hersh’s piece in The New Yorker about the Bush administration’s strategic swing against the Shi’ites, as represented - to them - by the Iranian government. Personally, I hold onto the hope that the severe U.S. shortage of troops (what I consider the biggest political booty of the anti-war movement so far) prevents invasion of Iran, but troop shortage doesn’t preclude a U.S. bombing campaign or other military attacks.

What does preclude military attack (at least of the overt variety), I realize, is popular opinion. Popular opinion, however nebulous it always is, however indistinct and unquantifiable, remains indispensable to the achievement of the U.S. government’s political objectives. After reading over the above interviews and commentaries, and reflecting on my friend’s feelings, I’m struck by how insidiously popular culture can prepare society for war - and I wonder to what extent pop culture swings public opinion.

For years, Kiarostami has played himself off in interviews as an apolitical person - and he has every right to be so, though I personally find a great deal of the political in his films. Nevertheless, whoever organized his retrospective is making a small, but very smart political maneuver: bringing attention to Iran as a nation, broader than its State, and beyond whatever designs the US government has on the region.