For the first time since Day 1, My wife and I discovered that we had managed to co-ordinate our choices and that we were going to be seeing all of the same movies today.  We were starting with Reporter, Eric Daniel Metzgar’s film shadowing the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof.  In fact Kristof is not only being shadowed by Metzgar and his video camera, he is also being shadowed by two aspiring journalists.  The film deals with critically important issues and yet is strangely unsatisfying.  The problem is that it has crammed way too much into its 90 minute running time.  The film provides a brief biography of Nicholas Kristof, highlights his pioneering work in bringing the genocide in Darfur to international consciousness, addresses the challenges confronting journalism today, confronts (in Stephen Colbert from a segment from The Colbert Report) pervasive American apathy, and gives viewers background research on the phenomenon of “psychic numbing.”  This is where information about multiple victims and pervasive suffering has the paradoxical effect of generating less action to alleviate the misery than learning about the suffering of a single individual.  In essence, a classic less is more.  All of this happens before we meet Kristof’s aspiring journalists (to whom we are introduced and then they seemingly disappear only to reappear later) or visit any of the world’s newsworthy hot spots.  We do see some footage of Kristof and company in Afghanistan, but the bulk of the film’s footage is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo which has been engaged in the same kind of intertribal conflict between Hutus and Tutsis that resulted in the horrible genocide in Rwanda in 1994.  The conflict in the Congo has resulted in an estimated 5.4 million deaths since 1998.  However, Kristof knows that a recitation of this and other horrible statistics will not incite the kind of call to action needed for Americans and others in the international community to help that the presentation of a single personal story can have.  He is, in essence, searching for a “poster child (or adult)” for the suffering in the Congo.  He eventually find her in a badly emaciated woman who was suffering from horrible bedsores.  She had been raped and apparently so brutally was she attacked that she suffered a pelvic fracture although the details of what she endured were not presented so it is possible that the fracture is unrelated to her sexual assault.  It is obvious that she is very seriously ill and one of Kristof’s journalists-in-training advocates forcefully for her to be sent to a hospital for treatment.  Her situation is one focus of the film and the other is a trip to visit the local warlord.  He is a gracious host, espouses a devout Christianity, and sees himself as a Pastor and a liberator.  When one’s head is in the mouth of the beast may not be the best time to ask really tough questions, but Kristof does ask whether taking up arms has benefited the local population as the biggest problem for civilians is being caught between and victimized by the opposing forces.  The victimization is particularly hard for women and girls as they are targeted for rape.  One young prisoner held in the warlord’s camp acknowledged that he and his fellow soldiers had been given permission to rape women. [If you would like more information on how the war in the Congo has brutalized women, you may wish to see Lisa Jackson’s The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo.] The subject of the film and the film itself are both about the challenge of providing information in a way that it can meaningful and be used by its audience.  The information in the film is quite difficult.  One other aspect of this film that will be difficult for audiences is that it was filmed—by necessity—almost exclusively with hand-held cameras resulting in very jerky imagery throughout the film.  Reporter is a very important film, but one that is flawed and definitely not an easy one to watch.

Little Big Man was to have been the film shown when Arthur Penn received his Lifetime Achievement Award.  Unfortunately, he was still hospitalized in New York City.  The news was encouraging that he seemed to be recovering and was expected to be discharged next week.  The special guests who accepted Arthur’s award were Jay Cocks and Verna Bloom who both knew him personally and professionally.  The award—each one has been custom-made for the recipient—was a handcrafted Little Big Man moose.  Verna exclaimed that “this [award] is better than getting an Oscar.”  Little Big Man is a film that did not receive the kind of recognition that Penn’s earlier Bonnie and Clyde received.  Chief Dan George who provides the mouthpiece for so much wisdom received the film’s only Oscar nomination.  Dustin Hoffman, who is in almost all of the film—only scenes in which his character Jack Crabb is a boy does he not appear, gives an Oscar-worthy performance.  It is, however, undercut since his character is going back-and-forth between the world of the white settlers and the world of the Cheyenne.  In addition to the strain of adjusting to each change of venue, within the story his character is constantly acting in ways to deceive others around him—as a shill for patent medicine sales, as a gunfighter, and, most famously, as an Indian scout with Custer’s cavalry.  In essence, this requires that the actor’s character act and that there be something not quite convincing about the performance within the performance.  The film is a comic Western epic.  Jack Crabb’s constantly shifting life is a source of much humor and Custer (Richard Mulligan) is portrayed with a comic vainglorious flair that certainly had never been attempted previously onscreen.  However, the film also challenges American—especially white American—society on a number of levels.  It challenges the philosophy that underpins our lifestyle as to its environmental sustainability and its view of other peoples.  Custer, who had previously been portrayed as the martyred cavalry General killed with all his troops at the Little Big Horn, was first portrayed as an ambitious man committed to killing Indians to further his political career.  The finger is clearly pointed to our complicity in a genocidal campaign to remove the Indians from their lands to make way for American manifest destiny to settle from coast-to-coast.  It also shows how the Cheyenne were able to accept effeminate males who were not cut out to be warriors and to find an acceptable role (berdache) for them in their society which runs counter to American society’s punitive approach to keep them in the closet.  This film certainly could be seen as commenting not only on the historical period in which it is set, but on several things that were happening when it was made: the war in Vietnam; the civil rights movements for African-Americans, Native Americans, and homosexuals; and the beginning of the environmental movement.  While its depiction of an historical period is clearly still valid today, the broader issues that it commented on are, unfortunately, also still relevant today.  Yes, truly this film was and is a neglected cinematic gem.

We finished our day by seeing again Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums).  We had previously seen it in Toronto.  The film shows us black people living and working in Paris which is rarely depicted in movies and when black Parisians are shown on film it is usually to show the problems coming from their minority status.  This is a truly marvelous film for its depiction of the drama of real-life.  This film and real-life is full of ambivalence and ambiguity.  The filmmaker has presented us with four attractive primary characters who share a history together.  We don’t know exactly what that has been and clearly the relationships have not always been envisioned by the characters in the same way.  The camera enfolds each of these characters affectionately.  The director is, however, constantly asking us to enter into the story and to connect the dots.  What will happen next?  What did happen?  What will it mean for the different characters?  The film very definitely does hold up to a second viewing and likely is the kind of film that could be seen over and over again so that film viewers could reconnect the dots differently creating entirely new stories for the characters.