Peter Sellars gesticulating wildly; his head, torso, and arms going up and down in a vaguely mechanistic motion. A room full of young dudes and dudettes nodding at every turn of phrase during a forty minute polemic about the American judicial system. Bursts of applause punctuating the harangue, rising at the very mention of our dear loathed president and quickly quelled by the speaker lest his rhythm be broken. The new trend in the prison industry is the development of subterranean concrete isolation chambers! Shame on you Mr. Bush! Shame! I mean is this fucking America or Stalinist Russia? At this point, I remember gazing beyond Sellars' plateau of blond hair at the mountains in the distance and realizing: this is liberal bootcamp. The conservatives have their religious summer camps; we liberals have the Telluride Film Festival.
And how fortunate we are. For thirty years, film lovers have ventured across the Rockies to arrive at what is commonly referred to as the "gem of all film festivals." Convening for four days in late August, the Telluride Film Festival takes place in the remote Four Corners region of Southwestern Colorado. The festival also sponsors a motley array of fifty film students from across America to participate in their Student Symposium Program. The students are treated to countless films and conversations with festival participants, this year including Ken Burns, Gus van Sant, and Werner Herzog. In short, the program is an idyllic incarnation of bootcamp - the greatest challenge lies in absorbing over thirty hours of film and countless more of discussion.
What was apparent in the films, on the streets, and in the queues was that the festival offered a refuge and place of resistance for those on the Left. The pristine beauty of Telluride's main street and soaring precipices aren't obstructed by corporate banners; unlike Cannes or Sundance, all evidence of sponsorship is contained in a tent. Independent cinema has always defined itself in opposition with Hollywood and this year's films were no different. The selection was eclectic, ranging from contemporary independent and foreign films to restored versions of neglected masterpieces like Bud Schulberg and Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957) or Julien Duvivier's Carnet du Bal (1952). However, one could not mistake the bleak outlook of so many of this year's films. One could sense that more than the usual critique of Hollywood cinema was at work.
The films offered varying responses to the larger phenomenon of the Hollywood-ization of our country. That is, in the leftist caricature, the narrative in which our politics has become an elaborately story-boarded and tightly controlled shoot starring the president cowboy and his posse. This four-year-long feature film is a brazen collage of cinematic tropes, tugging at the nation's heart strings. In one scene, our hero, clad in blue jeans and a Stetson, appears in a Western-style remake at his Texan ranch. In the next scene, he pulls Top Gun-style stunts by landing a fighter jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Our hero even dons the pinstripe suit and patriot red tie to try his hand at playing the President himself. The media's indulgence in these kitschy cinematic antics has shown that America's obsession with macho heroes has no reasonable limit: think musclehead misogynists as governors, think firemen, policemen, combat soldiers - uniformed male minions serving their leader (our hero) faithfully to the end.
Some of the filmmakers at Telluride this year seem to have taken offense at this devious use of their art. If one is willing to view the films as responses to the global situation (at least in part), they constituted a full spectrum from resignation to frustration to incredulous outrage. Portraying this deep-seated fury like no other film, Alexandra's Project, directed by Australian Rolf de Heer, offers a scathing critique of contemporary society. Replete with the superficial benefits of the sexual revolution, financial prosperity and women's liberation, de Heer's characters remain entrenched in a suburbia which fosters traditional roles for men and women. Steve, the father and husband, has a successful career in the city, and a wife and two lovely children at home. Though he has a penchant for dallying a little too long at lunch with younger blonde colleagues, Steve comes across as a relatively benign businessman and a good family man. Unfortunately for Steve, his wife doesn't share that view. Alexandra subjects her husband to a protracted form of confessional torture which leaves the audience aching for both of the characters. The claustrophobic horror experienced by Steve and the baroque, brutal honesty of Alexandra can barely be contained by the film. De Heer uses the Hitchcockian tropes of the "suspense movie" to indict, rather than celebrate, a society that is still deeply male-centric. At the same time, Alexandra's protests are so incisive they are sadistic and possibly even morally dubious. The film is as much a critique of reactionary or vengeful responses as of the reprehensible actions which provoke them. No film could be as polarizing - dividing the audience like the Left is divided over a candidate like Howard Dean. No matter whom one has sympathy for, the film brands an indelible mark upon any filmgoer.
Equally as divisive and complex was Lars von Trier's Dogville, a cynical take on American mores. Like Alexandra's Project, Dogville is a movie whose aesthetic is thoroughly original. Von Trier shot the entire film on a black sound stage using a camera mounted on his shoulders. Among the myriad objects of critique and commentary: Christianity, xenophobia, labor roles, gender roles, sexual abuse, slavery (past and present), the triumph of the rich, notions of charity and forgiveness, and capital punishment. Despite how horrific it is, Dogville is utterly endearing. Part of that is due to the tremendous acting that van Trier coaxes out of his actors. Nicole Kidman plays Grace, a spectacular Messianic foreigner, whose arrival and sojourn in a small mountain village forms the central conflict. The gorgeous newcomer disrupts the social equilibrium and humble routine of the townsfolk (including Laren Bacall, Stellan Skarsgård, Patricia Clarkson, and Chloë Sevigny), unearthing a deep mineshaft of passions. Tom Edison (Paul Bettany), an aspiring Thoreau, is Grace's champion and tries in vain to keep the town in spiritual order. Sadly, the more time Grace spends in the village, the more abusive her situation becomes. Von Trier stops at nothing to create a film that is so monstrous that its anti-Americanism is palpable, but not exactly coherent. One walks out of the film with a sickening sensation of repulsion tinged with deep satisfaction. Is von Trier appealing to our most base desires while offering a scathing critique of them? Not a simplistic moral vision, no simple solutions.
Where Alexandra's Project and Dogville succeed as superb filmmaking matched with a complex agenda, a film like Ruth Mader's Struggle fails. An Austrian film of just seventy-four minutes, the movie felt at least three times longer than Dogville's one hundred seventy seven minutes. The film was divided into two sections, the first of which followed - very movingly at times - the plight of an itinerant Polish worker (illegally employed in Austria), Ewa, and her daughter. In long and silent scenes, workers pick strawberries in the rain or hack up chickens in a slaughter-house until they are drenched in blood. The movie has remarkably little dialogue but is rich in the sounds of labor - aching joints, deep sighs, automated equipment. Everyone is too miserable to have much to say.
Unfortunately, the understated beauty and horror established by the first narrative is destroyed by the second. A divorced real estate agent, Marold, tries to find renewed purpose in his overly bourgeois life. Instead, he finds himself unable to communicate with his daughter or make friends. It seems like only driving his BMW while listening to American oldies ("Just the Two of Us" and "Everybody's Talkin'") can put a smile on his face. In what is meant to be the film's coup de grace, Marold hesitantly enters a subterranean room, strips naked, and permits a man in a black body suit to asphyxiate him with a noose. As if the point wasn't overstated there, the film continues to chart Marold's masochistic desperation as he nightly frequents swingers' clubs.
The two story lines converge one night in a club where Marold watches Ewa engaging in girl-on-girl action. In the next scene, the two of them are strolling through a shopping mall alongside Marold's daughter. At one point, the "family" takes a break from shopping to watch a puppet show. In a slow tracking shot across the audience, the camera dotes on each of the families, illustrating their particular dysfunctionality -some have missing parents, others have disgruntled couples and troubled children. The irony is that the most wholesome-looking family is the one we know to be composed of an illegal alien and a perverse real estate agent. The lies of bourgeoisie are unmasked! What seems conventional is in fact deeply irregular! Unfortunately, this moment has the opposite effect of what seems to have been intended. What had been a exposé of contemporary Europe (and its reliance upon unacknowledged systems of exploitation) inadvertently comes off as a polemic about the decline of the nuclear family. The progressive clichés, piled on top of one another in Struggle, parade as edgy indictments while functioning as misleading, quasi-reactionary rhetoric. Whatever agenda Ruth Mader had hoped to infuse her film with was compromised. Perhaps it is a blessing that the insubstantial plot and one-dimensional characters prevents Struggle from even captivating the audience enough to insinuate its views.
And that left me wondering. The Telluride Film Festival is a miraculous event; the confluence of talent, ambition, and agenda is truly inspiring. But in thinking about what it means to offer resistance and critique in art, I could not help but feel alienated by the rhetoric of a film like Struggle or Peter Sellars. Shame on you Mr. Bush! Shame! I mean is this fucking America or Stalinist Russia? [pause] Every day we are getting closer to living in a fascist state where the wealthiest one percent control half of the total wealth in America. When does the ideological ranting of Peter Sellars become the same as Joe Scarborough's or Bill O'Reilly's? My experience was: very quickly. I know that Sellars presents himself as a provocateur, and that he does, successfully. However, as I looked around the room that day, I was more alarmed by the metronomic nodding of heads than our incipient fascist state. Doesn't appropriating right-wing methods of mind-control, for whatever purpose, become a form of conservatism when it overpowers all other dialogue? Whoever can out-yell the other person wins - and that requires taking the most macho and hard-line view imaginable. Isn't that the point of talk radio à la Rush Limbaugh and the essence of the neo-conservative movement?
The reality is that liberalism is just as prone to reactionary trends as conservatism. Struggle and Gus van Sant's Elephant, were salient examples of that potential at this year's Telluride Film Festival. But, what sets the best of the Left apart from the Right is its capacity to accommodate moral complexity. The most successful films like Dogville and Alexandra's Project combine an intricate agenda with great filmmaking. In this day and age, a morally contentious and ambiguous work of art is a subversive one precisely because it does not offer a simplistic, reductionist moral view, like that of Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Rumsfeld/Rove. When Peter Sellars said that cinema is the art of the 21st century, I was able to hear him clearly for the first time: Cinema is cooperative in its production and social in its consumption. The mysterious power of the flickering image holds us in thrall in the dark auditorium, and makes us witness to its slippery chaos.
1. Larry Gross in Program Notes for the 30th Telluride Film Festival