Boxing Gym

(from Boxing Gym/Zipporah Films, 2010)

One irritating visual cliché in films is the foot shot. This is the shot that shows a character’s feet at ground level, usually in motion. In his new documentary Boxing Gym, Frederick Wiseman takes this dead image and re-births it. Uma Thurman’s moving feet in Tarantino’s brawl-fests are shown to tag some supposed dramatic energy on to her characters; the moving feet of boxers in Wiseman’s brawl-fest are shown because these characters move like dancers. They parry around a punching bag with the left foot in front, followed by the right foot. They do a tap dance in the ring while they threaten to punch each other’s lights out. It may be self-evident that this film has much in common with Wiseman’s La Danse, from last year. But that film was actually about ballet. This film is about a dance with violence, or rather, pseudo-violence making constant contact with the real thing.

            Perhaps the protagonist of the film is Richard Lord, the manager of the boxing gym of the title, in Austin, Texas. Most of the people who come in and out of the gym are locals from all social classes and ethnicities. Men only have the slightest edge on women in attendance, and many of the regular participants are married or divorced working people over forty years old. There is apparently even a 68-year old woman who can “…hit the punching bag better than any one else,” according to Lord. But although Lord presides over all the operations in the gym, he tries to stay out of the way. The protagonist may also be the young man who rides in from Houston, casually boasting of needing to “take things up a notch.” It may be Eric, whose daughter, we are informed, attends Virginia Tech and is wounded in the fateful shooting that occurred there, some time near the end of the film. Characters such as these—victims and proponents of violence real and staged—are among the huge cast of characters, but they are the one’s Wiseman gently guides our attention to. Otherwise, he doesn’t intrude; a barely registered agreement between Richard Lord and his camera.

            But despite its pre-occupations, it would be a grave mistake to recognize Boxing Gym as a romantic film, or even more tepidly, a film with a message. Boxing Gym is a work built on physicality, deriving its rhythms from people’s bodies rather than a narrative or a meaning. The film is not ruled by any theme, insofar as there is one. It is ruled by spectacular images like the one of five boxers, warming up in the ring by doing a frog-leap exercise; four crouch down, the fifth propels himself over each of their backs with his hands until he reaches the front of the chain, at which point the new last man stands and propels himself to the front of the chain, where he crouches down…and so forth. All this amounts to nothing more than a fascination with the way images move across the screen. Wiseman is one of the few filmmakers today to concern himself with such a basic objective. This approach takes more guts than in takes to punch a man across the cheek.

(from Boxing Gym/Zipporah Films, 2010)

            So while on one level, this particular dance from the eighty-year old Wiseman is a work of deep concern, even stating that goes far overboard. His films are in one sense public service announcements, and in another sense vast, observational tapestries. They are in one sense deeply personal and in another sense staggeringly holistic. We can’t ever be sure. They are so cool, so presentational (not representational), that they can hardly even be written about. This is not to say that Wiseman never shows his hand; Boxing Gym takes on an unpredictable structure in which nearly two-thirds of the film are spent in the close quarters of the gym before we are shown wide shots of the surrounding city in the middle of the day. Wiseman knows when he has to pull back and take a long view of the surroundings. No film can do without a context. But Wiseman’s context is, literally, a long view, nothing more. There is no romance or metaphor in those Austin buildings. Only room for sparring.

              

Catfish

(Megan Faccio in Catfish/dir. Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman, Rogue Pictures)

          Catfish manages to state what we already know about the Internet in the ugliest, most uncomfortable way possible. It gives us a glimpse of what has always been true about certain people; the fizzled-out, wayward truth that is only made worse by social networking sites. This is a unique achievement considering that this film does not need to be a film at all, and the characters in it did not have to go to all this trouble to confirm our most dismal suspicions.

            The film really gets weird right from the get-go, after Nev Schulman, a New York-based photographer who had a picture of a dancer published in The New York Sun, begins a Facebook friendship with a young girl from Michigan—eight year old Abby—who has sent him an extraordinary painting of his photograph. The Beach Boy’s ‘Good Vibrations,’ as rendered by a chorus of children plays over the frantic imagery of Facebook. The voices of these children—singing a lightly suggestive pop song—add a perverse dimension to the inherent strangeness of a 24-year old talking to an eight year old online. Yet what is more astonishing is that it seems, initially, to be all good and then some. Nev begins talking to Abby’s mother Angela, on both Facebook and the phone, and soon is introduced to Angela’s stunningly beautiful daughter Meg, with whom he begins an online romance that soon crosses the limits of mere flirtation. Abby paints more of Nev’s photographs, each one indicating that she is a child prodigy. Megan is a farm girl who records him songs whenever he wants her to. All of it is captured on camera by Nev’s brother, Ariel, and their friend, Henry Joost.

            That all this elaborate shadiness is fully engaged, even enabled, by Nev is an indicator that he, Ariel and Henry had an idea of what they were getting in to all along. It also raises questions about Nev’s own grasp of ethics. So it does not come as much of a surprise when, less than halfway through the film, the legitimacy of some of the claims this family is making come in to question.

            It is at this point when Catfish morphs in to a detective story. This is not its final transformation, but it is the high point of the film. Nev and his friends are amateur detectives, but that’s all they need to be; the Internet will do most of the research for them. It is just when their findings yield a situation that any normal person would walk away from then and there, that the three of them decide to stop by Ishpema, Michigan, where the family resides. Their journey yields a final twist that is far from unbelievable, yet still very weird. But prospective viewers should not think this twist will bring the film in to horror film territory, complete with a homicidal maniac, rapist, or any situation where Nev’s life is put in danger. In its final act, the film simply enters an entirely new investigation, one which, unfortunately, the filmmakers fail to truly probe. The amateur detectives turn in to non-investigative journalists. They are so wowed by their discoveries that they miss what their discoveries imply about our modern society. Once it is all over, it feels as though Catfish could have easily been a literary work; part-memoir, part journalism, rather than a film.

(Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman and Nev Schulman in Catfish)

           In any case, Catfish is an almost too clever film. Although Joost and Schulman do their best to find poetry in online imagery, it all looks like neat editing. Although they appear to have shot the film on two different digital formats, there is nothing particularly cinematic about the movie. Despite this, there are images from Catfish that will depress any Internet user (read: modern man) for some time. Although the film’s legitimacy has come in to question—some claim that this is not a documentary at all—this is a moot point, because Catfish  adheres to documentary standards in the truest sense. The point of documentaries, from the time Robert Flaherty visited the Eskimos, has not been to capture authentic, un-staged action, but to cover a real phenomena in a social setting (i.e, internet networks) and its real outcome (i.e, the final third of this film) and let us decide on whether this a tragedy, comedy or drama for the real world. Catfish doesn’t follow through as well as it should. The best it does is hold a mirror up to the three self-absorbed hipsters who got involved in such a mess, thereby holding a mirror up to the rest of us e-weirdos. When we log online, we all become demented. That is its real world tragedy. But who is it that acted more demented in this story? Was it Henry and his friends? Or was it--- ?

Filmmaking and Corporatism

       Here is a New York Times story today that, despite it being relegated to one of the side-sections of their website, I find absolutely appalling. Michael Moore has spoke out against the court ruling in question (it's curious to me why the actual director of this documentary has not said anything, though). Whatever I think of Michael Moore-- and I take any number of issues with his approach to filmmaking and the trend it has created-- I will side with him any day on this issue. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/michael-moore-says-judges-ruling-could-have-chilling-effect-on-documentaries/?hp