Our Lady of Perpetual Hell

Believe the coincidence or not, but I followed the film about folks intentionally falling from absurd heights to someone trying not to fall from absurd heights.

Man on Wire is James Marsh’s fabulous portrait of Philippe Petit’s infamous 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers. Crime? Performance art? Stunt? Coup? All of the above?

Marsh combines vintage footage (much of which has never been seen before–in fact, he was the one who had it developed for the first time) and stills with re-creations and present-day interviews with the principals to tell a remarkable tale from a more innocent time. Juggling these different techniques for telling the story, he has as deft a hand with film as Petit has with the high-wire (and juggling and sleight of hand). And both men are expert storytellers. At last, at this year’s festival, I have finally run across a filmmaker who is doing something interesting with the documentary form. Films like this one are why I’m here.

The film tells the story from the moment the idea of the WTC wire-walk struck Petit through the plotting of how to do it and the training he did to prepare for it to the actual carrying out of the plan and its aftermath. Late in the film, someone remarks that an illegal walk like this one could never happen today–‘You would be shot!’–and I must say that at the beginning of the film, when we see re-creations of the preparation for the illegal ‘coup’ (as they called it), that thought had occurred to me, too, as I watched a bow and arrow set smuggled into the towers inside an architect’s cardboard tube and the wires get packed in a big wooden box that was put into a wheeled garbage container that the imposters (dressed as WTC employees and construction workers) took, unquestioned, into the guts of the towers. This just couldn’t happen anymore. That it happened at the WTC makes that fact even more pointed, of course. Marsh may not mention the ultimate fate of the towers in his film, but the subtext of that is there–whether he wants it or not.

This film is deeply intelligent and entertaining, it is astounding and funny, daring and beautiful, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Well, after much frustration, I have finally found a suitable nesting place where I can sit down with a coffee (and a nosh) and get free wireless access. Not sure why that’s harder to find in Tronna than it is in Sarnia. Go figger. Anyhow, my li’l EEEPC and I are sitting in the Aroma Espresso Bar, just next door to the Bloor Cinema, waiting for the box office to open so I can pick up my tix for two of tonight’s screenings, and I thought I could tell you a bit about the film I just saw this afternoon.

It’s called 20 Seconds of Joy, and it’s about Norwegian BASE jumper Karina Hollekim. Directed by Swede Jens Hoffmann, the film covers about five years of Karina’s life as an extreme athlete (she is also into freeskiing and skydiving but the focus of the film is her BASE jumping).

The film follows the charismatic and beautiful and complicated Karina all over the world, and, as you might imagine, the cinematography is breathtaking. We peer over the edges of fjords and mesas along with the folks who are bound and determined to throw themselves off, and if you have any hint of vertigo, you should probably skip this one. Hoffman typically set up about five cameras to capture each jump–including a helmet-mounted camera. It is spectacular and I am so happy I was able to see it on a big screen.

Hoffman talks not only with Karina and her fellow jumpers but also her family and friends. Most express how difficult to deal with her jumping is for them. She is mostly unconcerned about that and, luckily for her, they do seem to understand. There is discussion about Karina’s childhood—made difficult by a car accident which put her mom into a coma. Once she recovered from the coma, her mom had no short-term memory, and Karina found herself—at a young age—in the position of being the caretaker rather than the child. So she grew up fast and she grew up strong, and she constantly set challenges for herself. BASE jumping is a way of putting life’s challenges into perspective, I guess… I mean, if you can corral your fear of your own death and hurl yourself into the abyss off a thousand-metre cliff, then I guess losing a job or facing financial difficulties isn’t all that scary, y’know? Seems a bit extreme to me, but, hey, we’ve all got our own ways of dealing with life, I guess.

There is a turning point in the film which, Hoffman told us at the “long haul” panel on Saturday, came right at the end of the scheduled shoot. He decided to keep shooting, though, because he didn’t want that event as the end of the film. Wise choice.

See it on the big screen if you can!

“Is it still cheating if everyone’s doing it?”, the tagline for Chris Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster asks. Bell, despite being against using steroids himself, appears to think it isn’t. The thought that kept running through my mind as I watched his film was, “Boy, somebody around here sure has watched a lotta Michael Moore films!” And, honestly, I enjoyed Bell’s film as much as I enjoy most Moore films, so it’s not necessarily a knock against him. It is, then, a first-person documentary that uses wit and irony to deliver its message–which is that steroid use amongst pro athletes is rampant, has been going on for years, has negatively affected only a tiny percentage of users, and has no proven longterm health effects. Like Moore, his opinion is made pretty clear. His thesis is that steroid use is the American thang to do–with “win at all costs” being the way he believes Americans feel. He manages to find some less-than-stellar representatives for the other side of the argument (like the amazingly clueless California Rep. Henry Waxman, who is one leading the anti-roid charge but knows less about the subject than his unseen offscreen assistant does) but–that said–he does also let his steroid-using brothers (nick’d “Mad Dog” and “Smelly”) stand as representatives of those who are pro-roid even though the Bell boys are not necessarily positive role models (nor are many of the other pro athletes he looks at). And it all revolves around him. Very moorish. Still, it’s quite entertaining and the crowd loved it. As an aside, after I’d picked up my ticket for the screening and got in line to get into the Bloor Cinema, I noticed, beside me and off to the side of the lineup, a very familiar-looking face. Ben Johnson. (Briefly) The World’s Fastest Man. I decided against asking him for advice on how I could improve my own plodding running pace.

Cynthia Lester’s My Mother’s Garden feels like a companion piece to last year’s 7 Dumpsters and a Corpse, made with considerably less charm and wit. Like that film and Bell’s, it is also a first-person documentary but egregiously so. It is meant to be a portrait of her mother, who suffers from a hoarding disorder that means her bungalow in L.A. has so much stuff (read: garbage) in it that you have to climb in through a window and there is no floor to walk on inside–you walk on the piles of garbage that appear to be at least a couple feet deep in places. There are rats–living and dead. Old toys, clothes she bought at garage sales, rotten food. It is appalling, yes. In fact, action has to be taken because her long-suffering neighbours have finally called the city. So Eugenia Lester’s four children–who lived with their mother’s eccentricities when they were growing up and who each bear the psychological scars–return to their childhood home to start the spadework to dung the place out so that their mother isn’t evicted. What I don’t like about this film is Cynthia’s habit of training her hand-held camera on herself. I was put off by it, frankly. Her mother’s condition is difficult to witness and the inability to get treatment for her is heartbreaking, and her daughter’s reaction to the events of the film could better be delivered, I think, in voiceover (if necessary at all… which is debatable). I also think she is grasping too far for an explanation for her mother’s condition–blaming consumer-driven society, at least in part, for her mother’s disorder. I don’t buy that. So to speak.

Now, I don’t walk out of films very often, but an hour or so into the midnight screening of Alison Murray’s Carny, I gave up and, clutching my jacket and bag to my chest, slunk out the door. I wasn’t the first to leave. You’d think that if you were going to make a documentary about travelling carnival workers, you’d manage to find a few actually interesting characters to focus on.

Okay, it was a full day of film on Sunday, starting with a discussion panel and followed by three screenings.

The panel–at my old stomping grounds of Innis Town Hall (where I fell in love with film in first year university)–was about “long haul” documentaries. Those are the docs that take years to make. No particularly surprising insights there, except that the tendency seems to be for filmmakers who are this invested in their stories to want to keep shooting until there is a “happy ending”. Which ain’t always possible. I was hoping to hear about what it was like to try to maintain interest in their subject for so long, how greatly (or little) it ran roughshod over the rest of their lives during the extended shoot/edit, but, aside from the financial impact that self-financing such an enterprise can wreak on a filmmaker’s family, there wasn’t much said about that.

My first screening of the day was my second choice for that timeslot. I’d decided I couldn’t get all the way from the Royal to the Cumberland in time to see Junior, so Three Miles North of Molkom hadda be sacrificed and I went to see Her Name is Sabine at the Bader instead. (Naturally, the guy I ended up in line behind at the Junior screening… had just come from Three Miles North of Molkom!! [insert eyeball roll here] Anyhow, I ended up at French filmmaker Sandrine Bonnaire’s beautiful and heartbreaking portrait of her little sister Sabine, instead: Her Name is Sabine.

Sabine, we are told (and we see in videos shot during her childhood) has always been unusual. When she was a child, her parents never knew what, exactly, was the cause of her troubled grasp of reality. It isn’t until the end of Sandrine’s film that we learn that her sister was eventually (in her late 30s) diagnosed as psychoinfantile with autistic behaviour. The film introduces us to Sabine at approximately age 37, where she is living in a private hospice that cares for special needs clients in western France. Her behaviour is startling–moments of clarity interspersed with trance-like periods, an inability to concentrate on anything for more than a brief time, and a constant desire to lie down and do nothing but stare blankly. When sister Sandrine cuts to videos shot on holidays when Sabine and her siblings where younger, we see Sabine–while still noticeably outre–laughing and interacting and communicating in a way that makes her present state even more frightening. She had been cared for by her mother for years, until her sisters all moved away from home and a brother died and she started to act out. She was no longer getting the attention that she once had, when her siblings were around. A little bit of violence and contrariness at first, and then, when it began to be directed at her mother, the family had to do something. She was hospitalized for 5 years and, when she was released, she was a mere shadow of the person her family had known. She went from periods of almost catatonic behaviour to unbidden screaming and biting and hitting and then back again. Now, whether this devolution was a natural progression (if that’s the right word to use) of her (as yet undiagnosed) condition or whether it was a result of her hospitalization or the massive amounts of drugs she was on, it is hard to say. No decision about that is made by her sister Sandrine’s film. But we are left with Sandrine taking Sabine under her care again. The emotional climax of the film (at least for me) is when Sandrine shows Sabine a dvd she has created from video footage she shot on their vacation in NYC when Sabine was just a teen. Sabine sits on the couch, watching herself 20 years younger–interacting, conversing, enjoying herself, behaving practically the same as any other teen in her position might–and present-day Sabine bursts into tears (as do I). I don’t know if she is crying because some part of her understands what she once was/once had and what’s she’s lost, but that is (obviously) how I read the scene. It is a remarkably beautiful portrait by her sister in directorial debut.

Junior, a film by Montreal filmmakers Isabelle Lavigne and Stéphane Thibault, focuses on four Quebec Major Junior Hockey League players over the course of a season. What’s interesting about the film is that there is no on-ice footage. We don’t actually see any hockey. We just see the boys’ lives off the ice. And how 99% revolves around that one little bit we don’t see. The pressure on these kids (aged 16-20) is unworldly, and they are faced with making decisions that could make an adult shiver. I mean, would you want to be given 5 minutes to make a life-altering decision when you were a teenager? The burden of expectations (their coaches’, their agents’, their teammates’, their families’, their own) weigh heavily on their (occasionally dislocated) shoulders and emotions bubble to the surface now and again to remind you that, jeez, these guys are still just kids. The filmmakers were given remarkable access to the kids’ lives and the team’s dressing room over the season, and they produced a film that gives those of us who merely stand at the end of the rink and cheer on our boys another level of understanding of what’s going on before, during, and after the game.

My day finished with a screening of Dance With a Serial Killer. Nigel Williams (U.K.) tells the story of French detective Jean-François Abgrall’s 5-year hunt for a serial killer who struck all over the country. It started in 1989–before the days of “C.S.I.”-type investigations–so think of last year’s Zodiac (a fictionalized recount of the search for the Zodiac serial killer in ’70s San Francisco, by David Fincher) and picture it as a documentary. Old-fashioned policework–lots of legwork, lots of interviews, lots of time with seemingly little progress. And, like the Zodiac investigation, the lead detective had a pretty good idea who the killer was. It was just a matter of producing the necessary evidence. The story starts on a crowded beach in northern France, where a sunbather is brutally stabbed to death for no discernable reason. Young detective Abgrall gets a faxed alert when the body is discovered and begins his investigation. Little does he know it will end up taking him all over the country, will last for years, and he will know in his heart who the killer is and still be faced with what appears to be an airtight alibi. The film’s pace is slow but that suits the subject matter. The story is familiar, but the hunt for a serial killer is a subject that is always fascinating to me. It is a story of obsession–on the parts of both hunter and hunted.

The awesome sight of Chris Leavins riding onstage to the tune of LCD Soundsystem’s “North American Scum” at the funky Theatre Centre on Queen St. W. on the back of a 40-foot puppy with fire shooting out of its anus was, alone, worth the $20 admission. Everything that followed was pure icing on the cake.

White icing. In his Steve Martinesque suit–with white and pink Nikes–Chris positively glowed before us. And the packed house lapped up every last bit, and was about as performer-friendly as it gets. We love Chris and there’s no mistaking it.

As expected, Cute With Chris Live in Toronto was a scream! When you love the four-minute weekly eps of CWC online, a whole hour was like dying and going to heaven.

What was nicest about Chris’ live show was how much more personal it was than the weekly online show is. Not only was the venue intimate–rising in front of the stage was a series of about ten risers upon which chairs had been set up for us, along with a row of stools on the upper level for rush ticket-holders–but the content of the show was intimate. He told us about his neighbours–two beer-swilling, football-watching, foul-mouthed brothers who live in the apartment below his (he showed us photos from the courtyard of the apartment building, circling first his apartment and then that of the brothers, below) who frequently interrupt his Sunday afternoon tapings with their boozy howling over football games that penetrate the ‘paper mache’ walls of their building. He noted that if he can hear them, then they can probably hear him. Talking to his plastic horses. He told us about the genesis of CWC. How it seemed to him that we are living at the historical apex of cute. How so much in our society is judged by how cute it is. Or isn’t. And how it wasn’t until he’d started making the eps that he realized he doesn’t actually like cute stuff.

Chris is, I think, struck by the absurdity of what’s going on each week… He uses a $300 digital camera and one old stage light to shoot a 4-minute video all about what’s cute and what’s not. He features Teen Letters, a Cutedown competition between viewer-submitted photos of their pets (and now some of the viewers, themselves, are getting into the Cute-Downs) and an on-going dialogue with his chorus: two plastic horses. No wonder his neighbours don’t want to get too close. But that little slice of absurdity is watched faithfully by thousands upon thousands (and sometimes over a million–dig on that a while!) viewers around the world each week. I don’t know if judging the cuteness of puppies and kittens was what Marshall McLuhan had in mind when he invisioned the global village, but, well, that’s what we got.

And there were lovely gifts! Buttons! Pens, bitch! And Van. Shirtless!

ken – noun
1. knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception: an idea beyond one’s ken.
2. range of sight or vision.

Honestly, even after sitting through an hour and a half documentary about it, the whole belief system of the Australian ‘cult’/'alternative approach to spirituality’ called Kenja is still beyond my ken.

And so I consider the film, by Aussie filmmakers Luke Walker and Melissa Maclean, a bit of a failure in that I can’t quite get a handle on what Kenja is all about. Shouldn’t they at least try to give me an objective understanding of what the proponents are excited about and opponents are upset about? According to what I’ve read, the group offers a Utopia where life’s purpose is defined, the human spirit discovered and the universe itself explained. Well, if you’d asked me what the group’s purpose was when I walked out the door of the Al Green theatre tonight, I’d've shrugged and said that it appears that the group’s purpose is to teach “klowning” and put on talent shows for its members. ‘Cause that’s pretty much all I could figger out. There was something else about ‘energy conversion’ that happens between two members who sit, staring at each other in plastic chairs a foot or so apart. Fucked if I know what that bit’s all about.

The group’s foes allege sexual assault, suicides, disappearances, mind control, isolation of members, financial drain… basically, the usual things that “cults” are accused of.

The group’s supporters protest that participation is completely voluntary and no laws are broken.

Walker and Maclean do present both sides. Interviews with Kenja founders Ken Dyers and Jan Hamilton and seemingly contented followers are there along with interviews with former Kenja members and people whose family members were or are in the organization. However, kinda like that wacked Tom Cruise Scientology vid that everybody saw a few weeks ago, the talk is laden with Kenjargon and half the time I couldn’t figure out what the hell they were going on about. Nevertheless, and as you might expect, of course, the Kenja-critical side tends to come off better than the Kenja-supportive side. In fact, the film ends with a massive screamy fit by Dyers when Maclean asks him about some of the sexual abuse allegations that had been dogging him for ten years at the time of the shoot. Dyers, 84, killed himself when he was charged anew with sexual assault last year.

The cult-expose story is a familiar one so I would’ve liked this film more if it had actually explained to me more about what the Kenjan beliefs are. Jeez, ppl, don’t force me to look it up when I get back to the hotel near midnight. Sheesh.