March 1, 2004

WORDS Worth: In which Chris Ryall checks out one of the documentary entries in the upcoming Florida Film Festival; also, Silver Screen Samurai

What this also means is that the next few weeks, it’s going to be tough for me to actually get out and attend too many events. I’ll make it to the WizardWorld LA (actually, Long Beach) comic con in mid-March but beyond that, I’m not sure. So as long as I’m largely house-bound, taking care of last-minute details, it’s a good time to catch up on some of the movies I’ve recently been sent.

One such movie is having its World Premiere at this year’s Florida Film Festival. WORDS, a documentary guided, hosted and co-directed by Gregg Brown, actually has its debut this coming Sunday, March 7 and then airs two days later, on Opening Night of the festival’s documentary competition.

New Yorkers might know Gregg from his public access TV show, FACE TV!, which has aired for three years in that city. Okay, let’s be honest—late-night drinkers and smokers might know Gregg, because in my experience, that’s who’s watching public access television.

On that show, the press release states, Gregg’s skill revolved around his ability to get ordinary people to say and do most anything while the cameras roll. A lifelong West-Coaster, I’ve never seen the show, but those same skills are evident in WORDS. Gregg’s got a non-threatening and approachable vibe, which is important in talking to strangers and especially convincing them to do things like enter a Native-American sweat lodge or sit topless and discuss the country’s breast fixation. Gregg’s got that old-style floppy hair, which makes him seem goofy/harmless, not exploitative or shocking.

WORDS is based on the premise that we are all connected through the web of life and that one word from one person can lead to another from someone else and at the end of it all, one word and one person are connected to the next, no matter who or what.

WORDS opens with, essentially, a game of “telephone.” Gregg lined up a number of people, maybe 20 or more, in the park and gave the first person a word, “hanger,” and told this person to whisper the word to the person next to them. They were to whisper it once, and the next person should just take what they thought they heard and pass it on, and so on. At the end of the line of people, the last person was asked the word he was given: “Hindu.”

The voice over begins talking about Chaos Theory, the premise that “a butterfly flaps its wings in Hong Kong and soon a storm brews in New York.” This premise is exemplified at the start by this game of word association, but it becomes even more emphasized later in the movie when Gregg takes to a helicopter and shoots some footage of Ground Zero just days after September 11, 2001.

The official description of WORDS is “an exploration of the connections between such seemingly unrelated events as a Native American sweat lodge ceremony, a gathering of topless women, and the devastation of the World Trade Center, conveyed through a combination of documentary film-making and reality-based entertainment.”

Gregg starts interviewing people on the streets of New York, recruiting strangers for a Native American Sweat Lodge ceremony. Some are noticeably apprehensive, but he finds a wide array of people, most of whom are seeking answers of either the spiritual or the secular kind, and convinces them to come along.

The group heads upstate (I assume) to experience the sweat lodge. If you’ve never done anything like this before, a sweat lodge is usually a teepee or other enclosed area that is sealed off in pitch blackness, and the participants sit in a circle around a firepit of super- heated rocks. Eventually, the darkness and just a few glowing embers, coupled with the smoke, heat and one’s own subconscious, allows any number of things to happen. Native Americans used them to visit with the departed, or talk to their gods, or receive messages in the form of hallucinations. They would burn herbs to remove negative energy and let spirits in—the participants would suffer for mother earth. The experiences definitely vary, depending on your proclivity to open your mind to such things.

I’ve done a sweat lodge before, in Playa del Carmen in Mexico, only that one was under the ground, in a deep hole. It was pretty cramped, and hot as hell, and dark as hell, all of which don’t really help people like me who don’t love tight, restrictive quarters. In fact, a few minutes in, I was convinced I couldn’t take it for the forty or so minutes—someone else had a panic attack. I rode it out, though, and the cramped quarters…well, they seemed to disappear into what felt like endless space. The shaman, like in this movie, had us chanting, and eventually screaming, to fully release all our anxiety and toxins. We saw things in the embers, various animals that moved around, and afterwards, the guides helped translate what each animal meant.

In WORDS, we get to see the people before they enter the teepee, and then after, when they each seem to have had an epiphany of some kind or other. Some of the participants decided to get completely naked, which, in this documentary, then led into a discussion of breasts with many topless women of all shapes and sizes.

Well, when I say “all,” there were none with the perfectly shaped variety of breasts – Gregg and each woman sat on stools in a white studio, the woman topless and discussing her breasts and the effect she’s seen them have on the world at large. Some women were molested at a younger age as a result of their development. Some were harassed by other women for flaunting the body they were born with. But all expressed constant surprise at the way the world was so fixated on this particular body part. They all talked about how they didn’t want to be measured by their breast size (it should be noted that every participant had decent-sized breasts or larger) but it became evident that, as much as others judged them by their appearance, their breast sizes contributed to their identity as well. This segment ended with a topless dance with all the women and Gregg that helped them all shake free of society’s perceptions, if only for a few minutes.

Up to now, the documentary felt a bit like a less-salacious episode of HBO’s documentary series REAL SEX, exploring rituals and perceptions that the everyday person either isn’t exposed to or doesn’t talk about. This isn’t a bad thing, by the way—REAL SEX has done a lot to allow some people to see lifestyles that they aren’t normally exposed to. And Gregg’s presence and an easy-going guide through these things adds a personal touch and feeling of comfort to the participants that HBO’s show never has.

The movie then features a few sequences that threaten to run too long, but are still fascinating to watch – Gregg has multiple pictures of various Hindu gods, Vishnu and Ganesha and others, drawn in that ornate style you might see in a text book or encyclopedia (do students with ‘net access still know what encyclopedias even are?). He then proceeds to convince New Yorkers to re-create these scenes on the streets of the city. Some are fitted with elephant trunk masks, others are put in robes and close approximations of the garb and jewelry of the photos. It’s a pretty amusing sequence, watching secular New Yorkers re-create gods from a religion that many in these parts aren’t overly familiar with.

There are other bits, too – Gregg stopping New Yorkers and asking them to dance with him, picking from any number of cultures’ music. Italian, Russian, Spanish…it’s a pretty fun sequence as well, watching other societal constraints cast aside and watching older New York citizens just dance with abandon. There is a sequence at a cemetery, where he talks to various mourners of various nationalities, and gets the people to discuss what rituals they’re conducting and how the person they’re mourning passed on. This leads to another round-table discussion with other people who’ve lost loved ones in various, and sometimes chilling circumstances.

Which leads to 9-11. Easily the most captivating, and shocking, bit of the documentary is the fly-over of Ground Zero. Even in the couple specials that detailed the attacks, the footage that we saw showed the buildings coming down, the close-up details of people hurt and dirty and scrambling to survive. What we didn’t see was an overhead view of the devastation. For good reason—in the days after the attack, the airspace around the World Trade Center was declared a no-fly zone. The press materials state that Gregg was asked to capture this footage through “an unusual set of circumstances.”

I asked Gregg what these “unusual circumstances” were and he said that FEMA just found him through the yellow pages. He documented the site nearly daily from September 14 to mid-May of 2002. He even has an entire Web site dedicated to the experience of documenting Ground Zero if anyone wants to see more. Life magazine also did a G&A with Gregg in their American Spirit book.

I asked Gregg how it was to shoot such a thing so soon after it happened. Even here on the opposite side of the country, it was days before I felt any semblance of normalcy. I couldn't imagine living in the city and documenting it all so soon after the fact. He said, "It was truly horrifying. During the day when I would photograph the site I would shut down that side of myself because of the job that I was there to do, but at night I would see the site over and over again before I went to sleep. The same way some people experience seeing waves after a day at the beach. Except, this was not a pretty beach... The experience is deeply ingrained in me, and after the cleanup ended it took about a good year before I began to feel like myself again. Although, I do not think that I will ever be the same again...

"I think that the vantage point from which you see Ground Zero in "Words" is important as it shows the destruction like it really was. People are not used to seeing it from that angle, and it puts the enormity of it in perspective.

"Not to say that there wasn't heroism - which there certainly was. It was an extraordinary effort to cleanse the hallowed ground and wipe away the sins of man. And that part of it was uplifting. The progress and collective patriotic effort with which they took away the debris and readied the site for the rebuild was truly remarkable. But, in the end it was a terrible tragedy and you see that very clearly in WORDS."

It's this part of the documentary that really delivers the emotional punch that the rest had been building toward. As the helicopter circles the city, you see the gaping hole in Manhattan, smoke still pouring from the wound. You see the endless mounds of debris (which really make the clean-up process seem that much more astounding, that it was all cleared away as quickly as it was) and hear nothing but the helicopter blades. At times, almost at the same time your own vision feels overwhelmed with what happened, the camera slows to half-speed, as does the sound of the blades, driving home the impact that much more.

The press materials also state that this footage’s inclusion in the documentary came only after Gregg and his co-director Jason Holzman deliberated on it for a long time. Still, it doesn’t seem out of place in the context of the film, not when you go back to the definition of Chaos Theory – “a butterfly flaps its wings in Hong Kong and soon a storm brews in New York.”

The film gets playful again, as Gregg has various cab drivers reaching their hand into a large voting booth-sized box and feeling around in the dark. To a one, they all smile and are taken with what they feel inside the box…

…and then the bastards never tell us what’s in there!

Which is the point, of course, but if you’re one of those driven crazy by not knowing what was in Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase in PULP FICTION, this part might have a similar affect on you.

In all, it’s a very assured documentary, and Gregg’s approach is playful enough that even the more difficult areas of the film, the bits dealing with death and 9-11, don’t affect the overall enjoyment of it.

It’s also a pretty solid example of guerilla film-making—all the footage, 67 hours in all, was shot without permits in and around various parts of New York City. WORDS takes a look at the way we’re all connected, and it really does make you feel that connection in average people’s responses to the various stimuli Gregg employs while shooting this. A Pakistani cab driver has the same look of ridiculousness on his face as a Russian immigrant woman as a young, urban student while they’re trying to recreate a scene of Hindu gods. Women of all shapes and sizes have different body image concerns that are, essentially, one, and, of course, we can all look at the smoky ruins of the World Trade Center and be united in our sadness and awe.

Documentaries are always a tough sell to people—there’s never as clear a narrative as there is in a movie, and the production values and lower budgets, along with the use of real people, are a deterrent to some. They really shouldn’t be. This film features enough real people (trust me, even the nudity in this film isn’t anything like the nudity in a film starring otherworldly Hollywood actresses – this is reality) reacting in ways similar to the way you’d react. It drives home its point that there’s actually very little separating all of us.

All photos courtesy of WordsTheMovie.com

SAMURAI Joruri

About a year ago, I took a look at this book called JAPANESE MOVIE POSTERS -- I've always loved the inventiveness the Japanese use in posters for their various genre movies. The same company that put out that first book, DH Publishing, is also now offering a book of, really, just the posters you'd most want to see--the samurai flicks. Sure, the "Pink" movies are fun for the topless women and odd bondage imagery, and the horror movies are usually accompanied by a clever poster...but it's the samurai movies that have long been wedged in our subconscious.

As they say the their Web site, "For over half a century, samurai movies have wowed the Japanese public - and the world - with their gory sword fights and tear-jerking tales of honor and sacrifice. From Kurosawa's Seven Samurai to anime's Samurai X, this first-ever collection of original samurai movie art pays glorious tribute to a cinematic genre that is truly Japanese. Silver Screen Samurai is a must-have for samurai fans, movie-buffs and lovers of poster art!"

So here's their latest release, SILVER SCREEN SAMURAI. What it is is 112 pages of samurai movie posters, running the gamut from 1935 up through last year.

In looking at this thing, I never really noticed that pretty much every samurai movie poster up until 1990 or so features big red characters printed on them. By "characters," I mean the writing, usually the movie's title, and not the film's characters themselves. Sure, the actors are there, too, in various forms, but it's the rare poster that doesn't have large characters in red, usually running from top to bottom. It doesn't really meany anything, although it's said to possibly be used as a tribute to old kabuki theater, where different colors were used to emphasize moods. If nothing else, the bold use of red makes the posters very eye-catching.

The book's separated into five main sections: Introduction (1935 - 19590; Silver Screen Legends (1960 - 1969); Zatoichi - The Blind Masseur and the Screen Legend (1970 - 1989); Women of the Sword: Uma vs. Japan (1990 - 2003) and Anime: The New Type Samurai.

Like with the other book, there's a key to help you know what each area of the poster signifies, and a bit of a description about every movie pictures. Each era also ends with a little bio of some of the most prominent samurai movie actors and directors of their day, including folks like Kurosawa, Kitano and Sonny Chiba, among others.

It all just makes me want to be ten again and catching MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE on a Sunday afternoon...

/chris

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