Tribeca Film Festival 2019
New York, April 24 - May 5
Drake Stutesman
Some films to see:
CHARLIE SAYS
DIRECTOR: Mary Harron
USA
111 MINS.
Mary Harron, always an inventive director, with films in her repertoire such as American Psycho (2000), The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), and I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) takes an unusual - both emotional and dispassionate - look at the Charles Manson story, focusing on the women in his “Family.” The Manson story has been much told and retold but Harron brings a contemporary feel to the film, while keeping the actual reality in the past as a phenomenon of the late 60s and early 70s. With good production design (Dins Danielson), good writing (Guinevere Turner, with whom Harron often works), and a grounding in small everyday details, Harron keeps the past real in keeping the storyline very simple, focusing on three Manson women in prison, during their group sessions with a therapist, Karlene Faith, whose book, The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten, is one of two on which the film is based. The other is The Family by The Fug’s band member, Ed Sanders, a book that would seem far from Faith’s. Both authors are producers of the film.
Harron’s film is concentrated on the way the mind grips a delusion with such intensity that it can’t see beyond it, as Manson’s followers did when they followed what “Charlie says” to murder. The film moves back and forth between 1969, when the murders occurred, and the early seventies when the killers were incarcerated. The film looks at three women - while they were in Manson’s group and then as they start their life sentences. Harron focuses on how their mindsets began to change, under another leader, the therapist, who tells the warden that she, Karlene Faith, wants to “open the door” for them “to the recognition of what they did” because that is where “atonement begins.” To approach the Manson story from this perspective is difficult. In part because knowing how the mind takes in reality is complex and subjective as well as cultural and in part because the Manson crimes were then, and continue to be, unimaginably sadistic and strange. And even more difficult is that these crimes have been so mythologized over the decades, their realness is lost in all the interpretations.
Harron’s films often track these kind of weird, violent crimes which are based on a twisted rage as seen in American Psycho and I Shot Andy Warhol. She will streamline her focus, sometimes making the story too bare but, nevertheless, this minimization is, in itself, a new approach to violence, as something not just ‘worth watching’ but as something that is surreally intertwined with the human need to feel whole. Her choice of Matt Smith, the British actor who played Dr. Who, for Charles Manson is inspired, as Smith shows Manson as a man whose hair trigger rage is in constant agitation with a hair trigger calm.
A compellingly original take on the Charles Manson Family crimes through the experiences of three of his followers.
WU-TANG CLAN: OF MICS AND MEN
DIRECTOR: SACHA JENKINS
USA
80 MINS.
This film is a segment of the ten-part Showtime series, Wu Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men, focused on the story behind the hip hop Wu-Tang’s rise and impact, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of their debut album. The film is instantly absorbing, drawing even a casual viewer (versus an avid fan) into their world while somehow remaining outside it. It is a line between the two stances that is obvious and part of the strategy of director Sasha Jenkins.
The film is direct in its approach and is both useful and fascinating. It reveals the childhoods of the band members, through contemporary interviews with them, with people who knew them then and with people who know them now as well as scenes of their old New York neighborhood. What could have been an ordinary ‘rags to riches’ or ‘street to success’ story is devoid of any such reduction of a life story. Instead it makes apparent the tiny details of the musicians’ boyhood experiences in which they built a world of music based on what was available, from the small size of the rooms and how sound resonated in these spaces to the use of shoe boxes to hold microphones. This experimentation with sound became the foundation of their music as the band began to form.
Wu Tang Clan: Of Mics And Men brings out the violence, prejudice, poverty, fear, imprisonment, crime, hustling and much more that the men experienced as children and, as with the use of the small room or the shoe box, how their lives were augmented by chance jobs and the education, from all of these experiences, that opened their minds. The Wu-Tang Clan, in their interviews, stress this over and over - that their lives were built through these efforts and through tiny means. The film includes images of audiences whose faces press close to the camera, bringing forth how many lives, how many multiple generations are involved in the music and are involved in the same experiences.
This uniquely constructed film (part of a series) reveals, in depth, the world of the groundbreaking hip hop group the Wu-Tang Clan. Must see film.
AT THE HEART OF GOLD: INSIDE THE USA GYMNASTICS SCANDAL
DIRECTOR: ERIN LEE CARR
USA
88 MINS
At the Heart of Gold is straightforward HBO documentary that covers the horrifying crimes of Dr. Larry Nassar, the official Olympic doctor, who sexually abused young women, during the years that they trained and worked as Olympic gymnasts. Carr deliberately emphasizes that these women are athletes and focuses on the women, their courage, their fight and the prejudice they endured for years as they “were not believed,” when they reported Nassar’s abuse, highlighting that this dismissal of women is a trope in our society. Carr’s footage of the trial, which had 150 impact statements by the athletes, is a crucial part of the larger story of the kind of mistreatment these athletes endured. Nassar’s lengthy prison sentence of 40 -175 years was a first.
An indicting examination of Dr. Larry Nassar’s sexual crimes against Olympic athletes.
AMERICAN FACTORY
DIRECTORS: JULIA REICHART, STEVEN BOGNAR
USA
114 MINS
This Netflix produced documentary, American Factory, made by the iconic documentarian team Julia Reichart and Steven Bognar, whose films have shaped documentary ideas for over thirty years, acts as a kind of sequel to their 2009 documentary, The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, which followed the closing of a General Motors factory in Ohio, with tearful interviews with the workers who not only lost their jobs but lost the solidarity they felt among themselves as friends, colleagues and unionists. American Factory, also in Ohio though in another town, and filmed over a period of years, follows the experiences of the factory workers in a GM plant that has been bought by a Chinese company and in which they find a different work culture in this new system, where unions are disabled, pay is under minimum wage and the atmosphere is autocratic. American Factory is an important film to see, and it brings up many questions.
An important film to see, American Factory follows American factory workers at an Ohio General Motors plant that has been bought by a Chinese company.