THE MOVIE:

Any synopsis of Special Forces would make it sound like standard issue direct-to-video Hollywood fodder. That is until you see that Djimon Hounsou and Diane Kruger are speaking in French…and so is everybody else. That’s right, Special Forces (aka Forces Spéciales) is a French Men on a Mission film that mixes together elements of Tears of the Sun and Behind Enemy Lines with distinctly European flair before forcing its protagonists into a showdown with an unflinching opponent. I’m talking about Mother Nature. Spoiler alert: she’s in full-on bitch mode.

After a rousing opening that features our titular badasses capturing a war criminal in Kosovo, the film sets the stage for its central conflict by introducing the character of Elsa Casanova (Diane Kruger). She’s a French journalist who digs a little too deep into the workings of the Taliban, incurring the wrath of one of its warlords, Ahmed Zaief (Raz Degan), in the process. Zaief kidnaps Elsa and makes an example of one of her friends to demonstrate that he means business. In turn, the French government puts a search and rescue operation into action. This includes our small Special Forces group acting as a recon team until the heavy artillery can arrive.

When the team arrives at Zaief’s compound, they realize that the circumstances are much more dire than expected. They will have to act immediately and save Elsa themselves. While the rescue itself goes off as planned, they find themselves without any open lines of communication or any means of transport. Determined to survive, they embark on foot for safe haven across the border, with Elsa in tow. With Zaief’s men in hot pursuit and the elements conspiring against them, they will have to call upon all their training if they are to complete this mission successfully.

As I said, nothing about that summary screams novelty and that’s a fair criticism. This sort of search and rescue story has been done before (I’ve already mentioned it but comparisons to Tears of the Sun are unavoidable). Fortunately, execution still counts for a lot in my book and that’s where director Stéphane Rybojad (working from a screenplay co-written with Michael Cooper) shines in his feature debut (his only previous credit is a documentary about the French military…big surprise). Rybojad approaches the material with a fair amount of realism but overlays it with just enough of the sort of slickness that audiences have come to expect from modern action movies. The result is engaging in a you are there manner while not skimping on the slo-mo heroics that give the proceedings a glossy sheen.

As one may expect from a film of this sort, the protagonists are largely reduced to types. Hounsou is the stoic and heroic leader while Denis Menochet is ornery and efficient as his second in command. Benoît Magimel gets to play the charming cad who Diane Kruger will have a hard time resisting (there’s always room for a bit of romance when the bullets aren’t flying). Raphaël Personnaz is compelling as the young sniper of the group while Alain Figlarz and Alain Alivon establish their grizzled veteran status (with Alivon being a former instructor in the French Naval Special Forces in real life). I’m happy to report that with all the testosterone in the air, Kruger still gets to stand her ground and play a strong, plucky female lead.

Raz Degan plays Zaief with suitable cruelty but is short-changed by Rybojad who refuses to place his villainy front and center. As I mentioned earlier, our heroes aren’t just trying to evade Zaief and his men. They also need to survive the harsh climate and terrain that stands between them and a safe trip home. To this end, Rybojad actually makes nature a far more intimidating opponent than Zaief can ever hope to be. While this helps add a realistic element of survival to the movie, it diminishes the human threat and deflates the climax a bit. The stakes are still high but far less personal. This nitpick aside, the film is still engaging from start to finish and should prove to be a pleasant surprise to anyone approaching it with modest expectations.

THE DVD:

Video:
The image is presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio with anamorphic enhancement. As one may expect given the material at hand, earth tones dominate the natural color palette. Fortunately the image is presented with sharpness and clarity. There aren’t too many dark scenes as the film mostly transpires in the daytime but shadow detail is reasonably good. A few scenes do feature visibly bleached whites but this seems to be intentional. Altogether, a worthwhile presentation which provides able support to cinematographer David Jankowski’s work.

Audio:
The audio is presented in French and English 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround mixes with an optional English 2.0 mix being available as well. English and French subtitles are included. I chose to ignore the dub and viewed the film with its original French surround mix (which has a fair amount of English in it anyway). This isn’t an especially chatty film but dialogue comes through with clarity. More importantly, the action scenes comes alive with vibrant energy. The gunplay has an immersive quality as do the chopper shots of the early rescue scene. Composer Xavier Berthelot’s score is also done justice by being placed front and center on numerous occasions.

Extras:
We kick things off with a set of 7 Deleted Scenes. The scenes are roughly divided between action and character moments that could have worked nicely in the film and other extraneous bits that deserved to be excised. The only other extra is a short featurette on Marius (3:31) which features Alain Alivon in naval commando mode taking us through realistic training exercises.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Director Stéphane Rybojad has delivered something resembling a French Tears of the Sun with his feature debut Special Forces. Djimon Hounsou may not have the star power of Bruce Willis but the cast as a whole is efficient and keeps the team dynamic at the forefront. The climax is too drawn out and divided in focus to match up to the energy of the film’s first half but the overall impact is still fairly positive. Recommended.

THE FILMS 

Attempts for amateurs like myself to approach and understand avant-garde/experimental films — like those, collected in Materialfilme, of German husband-and-wife team Wilhelm and Birgit Hein — require making equivalencies and looking for overlaps. To pose the overlap question: What, in my much more extensive experience with narrative/dramatic movies, might allow me to make a connection with them There’s that moment in Bergman’s Persona where the film gets stuck and melts before our very eyes, calling attention to the mechanism of the celluloid in the projector itself and creating a shocking disruption of the “story,”; or the interludes in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love for which he used the actual work of an avant-garde/experimental filmmaker, Jeremy Blake, to fill the screen with patterns of fluctuating color momentarily obscuring the adventures and fates of the film’s human characters. There’s even a bit in Fight Club that counts, when Tyler Durden points to the upper right-hand corner of the screen to call our attention to the reel-change marker. (Perhaps the most famous example would be Kubrick’s use of abstract patternings of light and manipulated-beyond-recognition images for the “Jupiter and Beyond” sequence of 2001). When it comes to the equivalencies — parallel movements in other arts — there’s the mid-20th-century movement in painting toward abstraction, which decisively preferred confronting and provoking the spectator with patterns, shapes, or solid blocks of color, causing an immediate sensation and calling attention to tangible properties of color, paint, and canvas rather than representing anything from immediate, recognizable reality. Or there’s avant-garde music, like that of John Cage, that obligates listeners used to certain types of melodies and movements to listen for what wasn’t there. Films like those of the Heins (or Stan Brakhage, or James Benning, or Hollis Frampton, diverse and divergent as all of these experimental filmmakers’ work is) are like that, but they aren’t disruptions within narrative works; they’re all disruption. They have no intention of telling us a story, putting themselves at odds with what is by far the dominant, expected use of the medium; they’re “difficult” in the sense that they start by refusing us what we’ve come to expect from most any movie we come across, and then proceed from there. But the perceptual and cerebral doors they open can (it doesn’t always; this sort of filmmaking has its failed attempts like any other type) make the effort they demand entirely worthwhile. Such is the case with these two German experimentalists who, signing their films “W+B Hein,” engaged with a turbulent political and cultural period for their nation (and the world, when you consider Vietnam, May ’68 in France, Nixon, anticolonialist uprisings in Africa, etc., etc.) and fecund period internationally for the cinema by making work that, as the title of this collection suggests, stringently investigates not so much the images usually captured on celluloid, but the “materials” from which the images we’re more accustomed to seeing on cinema screens are composed.

The six films included on this disc were made and originally exhibited (through the underground distribution network of cinema clubs, universities, and programs at arthouse cinemas) between 1968 and 1976. The first, Rohfilm (1968, 20 min.), throws down a gauntlet and announces the Heins’s uncompromisingly formalist concerns and approach by consisting of nothing but endlessly, variously repeated snippets of faintly, intermittently recognizable images — a famous cathedral in Cologne, Wilhelm Hein working in his office, the nude filmmakers embracing in bed, iconic-looking images of a German politician — mangled, both before projection (with bits of debris, ashes, glue, hairs, and other material a film can gather over a lifetime of wear and travel) and during (through manipulations of speed and focus). The entire, relentlessly mangled strip run through a projector and the halting, stuttering, often literally decomposing frames are the end result, what we actually experience as we view Rohfilm. Our instinct to see what’s “in” the pictures is violently thwarted; our attention is forcibly refocused onto their fragile status as images on physical materials, and the patterns and tempos created by those materials and the machinery being used to (“wrongly”) project/record/re-project them. Rohfilm is easily the brashest and most aggressive of the works collected here, with a scary but exuberant glee being taken in the hard material fact and the consequent perishability of a material (celluloid) more often used by filmmakers to offer us the illusion of entire worlds; it’s like an isolation of, a riff unto itself on that aforementioned Persona moment where the frame sticks and melts. The three films that follow — Reproductions (1968, 28 min.), 625 (1969, 34 min.), and Portraits (1970, 15 min.) — build on the scorched earth left by Rohfilm, allowing gradually and carefully for more sophistication, wit, and even beauty as 625 takes a half-hour image of TV “snow” being manipulated through every variation and letting us soak up the abstract patterns of broadcast static and celluloid markings (purposely highlighted scratches, lines — intentionally cultivated “surface noise” like that used in numerous rock, pop, and rap recordings) thus produced, or Portraits offers a triptych of photos of, respectively, Charles Manson, British train robber Ronald Biggs, and Wilhelm Reich, shuddering and jittering and blurring, sliding from side to side to expose sprocket holes and “Kodak” insignias or morphing from a positive image to a negative image and back again, all as ways of emptying these film images of their representational meaning (provocative enough, in the case of the Manson photo, but not the main point) and recasting/reclaiming them as physical objects.

While each of those films has a conceptual and actual force that makes an undeniable impact, arriving at states of being that fascinate and frustrate in equal and complementary measure, it’s the two works that the Heins completed in 1976 and that conclude this selection — Materialfilme I and Materialfilme II — that pose with the most resonance the questions they’re asking of their medium and of us, in addition to serving up the most immediate, tactile visual pleasure of the bunch. These 35 mm films (the others were made on 16 or 8) are composed of the “extraneous,” rejected materials that come along with theatrical projection of films: “headers” and “footers” marked with coloring or scrawled letters meant for the projectionist’s information, not public viewing. The first, shorter Materialfilme is kaleidoscopic; it seems to be all short bits, making for a rapidly unspooling cavalcade of nervously squiggling, jumping soundtrack strips and numbers and intermittent, near-subliminal flashes of a human figure from, perhaps, a concessions promo or other pre-feature advertisement. The second is beautifully complementary to the first (they really should be viewed in succession), using much longer and now more discernibly organized cast-off bits for a sustained, stately experience that, with its regular movements of two rapid, blurring, evenly spaced strips on the celluloid with stretches of solid color (save for the Heins’ all-important surface dimension of pops, marks, and debris) actually does achieve the initially confusing but ever-inviting and rewarding perceptual grandeur of abstract painting, a (seemingly) impersonal but transfixing stimulation that pulls you up short, draws/fixes your gaze, and has the paradoxical effect of leaving one actually refreshed after having been immersed in the film’s achievement, which is a degree-zero of pure, self-representing celluloid, movement, and sound. (I would be remiss not to mention here the specially, carefully crafted original “soundtracks” for all of these films by Hein collaborator Christian Michelis, which alternately feature fitting but unexpected mechanical noises and, as in the Materialfilmes, perfectly re-create, in a slightly amplified and eerie form, the familiar pops and squeals and hisses made when running “blank” or otherwise un-soundtracked film through a projector).

It might seem perverse to call something as dirty, difficult, and laborious as much of what is collected in Materialfilme “refreshing,” but, as opposed as one might presume the Heins are to a representational cinema that’s often enough been dismissed by dedicated avant-garde purists as a philistine misuse of film, work like this can be a bracing, enthralling palate-cleanser, a point of contrast that leaves you awake and alive to all the possibilities that storytelling on film most often leaves unexplored — an experience that’s less of a Damascan-road conversion than a visit to a part of the cinema world you’ve never been to before, one that can leave you more sensitive and appreciative of just what it is that goes on at the more familiar “home” that narrative cinema represents for most of us. If you’re of an even remotely adventurous bent, or in any way able to be swayed from the (arbitrary, after all) rule that a movie first and foremost needs to tell a story, an exposure to at least Materialfilme I and Materialfilme II could be both an eye-opener and a pleasure. It’s unfamiliar and radical territory for all but the initiated, but it’s hardly as inaccessible and rarefied as all that; a slight opening of the mind and readjustment of assumptions and expectations is all it takes, and before you know it, the films of W+B Hein are showing you things, activating visual-response pleasure centers, and evoking thoughts and feelings you may not have known were available through cinema before, demonstrating, despite their “demanding” nature, a valuable (if unusual) sort of generosity after all.

 

 

THE DVD Note: Materialfilme is a Region 0 disc manufactured in Europe; it may not play on all region 1 players, particularly region-locked models such as those manufactured by Sony.

Video:

Each of the six films is presented at the originally intended aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and the films, though they were never meant to look anything remotely like pristine, retain an appearance here that is meticulously faithful to the way they were meant to look, in all their rough, grainy, beat-up, and scarred beauty. With issues of texture and color having been so nicely attended to, the only other potential flaw would be edge enhancement around linear shapes or the rare human figures that appear here and there throughout the films, and there was none that I could detect.

Sound:

Christian Michelis’s soundscapes are presented as Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo tracks (no dialogue throughout, so no subtitles necessary), and their carefully designed aura of mechanical blankness or failure is as deep and as resonant (those pops have bass!) as could reasonably be expected without compromising the superficially rough/spontaneous/arbitrary but actually frequently quite precise vision of the work.

Extras:

–A multilingual booklet featuring an essay on the films by Marc Siegel is nicely designed and very useful as a cheat sheet for those unfamiliar with W+B Hein or their placement among the various movements within underground/experimental film.

–The two Materialfilmes have optional soundtracks by various rock/post-rock artists working, in their medium, in a similar vein to the Heins. This is an interesting move, but the original soundtracks created by Christian Michelis are of greater artistic merit and are more of a piece with the visuals, so the inclusion of additional soundtracks, however conscientiously produced they may be, would seem a little bit redundant.

 

 

FINAL THOUGHTSThe six non (or, perhaps better put, anti-) narrative experimental shorts by German avant-gardists Wilhelm and Birgit Hein included in Materialfilme are challenging, cerebral works whose satisfactions it requires some effort to appreciate. But there’s really no need to be intimidated: If you’ve ever contemplated an abstract painting and given it enough thought not to reject it outright via the “my five-year-old could do that!” route, it has something to offer you, potentially something quite uniquely enthralling. Most viewers will experience the cognitive equivalent of growing pains on first exposure (I certainly did), but with an open mind, a little perseverance, and some patience and concentration, the Heins retrain your senses to stop looking for what’s not really there and appreciate what (literally, in the most physical and tangible sense) is there, which is the amazingly multitudinous visual and tactile qualities that can be conveyed through celluloid images and projection when they’re not being used for the usual purpose of telling us a story or (as with documentaries, usually also with a strong narrative component) giving us information. Yes, it’s true that you might actually “learn” something from these works, but they’re hardly drily educational. What they are is severe, rigorous; it’s that formalist severity that leads to their particular beauty, their particular pleasure. They would probably not be the first non-narrative films I would show someone who may not have seen one prior or be too enamored of the notion, but if you have even a vague idea of or interest in cinema’s other, less well-traveled, abstract/cerebral possibilities, or if you’re even sort of or maybe inclined to overcome what might be initial confusion or impatience to see something through to its unexpected payoff, W+B Hein have some sensory/intellectual adventures you might like to go on, forays outside the comfort zone that lead to a discovery of forms of cinematic gratification you may not have previously imagined, a horizon expanded beyond what you might have previously assumed was its limit. Highly Recommended.

THE FILM 

The headline-grabbing efforts of AIDS-awareness/advocacy protest group ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) didn’t happen all that long ago. But, thanks in large part to the effectiveness of their controversial tactics (nonviolent but aggressive marches, sit-ins, obstructions, and shut-downs) and the ultimate successful attainment of their political aims, ACT-UP’s most active years — from 1987, when the group was founded, to the mid-1990s, when combination-drug “cocktail” therapy began prolonging the lives of persons with HIV, often all the way back to normal life spans — are now settled enough in the past to qualify as history of the sort that can be surveyed in a film like David France’s Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague. France, a renowned journalist and author who was himself on the ACT-UP beat for New York magazine, has gone back into the archives of national and local media and, especially, into the video footage made by individual ACT-UP members and under the organization’s own confrontational but savvy public-relations auspices, to tell the story of its parlaying the inchoate anger of a decimated, reviled population of those who contracted AIDS (a great many of whom were already-marginalized gay men) into a potent political machine. It’s a story that’s clearly well worth telling, and France has undertaken to use the lifetime of the group as a year-by-year chronological narrative, from 1987 to 1996, around which to organize and offer up a cornucopia of archival footage from those years, presenting a broad, non-monolithic view of people with AIDS, of course, but also of our nation’s political climate in what seemed, to those on the left in general and those facing the urgent, life-or-death matter of AIDS (Reagan, notoriously, wouldn’t utter the name of the syndrome until he couldn’t possibly ignore the matter any longer) very specifically — a climate in which fighting or dying (or “silence=death,” as the famous ACT-UP slogan put it) were the only two options available.

The individual faces of ACT-UP presented here — the “characters” France has chosen to focus on — are varied: The principal protagonists, whose involvement with the group France most consistently and completely follows from ’87 to the present (in the cases where they have survived), are former stockbroker Peter Staley, who felt he was given a death sentence when diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1986, realized the FDA and drug companies were ignorant and/or dragging their feet, and had a personal/political awakening that brought him well away from Wall Street to go for broke in a different milieu altogether; film archivist Mark Harrington, who became a sort of de facto video spokesperson for the group, articulating succinct and provocative communiqués for broadcast; avant-grade playwright Jim Eiger; and the late Bob Rafsky, a man who came out of the closet later in his life only to be stricken with the dread disease and who, perhaps because of his own rich personal experience (snippets from annual home videos of him celebrating successive birthdays with his ex-wife and daughter punctuate the film), became ACT-UP’s most passionate and articulate speechmaker and chant-leader (at one point midway through the film, circa 1992, we see footage of him heckling and confronting candidate/future president Bill Clinton about governmental homophobia and inaction).

These central figures give us recurrent points of reference (we can recognize them frequently in the generous swathes of meeting/protest footage France has curated, and Paley, Harrington, and Eiger — though, sadly, not Rafsky — have been interviewed in the present, too) around which far-flung constellations of other activist’s experiences and stories can revolve. A host of voices in addition to the central ones speaks to us both from the past (as recorded on video in the thick of the melee), and also sometimes in the present day, in interviews conducted by France for the film: Researchers from Merck, the first drug company to cooperate with AIDS activists; representatives of the National Institute of Health, which, along with the FDA, was the frequent target of ACT-UP protest and resistance for its lackadaisical approach to approving treatments while people were dying; and the anonymous bulk of the group who never rose to prominence or official leadership, the diverse rank and file, which encompassed everyone from Garance Frank-Ruth, a wannabe-bohemian teenager when she got involved in ACT-UP who became one of the most steadfast and bold protestors, to the late performance artist Ray Navarro and his campy, irreverent implorations to safer sex, to a housewife/retired chemist called Iris Long, who planted the seeds of what became an impressive medical/scientific self-education on the part of the AIDS community, to the point that they were eventually able to speak to the “experts” in the government and at the drug companies in their own language, seeing through any evasion tactics. (Of course, no delve into the history of the AIDS crisis would be complete without playwright/novelist/agitator extraordinaire Larry Kramer, and so that perpetual curmudgeon, conscience of the gay community, and co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first institution to take note of and address the rise of HIV, makes an unusually lucid appearance, as well.) With this chorus of voices harmonizing and sometimes becoming a cacophony (France doesn’t shy away from some internecine conflicts in the group — disagreements over tactics and negotiations, resistance to any “elitism” that would make one faction’s voice more powerful than any other’s), the film becomes a varied patchwork of distinctive personalities from widespread factions and levels of the organization whose connections one to another are clear enough to make for a comprehensible (if not comprehensive) whole — a good cross-section of those who were concerned or, more often, righteously angry enough to get out in the streets (often getting arrested for their civil disobedience) and invade the corridors of power to fight the good fight.

France wisely focuses much more on immediate exposure to the chaotic history with all of its heated meetings and dynamic protest actions than on the becalmed, reflective present-day remembrances; there’s probably a good three-to-one ratio of moments that put us back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, in the thick of ACT-UP’s struggle, to ones that that give us lucid, encapsulating (and, sometimes, quite moving) backward glances and ruminations. In addition to selecting the several aforementioned long-term and prominent founders/organizers as an anchor around which to let the other “characters” ebb and flow, he’s structured the film along a very straightforward timeline, 1987-1996, each new year announcing itself in an intertitle along with the number of AIDS deaths to date worldwide. This limits the film in a way, but it’s also necessary; there are moments where the breadth of France’s project, the million competing details of the plague years, threatens to rob it of its focus, for example a montage of marchers accompanying the memorial AIDS quilt to Washington that doesn’t quite fit, coming off more as an obligatory acknowledgment than anything directly to do with ACT-UP (entire documentaries have already been devoted to those specific, memorializing and mourning aspects of AIDS history in the form of, respectively, Rob Epstein’s Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt and Bill Weber’s more recent We Were Here). The film’s signposts, oversimplifying as they inevitably are, provide a welcome sort of rigor for us, and one imagines they did for France as well, as he must have had hundreds of hours of footage to hone into some kind of “story” with a discernible narrative shape.

On the other hand, though, the obvious need to fit the extremely complicated and multifaceted history of ACT-UP into such a determining, unavoidably reductive pattern inescapably conventionalizes a most unconventional movement (some of France’s template choices of music and montage doesn’t help matters, though things remain immediate enough generally to maintain impact). It’s a good, respectful, engaged, and overall principled work, but it seems too pat nevertheless, as if there’s something vaguely missing; it may be that there’s an endemic weakness to the documentary approach when it comes to getting to the heart of the matter and making the history of the AIDS crisis come alive now that it’s no longer such a crisis (thanks, in large part, to ACT-UP’s victories). There’s no denying how informative, dedicated, and even rousing France’s film is, and it’s a valuable document, most particularly as an enlightening introduction or reminder for those (the majority) who were out of the loop from ’87 to ’96, either because they weren’t directly affected at the time or are too young to remember it for themselves. But this reviewer is just old enough to recall being aware of a cultural history that formed around the AIDS crisis, a wave of art that meant to do what no documentary can, somehow encapsulating and expressing the inexpressible horror of a pernicious, fatal, domino-effect medical disaster compounded many times over by social and political prejudice, indifference, and something ultimately rotten at the heart of a “traditional” culture that hesitated, hemmed, hawed, and did nothing much more than get squeamish, embarrassed, and reactionary as hundreds of thousands of gay men (and, obviously, not only gay men) died. We see footage in How to Avoid a Plague of ACT-UP arch-nemesis Jesse Helms — a senator from North Carolina and notorious racist and homophobe who will live forever in ignominy — disgustedly and petulantly demanding (from the Senate floor, no less) that gay men take their sexuality and what he perceives as “their” illness back into the closet to die without upsetting his delicate, homophobic sensibilities; and we see the activists’ retaliation, their trespassing and unrolling of a larger-than-life condom, emblazoned with anti-Helms and pro-safe-sex messages, from the roof down to the foundation of the Helms residence back in Dixie. But I remember that what really got Helms’s goat was the work of gay artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and, most relevantly, that of the great filmmaker Todd Haynes, whose 1991 debut feature, Poison, caused a furor by parlaying its tiny allowance of public funding (1/10 of its already-minuscule budget) into a graphic, inspiredly creative, purposely upsetting narrative film that vividly and indelibly tied together themes of homophobia, homoeroticism, ostracization, and AIDS into something deeply disconcerting and genuinely provocative; avoidance of visceral feeling and an understanding beyond polemics or day-and-date history was not an option in the face of such a film. Something like How to Survive a Plague gives you the facts and the testimony, and those are extremely important things; it’s not a history whose facts should ever be forgotten, and getting them down into a document is vital. When it comes to deeper thought, further implication, and more insistent demands for recognition and empathy, though, it may be that documentary gives us the facts, but forms less beholden to “reality” give us more access to the Truth.

 

THE DVD
Video:

The anamorphic-widescreen transfer (preserving the original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1) is easily able to reflect the film’s look, which mostly means very washed-out, old-school VHS-type video along with some graphics and contemporary interviews in high-definition. Most flaws seem due to the sources, not the transfer; the only flaw I could detect was some intermittent edge enhancement/haloing in some scenes, which may have been the necessary result of making some of the camcorder-type footage watchable. In all, the transfer does an excellent job of bringing home a look that never meant to be anything like pristine in the first place, but rather to reflect a specific, accurate, and necessary blurry-video, late-’80s/early-’90s camcorder/TV news aesthetic.

Sound:

The disc offers both Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround tracks. The latter is the go-to set-up choice, reflecting the full theatrical sound (though both tracks are as clear and vivid as the source materials will allow for), with good, clear sound throughout (even with the very limited sound capabilities of some of the recording devices used from the late ’80s through the mid-’90s, only a few scenes are subtitled for clarity*) and an impressive aural immersion at times, for example in the chaos of some of the footage of heated ACT-UP meetings and mass public protests.

*Also included are English SDH and Spanish-language subtitle options.

Extras:

–A feature-length audio commentary with director David France, who, rather than commenting too much directly on the film as it plays, interviews ACT-UP activists Ron Medley, Heidi Dorow, Joy Episalla, and Bob Lederer on their own memories, thoughts, and opinions relevant to each moment of ACT-UP history the film is delving into, which makes for an interesting deepening of what we’ve seen in the feature.

–Six deleted scenes running about four minutes each, which must have been removed because of time concerns and an unwillingness to digress from the film’s narrative, as they may have added a bit more messy but vital depth and roundedness, with a focus in some scenes on the personal lives of the central figures in the film, and in others on real-time, rawer footage (unenhanced by soundtrack or editing) of the intensity and brutality of some of the ACT-UP protest actions.

–The film’s theatrical trailer.

 

 

FINAL THOUGHTSDavid France’s How to Survive a Plague does something important — compiling together and preserving the history of one of America’s most effective protest movements, the AIDS-awareness/advocacy group ACT-UP — and it does it well, organizing unshaped tons of archival footage into a “story” that provides a fascinating, well-organized, eminently watchable cross-section of the individuals who made the movement, ultimately coalescing into a worthy snapshot of the organization’s many confrontations and accomplishments, a picture that ranges far and wide while neither evading nor too-gleefully exposing the complications, differences, and conflicts that are bound to exist behind the even the most united and purpose-driven front. Yet even though the film doesn’t purport to tell the whole story (an impossibility), there still seems to be a dimension missing, some route of deeper access into the harrowing physical and emotional experiences (exacerbated profoundly by the unbearable ignorance dominating American politics and much of society at the time) that gave rise to the passion we see playing out in the form of ACT-UP’s bold civil-disobedient actions. France’s film is made with skill and care, it’s capable of sweeping you up in its subject, and it has a real value to it on the informational, historical, and politicizing fronts. But it may be that the most eye-opening, galvanizing truths — the torment, anger, and desperation of an era where AIDS was spreading like wildfire and had no treatment because of social prejudice and government neglect — lie elsewhere, and that France simply reached the parameters of how close a documentary can effectively get us, demonstrating in the process both the not-inconsiderable properties available to this kind of film for letting us glimpse a bygone reality, and its limitations for conveying the murkier depths and meanings of how that reality was experienced, its less outwardly visible textures and its ineffable emotional endurance tests. Recommended.

THE MOVIE:

I feel like I am stuck in some uncanny valley where the importance of the story behind a particular cinematic effort is mistaken for a legitimately successful movie. The self-reflexive Iranian documentary This is Not a Film was one of the most lauded releases of 2012, even receiving a highly complimentary and thoroughly convincing review from one of my colleagues on this very site. While I understand the impulse to heap accolades on Jafar Panahi for his noble efforts in the face of adversity, it seems to me that encouraging anyone to rush into watching This is Not a Film without first cautioning them to its utter dullness is kind of a jerk move. Pat yourself on the back all you want for watching a politically subversive movie–because that action might be the only thing keeping you awake–just don’t kid yourself that This is Not a Film has mass appeal.

Here’s the backstory: Jafar Panahi is a veteran Iranian filmmaker who was arrested as part of a crackdown on the arts in his home country, accused of pursuing cinematic endeavors that violated government-approved standards. As punishment, Panahi was sentenced to six years in jail and banned from writing and directing movies for twenty. This is Not a Film, which was shot in secret by Panahi and his friend and fellow filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb over one day, is Panahi’s risky attempt at finding some means of expressing himself while awaiting the verdict of his appeal. He was under house arrest at the time, and so the documentary takes place entirely in his apartment, except for an extended sequence at the end where he rides down the elevator with the janitor and catches a brief, on-the-street glimpse of Fireworks Wednesday festivities. This holiday, condemned by religious rulers but still going on all around Iran, makes This is Not a Film sound like it’s being shot inside a war zone.

Which it kind of is, though one that is being fought with ideology in this instance rather than guns. Panahi is a man being jailed for what he thinks more than what he’s done, for the film he would have made rather than the ones he did. Some of This is Not a Film‘s brief 78-minute running time is taken up with the director trying to bring to life scenes from the forbidden screenplay by reading them on camera. It’s ultimately a futile effort. As Panahi explains, if a moviemaker could tell you about the movie he or she intends to make, there’d be no real point in making it. The sadness we see overtake him at this failure is This is Not a Film‘s one truly heartbreaking moment, and it’s the key to understanding why This is Not a Film exists. At the center of the exercise is the desire to create. Jafar Panahi knows nothing else, there is no other activity he would rather partake in. Directing movies is his life’s blood. He even tries to direct Mirtahmasb when it’s supposed to be Mirtahmasb directing him.

That is a compelling and defiant statement made under the glare of extreme opposition, to be sure. The project as a whole is one giant fist raised in the air, speaking truth to power. All the details of how and why it exists, including the fact that it was smuggled to the Cannes Film Festival on a thumb drive baked into a cake, is the kind of drama that dances around other filmmakers’ heads when they go to bed at night. (Ben Affleck, you working on a dramatization yet) Even so, let’s not get confused, This is Not a Film the film is not all that compelling or dramatic, and no one would confuse it as such if it weren’t for the backstory. For every minute of emotional truth buried in here, there are five more of Panahi not knowing what to do with himself, watching the news or feeding his daughter’s giant lizard. The screen time, it seems, would have been better spent engaged in a more pointed dialogue. Panahi is searching for some kind of meaning in his struggle, and he even looks at his older films for analogous events, but the self-examination comes to very little.

Watch This is Not a Film as a small act of political protest, but don’t expect much of a takeaway. It’s important as a historical record, as a document of the time and place in which it was captured, but like many historical records, not all that engrossing when revisited.

THE DVD

Video:
Despite its clandestine production, This is Not a Film is a good-looking movie. The digital photography, mostly taken by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, looks excellent on disc. The natural lighting works very well to communicate the authenticity of the moment, and the high-def elements used to master this DVD maintain the natural color and textures as seen by Mirtahmasb’s lens. The transfer is spotless with no blocking, jaggedness, or crushing.

Sound:
The original Persian soundtrack is mixed in Dolby Digital 2.0. All the talking in the movie is really clear and sharp, and there is also a lot of great background sound that is nicely filtered through the speakers and moved around to re-create the atmosphere in and around Panahi’s apartment.

There are English subtitles burned into the picture, and they are so-so. There were lots of typos and clumsy phrasings that worked to undermine the seriousness of the documentary. They really could have done with another proofread and some added finesse.

Extras:
Film professor Jamsheed Akrami figures in both of the extras on the DVD, including eight-minutes of excerpts from a chat he had with Jafar Panahi before his legal troubles began but addressing many of the issues of censorship that would come to plague the director. In addition to this, Akrami recorded an audio commentary that offers some insight into the film and the context, but far too often lapses into onscreen descriptions. You know the phrase “it’s like watching paint dry” This is like watching paint dry and then having some other guy describe it to you at the same time.

You also get the theatrical trailer.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Listen, I know plenty of folks are going to be indignant about this review. I walked right up to a sacred cow, ripped off its glasses, and stomped on them. I get it. I also get why This Is Not a Film is an important, even incendiary, indictment of government censorship and how it flips the bird at the Man. That doesn’t make it a good movie. Jafar Panahi should be commended for standing up against injustice, which is why everyone should give This is Not a Film at least a peek. He still made a dull movie that doesn’t say all that much on its own. And no explanation of his noble intentions will change that or make sitting through This is Not a Film any more pleasurable than taking vitamins. Rent It.

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. He is best known for his collaborations with Joëlle Jones, including the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, the challenging romance 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately, for which Jones did the cover. All three were published by Oni Press. His most recent project is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich’s blog at Confessions123.com.

Note: 99% of the time, I try and write reviews that I consider to be spoiler-free, but in the case of American Mary, I do have to cover one major part of the plot. It is an inciting incident, occurring early in the movie, and many people would include it in a plot synopsis. However, if you wish to remain completely spoiler-free, skip to the technical sections or click away.

Mary Mason (Katharine Isabelle) is a med school student studying to be a surgeon. She’s dedicated, spending Thanksgiving sewing up her turkey as practice rather than roasting it, but like most students, she’s struggling to make ends meet. To prevent her phone bill from getting shut off, she decides to respond to a Craigslist ad looking for exotic dancers. In the middle of her interview with the club’s owner, Billy Barker (Antonio Cupo), one of the patrons is wounded, and Barker gives Mary $5,000 in cash to sew him up and keep quiet about it. Before long, other underground patients are showing up at Mary’s door, flush with cash and looking for help with procedures that other surgeons would think twice about.

American Mary is a tough movie to review. Its ambition is admirable, but its sloppiness is not. It’s a film directed and written by women that tackles subjects that are sensitive to women, but in doing so it often plays into stereotypes or implies things that don’t seem to be intentional. Every moment is big and bold and screaming for attention, in a way that oscillates between exciting and obnoxious.

To jump right to the core issue: Mary is raped. In fact, the rape is listed in the MPAA rating description, but I’d forgotten by the time it became clear what was about to happen. Mary is invited to a party by a doctor she admires (Clay St. Thomas), and she excitedly accepts, thinking that she’s being accepted by people she hopes will become her colleagues. Unfortunately, they invited her because they figure her visible new wealth means she’s turned to prostitution. She tries to leave, but she’s already been drugged by one of her professors (David Lovgren), who takes her into a bedroom and records himself raping her, while she floats in and out of consciousness. A few days later, she quits med school.

Rape has a history in horror movies, often as the premise for revenge flicks that present the woman as a fury men were foolish to scorn. Unfortunately, “survivor’s strength” can easily become “rape creates strength” with the wrong emphasis, and that’s the problem with American Mary, which the film fails to support on multiple levels. First of all, for this one scene, Mary is portrayed with bright-eyed innocence and naivete that she doesn’t have before or after. Before the doctor invites her, the lesson of the day is about learning to deliver bad news, and Mary doesn’t hesitate to tell some strangers that their father is dead. When she applies for the job in the strip club, she’s on the lookout for people trying to take advantage of or exploit her. Not only that, but by the time the rape occurs in the movie, Mary has already earned a boatload of cash from two successful surgeries, one of which she sees has transformed that person’s life for the better. Although she has reservations, Mary has already found a bit of empowerment through her own actions, and there’s no reason other than ugly shock value to bring in rape as a motivation for committing to her new life.

Second, the addition of the rape creates dead weight in the story. American Mary is not actually a revenge thriller, but the thread that stems from the rape continues through the film, introducing a detective (John Emmet Tracy), because all movies where criminals are the heroes have to have a detective that the audience likes but roots against. Meanwhile, there’s an entirely unconnected story about Mary’s new business and the repercussions one of her surgeries ends up having. The conflict in this thread is shifted way toward the end of the movie, and it’s really cheesy and stupid, but there’s no reason the rape thread couldn’t be lifted right from the movie, and this other thread reshaped into a central narrative. The film feels as if the sisters came up with the character, had a brainstorming session on the stories that could be told with Mary in them, then crammed them all into one movie. Finally, even if the rape had a place in the movie, there are other problems: the Soskas stack the deck by making Mary’s rapist an unrepentant asshole from the very beginning, and screw up the biting observation that the doctors all assume Mary is a prostitute just because she has money with an earlier scene in the film where she considers prostitution before switching to erotic dancing (it’s only her first thought, and brief, but it still basically says the doctors are “right”).

Aside from the rape, despite being directed by women, American Mary doesn’t seem to have a great opinion of women. This is the kind of movie where all the women are casually cruel to one another for no real reason. One patient brings her daughter, who seems to have no purpose but to say “cunt” a whole bunch, for the sake of comedy. One of the surgeries involves a strange comment on Barbie dolls that totally overestimates society if the Soskas believe what the patient is saying, and which is another snipe against innocence and naivete if they don’t. There is even a scene where Mary is mean to the woman at the phone company that has an air of gendered anger to it. The Soska sisters themselves appear as clients for Mary in a series of scenes that have no apparent narrative meaning, other than an extended Hitchcock moment for the both of them. The body mod community could’ve provided some interesting elements to the film, but it never becomes more than a minor backdrop element, which feels like a waste. The one side thread that’s interesting is the side thread of Billy’s sad, unrequited crush on Mary. Frankly, the Soskas’ economy of character in bringing Billy back at all is fun.

There is a darkly empowering story somewhere in American Mary. The film has a great lead in genre vet Isabelle, who seems excited to dig into a role with so many facets (disparate as they are). Sadly, the Soska sisters aren’t interested in only telling that story, so they tell multiple stories poorly, fumbling their subtext and wasting a ton of potential on a movie that’s very poorly (wait for it) stitched together.

The DVD
Can’t figure out how to design some decent key art for a movie Why not just use one of the publicity stills and throw some text on it That’s American Mary’s art in a nutshell. The disc comes in a plastic-reducing eco-case, no insert, and a cardboard slipcover featuring the same art that’s on the actual cover.

The Video and Audio
I have been impressed with XLrator’s other DVDs, but this 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation is a real bummer. Contrast is weak, turning blacks into grays and flattening the image, and banding is visible all over the place. Pretty much every darkened room and dimly lit basement is covered in ugly rings of color. Daytime scenes look basically fine, other than the contrast, but this is still a disappointing piece of video. Dolby Digital 5.1 is better, giving the music a nice immersive quality and rendering several environments with a pleasing authenticity. Although it’s horrible, the rape scene has some interesting audio effects that the track manages to cover. English captions for the deaf and hard of hearing are also included.

The Extras
Two extras are included. The first is an audio commentary with directors Jen and Sylvia Soska, Katherine Isabelle (via telephone), and Tristan Risk. Not surprisingly, considering the film itself, the Soska sisters are only so interested in discussing the themes and subtext of their movie, commenting instead on topics like Isabelle’s miniscule wardrobe. Within the first few minutes, they crack the joke “Dr. Rapey” and complain that they can’t say the C-word. At one point, one of them offers the following wisdom about shooting a film on a rapid schedule: “you lose shit, and it’s a fuckin’ bummer.” The other is a fly-on-the-wall behind-the-scenes featurette (17:31), where you can watch one of the sisters explaining to a bunch of extras how she’d like them to jerk off onto a girl (“you’re a surgeon, you’ve had a long day”). An original theatrical trailer is also included.

Conclusion
Skip it. American Mary has lots of interesting ideas about an interesting character, but it also has lots of fully-developed problems, which weigh down the movie and ought to have been excised in favor of something fresh and different.

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