An Injury to One

An Injury To One
Direcetd by Travis Wilkerson
(2003)

I have a certain amount of class rage. I don’t have any complaints about my own life. Whatever hardships, pain, loss, troubles, indignities, and so on, that I might have endured, I regard as a natural part of human life, and a relatively privileged existence I’ve had, really, especially for one who would be considered most definitely underpriveleged in this culture. I feel lucky and always have. But I do have a certain amount of class rage.

What this film does is endorse my rage, pure and simple. I don’t think it is a spoiler to say that An Injury To One is about the murder of IWW activist Frank Little in Butte, Montana in 1917. Who did it? That’s what the film is about. And why they did it. And what else they did. And what that means.

What does it mean?

I don’t know. I don’t think there is a reason or a meaning for everything that happens to me, or for everything that I do, or, for anything else, necessarily. I do think that there are those who would rule us all, and don't mind what they do in order to achieve that. I love this film because it confirms just how serious all of this is, for me, more serious than my own rage. Whatever my own rage is.

An Injury to One takes me out of myself, just as looking up at a big sky full of stars takes me out of myself and into something bigger and more profound. The struggle for such pleasures to be contained in the context of a meaningful life for all is not a hopeless one. And this film reminds us, should we need it, of the penalties that can be paid by those who fight for it.

The story of Butte, Montana, of the Anaconda Mining Company, and of the Wobbly organizer Frank Little, is a telling account of a significant moment in American labor history. It is given flavor by the involvement of Dashiell Hammett as a Pinkerton detective in events related to Frank Little's murder and possibly in the murder itself. Clearly, there was some inspiration for Red Harvest here, if inspiration is the right word. The formal beauty of An Injury to One somehow transcends the despair that is intrinsic to its story. There is music by Will Oldham, Jim O'Rourke and others, contrubting to that formal beauty.

Unfortunately, An Injury to One does not seem to be available commercially, except for a direct purchase from Icarus Films at $390 for a DVD or VHS recording. I was just lucky to have been curious enough to record it when it played on the Sundance Channel, last year, I believe, or, possibly 2005,

Theremin

Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey
Director: Steven M. Martin
1994

Somewhere early on in this amazing documentary, theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore was playing the famous instrument in the 1930s, when I began to hear Jimi Hendrix. And I saw the whole history of electronic music spiral through my imagination. Trombonist/guitarist Eddie Durham plugging his guitar into an amplifier so that he would not disappear in the fabulous textures of the Count Basie Orchestra. Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker and Les Paul. The electric guitarists of jazz, blues, rock and related musical genres. Hendrix. The Beatles and George Martin. Everything that came after that, including techno. trance, jungle, industrial music, electonica, hip-hop, trip-hop. And before them all, Léon Theremin. It gave me goose bumps.

What is amazing about this film, though, is the story of the man who invented the instrument named after himself. The film starts with him describing his memories of being born. The story doesn't get any more commonplace as it continues. Theremin invented the theremin, the "thereminvox," in 1919 in Russia, during the Russian Civil War. He found his way to the United States, where he patented his invention in 1928. He married a young African-American ballerina, Lavinia Williams, causing a huge scandal in his social circle in New York City. He was kidnapped out of his apartment in Manhattan by KGB agents in 1938 and taken back to the USSR, where he remained for many years. At first he was imprisoned, and later labored in a gold mine. He was "rehabilitated" in 1955. He invented the first ever bugging device for the Soviet Union, and was awarded its highest honor by Joseph Stalin. He invented the first motion detector for automated doors. He invented an early version of the burglar alarm. In 1991, he returned to the United States and was reunited with Clara Rockmore. He died in Moscow in 1993, aged 97.

Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey has lots of footage and still photographs of its subject, including material from his early days in New York, with the young Clara Rockmore playing a theremin.

Clara & Léon

In fact, Clara Rockmore is a major figure in the documentary, linking the past to the future. Robert Moog is also an important figure in it, as the film shows how the theremin was adopted by film composers and electronic innovators like Moog. Later, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys appears in the film's most invigorating sequence, explaining how the theremin became a crucial componet in the recording of "Good Vibrations," a seminal moment in pop culture history. The film also features Theremin's niece, Lydia Kavina, another theremin virtusoso whom Theremin himself trained.

Robert Moog describes how he was inspired as a teenager to build theremins of his own, using instructions found in a magazine; from there he went on to create the first synthesizer, and to make a significant contribution to the evolution of electronic music. Also, the film shows scenes from films such as Spellbound, The Lost Weekend and The Day the Eart Stood Still, in which the theremin was used to great effect. And it leaves no doubt that the revolution in music from acoustic to electronic that characterized the second half of the twentieth century began with this strange and fascinating man.

The film creates an impression of Léon Theremin the man as half mad scientist and half egomaniacal, driven artiste. Scenes towards the end of the film, showing his reunion with Clara Rockmore, are poignant in spite of the fact that Léon was apparently kind of a jerk. It is Clara who really wins the heart of the viewer, and anchors the story in terms of both its narrative and its emtional arc. She is just fabulous.

The Story of Jazz

Masters of American Music: The Story of Jazz
Director: Matthew Seig
1993

This 93-minute documentary preceded the Ken Burns jazz project by eight years, and used a similar format, although not as creatively. Employing soundtrack, film, still photography and talking heads, director Matthew Seig traces the history of jazz from Congo Square to Ornette Coleman, approximately. There is footage of the usual suspects (sometimes it’s the usual footage), all of which is a delight, and a whole raft of testimonials, from Bud Freeman to the inevitable Wynton Marsalis. They are all pretty terrific, too. Roy Haynes is my favorite among them; with a few choice words, tone of voice, facial expressions, and the shifting of the gum in his jaw, he just nails it. Diz is awesome, too.

It’s just too bad that America is so bored by its own history that it even ignores the present.
Our addiction to instant gratification recalls the rat in the famous experiment, that continued to nudge the pleasure button, neglecting its own need for food and sleep, until it died. We need history because it provides a deeper pleasure by providing context and continuity, if pleasure is all we care about. There should be so much more on this subject, more documentary films, more photographs, and more books. Why were there not more feature length documentaries made in the 1930s? The 1940s? The 1950s? The 1960s? The 1970s? The 1980s? The 1990s? Is the answer the same in every case? Why was Don Cheadle not cast as Albert Ayler in a biopic, ten years ago? Why does Cecil Taylor not have his own TV showcase? Why does Wynton Marsalis not have his own TV show? We all know the answers, of course. If there were an Albert Ayler biopic, either Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler would be cast as Albert, no doubt.

The Story of Jazz is an excellent piece of work, good for personal viewing, and a perfect classroom introduction to the culture of the music know as jazz. There’s a good script by Chris Albertson, intelligent structure, and there ‘s Louis Armstrong, , Willie "the Lion" Smith, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Dig it.

Sassy

Baraka

Director: Ron Fricke 1992

Thinking of the possibilities of film, especially those not realized to any significant degree, one must approve of Baraka, a film that is both loved by many and despised by many. I am in neither camp.

snow-monkey in hot springs

Here is Hal Hinson of The Washington Post, reviewing it in October, 1993.

“Shot in 24 countries on six continents over a stretch of 14 months, this completely wordless, plotless film by director Ron Fricke and producer Mark Magidson fulfills the "magic carpet" promise of the movies to a previously unimagined degree. Floating high in the air, you peer over the edge of a gurgling volcano in Hawaii, then sweep down to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, or Ryoan-Ji temple in Kyoto, or Lake Natron in Tanzania, or the fire plains of Kuwait, their oil fires burning like the eternal flames of the dead.”

& again:

“Definitely, Baraka is from the Joseph Campbell school of mystical-mythical pseudo-anthropological neo-Jungian New Age filmmaking. And yet very few artists of any kind possess the determination that this team shows to get it not just right but perfect. As a result, nothing in this epic visual poem is less than extraordinary. The film's curious, gliding camera (Fricke serves as his own cinematographer), Michael Stearns's eclectic, ethnic score, the slow, silken rhythms of the editing, the choice of subject and location, all these things contribute to the movie's spell.”

& here is an IDMB critic:

This slick collection of 'breath taking' landscapes and decontextualized, largely aboriginal peoples, attempts to thread together a global panorama that ends up levelling all of human culture in its mawkish will to universalize. It winds up playing like an extended tourist board advert, or else the bloated music video to a new age concept album, and winds up reeking of saccharine, entirely apolitical, sentiment. As such it would no doubt appeal to those desperate to find a shred of profundity in their entirely meaningless existences, but for the rest of us there can only be a sense of nausea at this cinematic violation of human rights. It is only its well meaning political correctness that seperates it from the numbing Faces of Death films of the nineteen eighties. Avoid at all costs if you have a shred of integrity.

Bromo caldera volcano, East Java

&

Summary: Nature is GOOD. Primitive tribes are GOOD. The Holocaust was BAD. So is WAR. Our everyday life is TOO FAST and leads to the TORTURE of BABY CHICKENS. PEOPLE, although not YOU because you are GOOD because you felt bad about the BABY CHICKENS, should SHAPE UP BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE.

& here is my old friend “tedg” at IDMB

Native people are not intrinsically wonderful. They are as evil and ecologically inept as we. The magic is in the difference, not the being itself. Romanticizing something as is done here, does a great disservice because what we see has nothing to do with what or who they are, and everything to do with excuses we make to ourselves in order to exist.

Friends, when you watch these "natural" people, take a moment to consider that everything you see is posed. Every scene was prefaced by the director arranging and prodding and placing them and us just so.

Consider that every photo you see here of nature is perfectly framed to be wholly contained in the boundaries of the screen: Nature isn't like that, it’s an infinite flow. What we have here are the motivational posters neatly snipped from nature and bounded. These are sound bites and as a result are every bit as repulsive as political utterances from the "other side."

One scene is a ritual ceremony of lovely native women undulating. Its truly wonderful cinema. No mention of the ritual itself: celebrating the scarring closed of pudendal lips after circumcision. There's a nice scene of an Australian marking his face with color. It says a lot that the color is acrylic and the instrument he is using is a plastic comb.

I like “tedg” – (s)he’s one of my favorite IDBM reviewers. “the red duchess” is my absolute favorite, though. (see link)

Most of the IDMB reviewers who love Baraka really go over the top, but we won’t hear from them today.

Baraka was filmed in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Nepal, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States.

Very early in the film there is a snow monkey sitting in a hot spring, just grooving, in the mountains of Japan. The monkey looks so intelligent. Eventually, (s)he looks up at the sky and closes his/her eyes. Meanwhile, there is a snow leopard somewhere in the background. It’s one of my two favorite segments in the film. When the film moves on and unfolds, it is easy to imagine the whole spectacle as a dream the monkey is having.

Director Ron Fricke was the cinematographer for Koyaanisqatsi, the first of the Qatsi films by Godfrey Reggio. Koyaanisqatsi has been compared to a coffee table book. I have not seen Koyaanisqatsi, but I do like (some) coffee table books. I was sufficiently put off Reggio’s film by the fact that Philip Glass composed the music for it, that I did not see it. Criticisms of Baraka made it seem like something that you’d want to hide under the coffee table. What I liked about it was very simple, the basic idea of a wordless film without a literal narrative. Fricke claimed to not have an agenda, but there does seem to be one, satirized in the “NATURE is good” comments above. I didn’t care about that. I didn’t care that the narrative was lacking in any real point of view about its images, such as the oil fires of Kuwait, burning on after the 1991 Gulf War. I’ve seen Baraka several times now, and it always creates a fantasy of having the opportunity Fricke had, making this film, and of what I would do with it. I’d have more monkeys. And poets.

The one sequence I do love in the film is the Balinese Kecak Dance.

"Kecak (pronounced: "KEH-chahk", alternate spellings: Ketjak, Ketjack, and Ketiak), a form of Balinese music drama, originated in the 1930s and is performed primarily by men. Also known as the Ramayana Monkey Chant, the piece, performed by a circle of 100 or more performers wearing checked cloth around their waists, percussively chanting "cak", and throwing up their arms, depicts a battle from the Ramayana where monkeys help Prince Rama fight the evil King Ravana. However, Kecak has roots in sanghyang, a trance-inducing exorcism dance."

Wikipedia

Kecak Dance, Bali






You can see this at youtube:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be5AzphS6kE

At the end of the movie, one really does have the urge to go make something like it, but better, using all of the possibilities of film. Looks like "tedg" did have a good argument (see post on The Movies Begin 1), when he argued for a more imaginative kind of filmmaking than that to which we've grown accustomed. At least, it's possible to get a tangible sense of that, after watching Baraka, whatever it's flaws and virtues might be.