Nov. 8, 2007

WHO: The Virginia Film Society
WHAT: “The Fall” by Peter Whitehead
WHEN: Wednesday, Nov. 14, 7 p.m.
WHERE: Vinegar Hill Theatre {More}

Posted in Film Society, News, Monday, November 12th, 2007

by Richard Herskowitz

It didn’t take long after last year’s Virginia Film Festival to come up with a theme for this one. Nine days after we wrapped, 58% of Virginia voters ratified an amendment to the state constitution banning marriage equality for gays and lesbians. This followed the “Affirmation of Marriage Act” of 2004, banning civil unions and other contract rights for Virginia’s same-sex couples. Of course, I live in the blue city of Charlottesville, where 80% of the voters voted futilely against the “marriage amendment.”

The Virginia legislature and constitution, it appeared to me, were aiming to be realms of certainty regarding what constitutes a family. But film and culture are realms of uncertainty, where filmmakers and audiences are always questioning: What is a family? One provocative question that often gets raised, especially in independent films, is: Is a “normal” family really normal? For example, last year’s Little Miss Sunshine asked how “dysfunctional” its subjects were in relation to the families of the thin and sexy showgirls competing with little Olive, and Little Children went so far as to suggest that the town’s pedophiliac monster had commonalities with the universally youth-obsessed, stunted parents in his suburban community.

Several films in this year’s Virginia Film Festival give us perfect pictures of “normal” families. The family in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt lives in “peaceful, quiet Santa Rosa.” Everything seems idyllic, except for the odd obsession the adult men have with debating murder methods, and the fact that lovable Uncle Charlie is really the twisted Merry Widow Killer. In Shotgun Stories, a respectable man, a model Christian, has died and left his loving family bereaved. The film, however, is told from the point of view of the three sons he abandoned when he was an alcoholic, and left in the care of a bitter mother; their rage is unfathomable to the people who knew him as a respectable family man. The Killer Within, by Macky Alston, introduces us to Bob Bechtel, a devoted husband and father who is an esteemed professor and a respected member of his religious and educational communities. However, fifty years ago, driven mad by bullying, he decided to shoot students in his college dorm and succeeded in killing one. Incredibly, this is a documentary, and the viewer must reconcile the truths about this likable, real person, who is a loving family man and a murderer.

Another film in the festival program asks a question that might unsettle those who felt they were following God’s teachings when they voted for the marriage amendment: What is a religious family? The film is For the Bible Tells Me So, and it is the transition from last year’s Revelations: Finding God at the Movies to Kin Flicks. All the families interviewed in the film are religious, but they have dealt with the coming out of their children in very different ways. Some, like the family of Dick Gephardt, embraced their daughter’s lesbian identity. Others would not waver from the religious precepts they had been taught. When one woman’s daughter commits suicide, she is driven to question the Bible’s message on homosexuality, which she discovers to be less clear and certain than she believed. Her questioning and activism, while too late for her daughter, is not too late to unsettle other religious families’ certitudes, on behalf of their struggling children.

The “normal” family in our culture wants to be an enclave, a holy haven in a heartless world. When we are out in the workplace and social spaces that we do not own, we are not the true, personal and spiritual selves we are at home with our families, whom we are working to preserve and protect. The elaboration of this normative image of “family” as the realm of private life is not eternal and God-given. It began with industrial capitalism, which took commodity production out of the household and into the factories, and made home the workers’ realm of personal freedom, and consumption. Home became isolated from economic production, although only seemingly–the women’s housework on which the male wage laborer depended was vital, just not valued economically. And so women, at home in the doll house, were oppressed by their devaluation and exploitation; kids were damaged by this, too, and by their father’s remoteness; and men were alienated by their work, whose soullessness seeped into their not-so-impenetrable haven. There has never been a better film made about this situation than Killer of Sheep, the 30 year old masterpiece that was recovered from copyright tangles this year to universal critical acclaim, and that filmmaker Charles Burnett is bringing to our festival on Thursday and Friday. You can find numerous other films, beginning with The Godfather, that demonstrate the futility of believing in the family’s transcendence of society and the marketplace.

Many, many films take the questioning of the normal, ideal nuclear family further, and ask: What alternative kinds of families exist and are possible? Among them is the uproarious new work from VFF veterans, Ray McKinnon and Lisa Blount. Randy and the Mob is, in some ways, a good-old-boy Southern comedy in the Smokey and the Bandit vein (Burt Reynolds even makes an appearance). But one of the film’s two protagonists (both played by McKinnon) is in a gay marriage, and, through this appealing character, McKinnon embraces a progressive Southern, non-exclusionary vision of family life.

One of the most influential “alternative family” films is Rebel Without a Cause (1955). A wonderful “making of” book, Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel’s Live Fast, Die Young, reveals that the film production was a crucible of family misery, turned into imaginative, utopian art. Director Nicolas Ray lived a more shocking family saga of teenage rebellion than Hollywood could ever imagine. In 1951, he found Tony Ray, his son from a previous marriage, in bed with his current wife, Gloria Grahame. Nick Ray and Grahame divorced, but nine years later, Tony Ray and Gloria Grahame married (making Tony the stepfather to his half-brother).

According to the film’s screenwriter, Stewart Stern, “I think [Nick Ray] hated himself to a large degree for failing as a father…And it influenced his approach to the film.” And so the film’s portrait of Jim Stark’s parents is pretty gruesome. Dad is weak, mom is domineering, and when Jim cries out: “You’re tearing me apart! You say one thing, he says another, and everybody changes back again,” we’re more than ready to join his rebellion.

Stewart Stern, who will be conducting a Regal Shot-by-Shot Workshop on Rebel Without a Cause on Sunday, was also driven creatively by the frustrations of his family life. His parents showered all their love on his sick sister, leaving him hungry for affection. Stern found, though, that his need for love could be met by alternative families. First, there were his teachers and schoolmates at the Fieldston School, “where my life was lived.” Later, as a staff sergeant in World War Two, and a war hero in the Battle of the Bulge, he found the camaraderie of a platoon.

But the single greatest influence on Stern’s faith in surrogate families, and the story that informed Rebel Without a Cause most powerfully, was J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Peter Pan, who managed not to care that his parents were absent, and who formed an imaginary family with Wendy and the Lost Boys, is the deepest source of Rebel’s alternative family of Jim (James Dean) and Judy (Natalie Wood) and their Lost Boy, Plato (Sal Mineo). In interviews, Stern describes the unforgettable scene of their tour through the mansion as a “night journey” to Neverland, “a magic world built on the armature of Jim’s unfulfilled wishes about his parents.”

To say Stern identified with Peter Pan is an understatement. He saw Eva Le Gallienne play Peter Pan on the stage when he was eight years old, and returned for nearly every Saturday matinee. A Peter Pan costume was his favorite childhood garb. He owns a first edition of Peter and Wendy inscribed to him by J.M. Barrie. His uncle, Adolph Zukor, the founder of Paramount Pictures, produced the first (and best) film version of Peter Pan in 1924, when Stern was two. And on November 3, Stewart Stern will stand on the stage of Charlottesville’s Paramount Theater, once owned by his uncle’s company, and introduce our lavish presentation of the classic silent film Peter Pan, with music by Donald Sosin, Joanna Seaton, and a chorus of Charlottesville children led by Paul Reisler and Terri Allard.

One look at the photo of Dean, Wood, and Mineo can easily produce the sense that there is something even more alternative going on here than three teenagers forming a surrogate family. Mineo’s longing gaze at Dean, and the amazing shot in the film of him laying his head on Jim’s arm (Frascella and Weisel: “It rattles one’s sense of what was allowed between two men, especially two younger men, in the mid-1950s”), confirms Mineo’s proud claim later in his life that Plato was “the first gay teenager in films.” And Dean, pioneering a new masculinity in films that was a revolutionary change (“a man who can be gentle and sweet,” as Judy puts it) from the strong-jawed movie heroes of the past, is also sexually ambiguous (note the scene in which he nearly walks into the women’s room).

Gay and feminist viewers of movies, searching for different family models to which they can relate, have drawn sustenance from Rebel Without a Cause and other movies that provide hints of other worlds. Among these are the films of Joan Crawford, to whom we are paying tribute on Saturday night with back-to-back screenings of Mildred Pierce and Mommie Dearest. Mildred Pierce, like other great women’s pictures (this movie has to stand in for the many, such as All That Heaven Allows, I was dying to show), manifests the conflict between women’s self-actualization and the submissive role they are required to play in a traditional family (this tension was particularly evident in post-WWII women’s pictures, as working women were being corralled back into the kitchen). And Joan Crawford’s masculine femininity, longing for a man but being more than a man can handle, achieves its apotheosis in Faye Dunaway’s portrayal of her in Mommie Dearest. Based on Crawford’s daughter Christina’s bitter autobiography, it portrays a woman who fiercely directed her kids to join her in performing the “normal” and “ideal” family for the viewing public. Femininity and motherhood were roles for this tough actress, and female impersonator Lypsinka has praised Dunaway’s choices (such as wearing white face cream while wielding the legendary coat hanger) as “brilliant, operatic, and almost experimental.” When we screen the film for free at the Gravity Lounge, we’re going to turn up the appreciative DVD commentary from the film’s DVD Legacy edition, delivered by gay director and camp appreciator John Waters.

“Women’s pictures” are a disparaged genre that has been a space for rebellious imaginings of new familial and gender roles. But they don’t hold a candle in the disparaged department next to the most embarrassing of all genres, the home movie. Yet here, too, we have alternative relationships being imagined and created, by film scholars like Patricia Zimmermann (author of Reel Families and Mining the Home Movie, who will be presenting rare archival home movies with archivist Pam Wintle on Sunday) and by experimental filmmakers like Su Friedrich and Alan Berliner, who are two of this year’s “Focus On” directors (eight directors whose works have focused on family, and who are each screening several films in our program).

Friedrich and Berliner appropriate and re-edit home movies and release their repressed imaginings. One of the things that characterizes home movies (not to mention traditional American families, as testified by numerous films in our program, including The Savages, Killer of Sheep, Starting Out in the Evening, and Rebel Without a Cause) is the father’s emotional and physical remoteness. This distance is supported by the common practice of having Dad wield the camera while Mom and the kids fill the frame. Alan Berliner conquers this by forcing his incredibly, hilariously reluctant father to talk and perform in his immensely entertaining Nobody’s Business. In Intimate Stranger (which we showed in 1995 but not this year), he uncovers the truth about his uncle, Joseph Cassuto, who was emotionally blocked with his nuclear family, but emotionally available when he was far away from them, with his business partners in Japan. In his latest film, Wide Awake, he turns the camera critically on his own family and shows how his work habits (never sleeping) are fueling his art but straining his family relationships.

Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim looks directly at her father, whose coldness and cruelty (as reflected in the imperative of the title) are shown to be rooted in larger cultural patterns of 50s marriage and parenting. Friedrich photographs the perfect patriarchal family sitcoms of the period (including Father Knows Best and Make Room for Daddy) off of the TV, destroying their perfection and letting them overlap with the shaky and unpolished home movie footage. And in the section of her film called “Kinship,” we sense her liberation from her father’s fears as she looks out the window of a plane, walks with a friend through the desert, and shares a shower with a lesbian partner.

What is a family? Is a “normal” family really normal? What alternative kinds of families exist and are possible? Watch our films, ask these questions, and then let’s see if we can make our laws reflect the openness of these issues.

Posted in 2007, Richard, Sunday, November 11th, 2007

KIN FLICKS is over. I’ve got some highlights of my own to mention, and photos by Festival photographer Jack Looney to share in this posting. But I’d love to know what events were highlights for you, and I encourage you to send comments to this blog. While you’re at it, let me know what themes you’d like us to consider for the 2008 Festival. {More}

Posted in 2007, Director, Saturday, November 10th, 2007