The naked truth
10th October 2008
If there's one thing film types don't like to make known to the public at large it's the truth behind film festivals. The rule is simple: Don't bite the hand that could give you the prize that you can subsequently highlight in big gold letters when your movie hits the screens, even if it's the Audience Favorite prize in the "Films from the Middle East That Look at Religion from a Feminist Angle" category from the San Gimignano Festival. You'd think that Amos Gitai's numerous successes at Cannes would be enough to instill some skepticism regarding even the most prestigious festivals, for Gitai's awful films surely prove that film festivals are one thing and good movies are something else entirely. Yet the glitziest festivals haven't lost any of their sparkle and prizes from them still adorn film ads, as always.
One of the most brilliant episodes of the animated series "South Park" was a parody of the Sundance Festival, the highly regarded independent film festival held in Utah. Watching Sundance films from the last few years, you soon realize that it's basically one movie being shot again and again in hundreds of different versions. A quiet American suburb. A dysfunctional family. A melancholy youth who refuses to come down from his tree house. His chubby (or anorexic) sister is in love - unrequited - with the high school football champ who is gay and will kill himself, probably with the help of her melancholy brother, who's also a pyromaniac. If, say, you have ambitions of your film from Sundance getting into Cannes, too, you need only add a political dimension, such as an Iranian exile who comes to the quiet suburb and becomes the lover of the mother in the dysfunctional family, to the dismay of her Jewish parents who can't understand why she can't at least find an ordinary white goy to fool around with.
The bad news is that the big festivals are nothing compared to their smaller brethren, which are steadily splitting off into endless categories and subcategories. In Israel, we're familiar mostly with the Jewish, gay and Middle East-themed festivals, but this is nothing compared to what you find abroad. Lots of Israelis will always win at least an honorable mention at these festivals, while the winners of the main prizes will be films from Third World countries more miserable than our own, films by a Muslim woman filmmaker, usually a lesbian who was subjected to genital mutilation, or else films lacking a beginning, middle and end - a genre that's always a surefire winner.
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A few years ago, when we lived in Los Angeles, we met a Goth lesbian called Paula, who was writing a dissertation entitled "Homoeroticism among Dwarfs in the Novels of Knut Hamsen: An Introduction to Freak Studies." You think I'm making this up, but I'm not. That was the actual title of her dissertation. Word for word. This Paula is now a "festival worker," as she puts it. You can find her taking one of her "films" - some incoherent blob of a thing she filmed on her cell phone - from country to country, or being invited to judge in special award categories such as "Most Contemptible" or "Most Twisted."
Just before Rosh Hashanah I found myself at a gay film festival in a staid European city. In the foyer of the venerable cinema, I hobnobbed with the finest queer filmmakers in the world. An Italian director whose film "No Songbird" depicts the difficult relationship of a 70-year-old transsexual with his canary (the stuffed version, actually, since the bird expired a long time ago); a Brazilian director whose film "8-Inch, Part One" tells the story of a police officer trying to catch a pickpocket who uses his impressive member as bait for men in a movie theater that shows sex films (The film is shot in total darkness by cameras concealed in movie houses of this sort); and an Irish director whose film "Bathtub" depicts (I'm quoting from the program here): "the vulnerability and intimacy a young man experiences with himself as he takes a bath. As he dips in the water and is surrounded by darkness, he has no choice but to withdraw inward and examine his life."
I really do want to encourage and promote queer cinema, but it's not easy. Alongside the three or four interesting films, as at any festival - be it Jewish, Russian, or Danish beer films - there are always dozens more that are no more than a passing thought in the mind of the "filmmaker" and that somehow, using production methods now available in any Cellcom store, make their way to the festival screenings. One of the biggest trends I've noticed is the total exemption from any need to tell a story.
For example, take an American movie entitled "Lloyd Neck" (I needed a Google search to tell me that this is actually the name of a town in Long Island, which is not mentioned at all in the movie, which I expected to be about the neck of a guy named Lloyd). The movie begins with a high school track meet. Taylor, a kid of about 17, finishes running a race and another hunky-looking guy tells him that he ran a great race. You think this hunk will show up again later on? Why? Anyway, Taylor goes home with his sister Alex. Their parents aren't home. Are they on vacation? Dead? This isn't clarified. Taylor eats a peanut butter sandwich. Alex watches television. He tells her to stop watching television. In the morning they go to a lake with Jesse, a friend, perhaps a lover - who knows? - of Taylor's. They take pictures of one another next to the lake. Just regular pictures. The End.
In other movie, "Without a Bikini," we follow a cute young girl in her swimming lessons. The top of her suit falls off and the coach, as well as all the other kids, is sure she's a boy. She swims, she jumps off the diving board. At the end of the semester, her mother receives a certificate saying her son excelled in swimming. The mother is shocked. She says to her daughter, "You can't be trusted with a bikini." The End. All the rest of the movies, by the way, feature male prostitutes. Because that's what all our lives are like, after all.
I would also like to "work at festivals." I'm thinking of a movie starring a transsexual prostitute from Somalia who immigrates to Geneva and films herself next to the lake in black-and-white as an expression of interracial and inter-gender tensions. I think I'll start with Cannes, and after that the sky's the limit.
Source: Haaretz