Stanless Steel

I saw Strongman at the 9pm showing of it’s opening night at NW Film Forum here in Seattle, with director Zachary Levy in attendance. Just a handful of people showed up. Which surprised me, because it won Grand Jury for best doc at Slamdance last year.

Synopsis: An aging strongman, whose specialty is bending pennies and lifting trucks with his bare hands, struggles to hold his life together and earn a living in a world more interested in flashy showmanship that “true” strength.

Story Structure: The film is organized on a linear timeline, which follows events in the life of “Stanless” Steel, the main character in the film. We see him rehearsing for performances, with his family in New Jersey, and performing at events that vary widely from private weddings up to a trip to London where Stanless performs on a TV show with other strongmen. The film closely follows his rocky relationship with his girlfriend, Barbara, and the challenge of living with his low-income family and drug-using brother. What really works wonderfully well is the fact that his struggle to bend steel acts as a metaphor for his struggle to keep his life together. Add that that the fact that it’s also a metaphor for how difficult it is to make a cinema verite film, and you have a perfect storm of cinematic synchronicity.

Cinematography: The film was shot entirely by Levy, who used a hefty digibeta, shoulder-held video camera. Nothing about the way it was filmed really jumped out at me, which is a testament to the filmmaker’s intentions: to put all the attention on the events as they occur, rather than on how they were filmed. The quality is “good enough” – standard definition, much of it was shot in low light at Stan’s home. Levy told me that to light the scenes, he replaced the standard 65-watt bulbs in  the home with 100-watt bulbs, which provided just enough light, while keeping the scene appearing exactly as it otherwise would have had he not been filming. Great trick.

Editing: Levy edited the film himself in Avid. The editing is simple and straightforward, and calls no attention to itself, in keeping with cinema verite tradition. My only beef with the editing comes about 3/4 of the way through the film, where I think a much tighter edit of the final quarter of the film would have improved its story and mainstream audience watchability. I was ready for the film to end sooner than it did, and the ending really just trailed out, rather than ending with any finality or in keeping with classic story arc. But that’s probably how Levy intended it: because life itself doesn’t follow story scripts.

Music and Sound: Levy is a cinema verite purist. He wanted what actually happened to provide the soundtrack for the film instead of adding music himself. Music in the film happens in scenes where the characters are playing the radio. Levy claimed “fair use” to reproduce them in the film, rather than paying expensive clearance fees, which I think is a great strategy for documentary filmmakers. To take this approach, of course, reproducing the song has to be truly part of the scene and therefore the quality is going to be limited. But it’s very authentic.  Levy did use one song for this film, and it plays over the credits at the end, not during, the film.

He had just one crew member with him on all of his shoots: a sound guy, who used a shotgun mic on a boom pole to record the main characters. He hooked up the main character to a wireless lav, but almost always had the boom operator there as well to catch his interactions with other characters.

While Levy was in Seattle for the screening of his film, he was gracious enough to accept my invitation to dinner, and I learned a lot about the challenges of verite filmmaking and DIY film distribution. I met up with him at NW Film Forum, where he was asking staff to make a bigger sign announcing his presence in an effort to boost flagging attendance. When a man walked in to buy a ticket to another film, Levy unsuccessfully tried to talk him into seeing Strongman instead. That’s what I call working hard to promote your film!

Levy told me it took him 9 years to make this film – 3 years shooting, and the rest in post. I hope it doesn’t take him that long to do his next one.

New Brow, a film by Tanem Davidson, just finished a short three-day run at Northwest Film Forum. I caught it last night on it’s final evening in town.

Synopsis: Through more than 40 interviews with “low-brow” artists, gallery owners and collectors, filmmaker Tanem Davidson explores the cultural roots and evolution of popular art through the work of graphic designers like Shepherd Fairey, cartoonists and street graffiti artists. The film chronicles their DIY rise from the streets to the place where today they are poised to break into the “high brow” world that has until recently been unwilling to accept them as “serious” artists.

Story Structure: This film is a straightforward, interview-driven documentary film. There’s tons of visually interesting b-roll and always the voice of an artist in the background talking us through the story. Still photos are zoomed through, panned across, or pulled back from before cutting back to the person being interviewed. The film tries to cover the entire movement but sacrifices a clear story arc in the attempt. Some elements of conflict arise from artists describing their outsider status from big NYC galleries who until recently have not been interested in showing their work. But I left the film wishing more thought had been given to taking me on a journey with a clear beginning, middle and end.

Cinematography: The production value was not high. The interviews appeared to have been grabbed in a scattershot way without any stylistic cohesion, and most disappointing, some were just plain poorly lit. But one thing worked well: there’s a ton of great art in the film. And that really helped make it visually interesting. In particular, most of the art is shot up close, so it’s really in your face, which works for the subject. I found myself wishing the camera had moved more slowly on the pans – you can hardly pan or zoom too slow in my view. Side note: the cinematography in Up In The Air, which I saw Saturday night, was so powerful, in part, because the camera work was so subtle. There’s all these wonderful super slow tracking shots. I had to watch the edge of the frame to determine whether the camera was actually moving, and it almost always was throughout the film, which worked very well for a film about travel.

Editing: This film could have been editing a lot more tightly. A lot of the material felt repetitive to me, and I didn’t feel l like I was being guided through the huge amount of material by a master storyteller. There wasn’t a clear beginning, middle and end of this film, just a lot of interesting and historically significant material, that I think could have been focused much more sharply to greater effect.

Music and Sound: Audio was distractingly bad in some of the interviews. There didn’t appear to have been any attempt to control the setting of the interviews, resulting in cuts that transition directly from a quiet office to an echoing gallery so that you really notice the difference. And in some cases the audio was too loud relative to what came before and after – levels weren’t normalized.

What happens when filmmakers make a film about the same topic as another set of filmmakers at roughly the same time?  I’ve always felt that it’s best not to worry about it, because no film can be YOUR film. But this film is one thing that can happen. Similar material was covered, faster and with higher production values, in Beautiful Losers, which was released in 2008. I guess this goes to show that it pays to be first, or that if you’re going to come after, you have to find a way to put a new spin on the material. I don’t think this film achieves that. But what the filmmakers DID achieve is, they made a film! And that’s always an achievement worth celebrating.

Synopsis: Tarnation is Jonathan Caouette’s dark autobiographical film, which draws on home movie footage, phone messages and conversations with family members to recount his abusive childhood and his awkward relationship with his mentally ill mother, who herself was a victim of abuse. The film follows her losing battle to stay sane, and the filmmaker’s struggle to face his own fear that one day he too may suffer the same fate.

Structure: While this is a chaotic film, filled with disturbing and repetitive visuals, there is definitely a structure that propels the film forward. The film opens in New York, where Caouette establishes that he’s gay in the opening scene of the film by showing himself chilling with a male lover. Then he learns his mom has overdosed on lithium, which launches him on a trip to Texas to be with her. While on the trip, he uses footage of the passing landscape to begin flashing back to family footage from much earlier years. He uses a final transition in which the present-day passing landscape becomes pixelated and dissolves into the old family footage and we pull back out of an old TV where we find ourselves in his disturbing past. The film follows a mostly linear progression from the time of his childhood and catches up with the point where the film opens, then continues briefly past that to the present day, concluding with Caouette finally making an appearance as narrator speaking to the camera, giving voice to his fears.

Cinematography: This was an extremely low budget film. According to the film’s IMDB entry, it cost just $218 to make this film, but cost $400,000 to license the music and video clip royalties. But the fact that the quality is crap adds to the nature of the story, which is about someone whose life is pretty crappy. The footage looks super saturated and in many places solarized throughout the film, which helps it look stylized intentionally, rather than just plain low-quality. Stills and moving images are freely and frequently mixed together and that works well.

Editing: This film was edited on iMovie. It uses an array of simple editing tricks to create a sense of dislocation and disassociation. Highlights are blown out, pictures zoom in and out and multiply, and characters seem to disappear into mirror reflections of themselves, as if being turned in a kaleidoscope. There’s a long sequence of still photos early in the film that show Caouette’s early childhood, and they simply “flash dissolve” one after another (that is, one picture gives way to the next by quickly fading up to white, and down to the next image).

There is HEAVY use of text to narrate the story, and despite my general aversion to narration in films, I found myself wondering whether narration would have been a better choice. We learn later in the film that the filmmaker doesn’t trust himself to let go in front of the camera, which explains the awkward and repeated use of text to move the story forward.

Music and Audio: Lots of music in this film (which explains why it cost $400k to get all of it released) playing in the background while an endless number of quickly cut stills and short clips play on the screen. Lyrics like “I fell down the stairs, I wished you were dead, he handed me your head…”  support the mood of the film. One nice audio transition that I’ve heard before: a sudden change of scene behind which a sound like a plane landing that is suddenly cut off as the volume rises. I want to find a sound effect for that and use it somewhere some day. There’s a nice found music edit which begins with a scene in NY subway where a street artist is singing. The visuals quickly move on to something else, but audio stays with the street performance for awhile. Great reminder to keep that camera rolling on stuff longer than you think you’ll need it – and remember that the camera is basically a rape recorder, too, even if you’re not getting any visuals at same time.

This film was a huge hit at festivals from Canne to Sundance, not because of it’s technical prowess, but because it is an authentic story told in the way only this filmmaker could tell. The subtitle for the film is also an important message to documentary filmmakers looking for ideas: Your greatest creation is the life you lead.

Here’s a really great in-depth interview with Caouette about how this film was made.

I signed up for Film Movement last month, a film-of-the-month club for independent and foreign films. The first disc arrived last week, containing a documentary called Mine, which was the audience award winner at SXSW last year. It’s a film by Geralyn Pezanoski, a San Francisco based producer who was so moved after seeing news footage of pets stranded by hurricane Katrina, that she (along with hundreds of other animal lovers) drove straight to New Orleans and pitched in to help save them. The idea to make this film came to her later, after she noticed that many of the people who adopted animals in the wake of Katrina were unwilling to return them to their original owners. With the classic elements of conflict falling into place, she got busy directing her first feature length documentary.

This film is pretty much a classic and well-executed example of what I would call “traditional” documentary as it’s practiced today: it makes heavy use of interviews, cutaway footage, historical footage, and follows a handful of people and their pets through what happened to them before, during and after the hurricane. It looks and feels like a film made by a skilled producer who has worked her way up in the video production world and knows how to cover all the bases with efficiency, fairness and professionalism. You can’t watch this film without feeling deeply moved by the plight of helpless animals – and the people who love them.

Filmmaker takeaways:

1. Show the universal through the particular. The filmmakers found a great mix of characters through which to tell the bigger story.

2. Tell more than one story. I like how the film switches constantly between the individual stories to tell a larger, but interrelated, story. It keeps it interesting to have more than one thread going at once and be able to jump between them frequently. Nicely structured.

3. Develop the characters. Even though they live very ordinary lives, it’s impossible not to start to care about the people because we hear them talking over and over about how much they miss their dogs. You begin to understand that their pets are part of what gives their lives meaning and they get a lot of joy from the relationship in a world that otherwise can be pretty bleak.

4. Stay with it. I’m not sure how long this film took to make, but I’m guessing quite awhile, because by the end of the film, most of  conflict has been resolved in a satisfying way – with the majority of the pet owners portrayed in the film getting their pets back.

Happy ending bonus: watch the dvd extras to find out what happens with the guy who was still waiting to be reunited with his dog at the end of the film.

This carefully crafted film doesn’t fit easily into any genre, which is part of why I like it so much. Filmmaker Caveh Zahedi uses direct address throughout the entirety of I Am A Sex Addict. And he  mixes actual footage of his past girlfriends with actors portraying them to tell the story of his life through his relationships with women, wrapping it up neatly with a significant real-life event at the end (at least I THINK it was real, although with this type of film you never really know).

I admire filmmakers who are as comfortable in front of the lens as they are behind it. I’m not. It’s quite a talent to bare your soul in a way that is entertaining and informative. As someone who has spent (and still spends) a ridiculous amount of time mentally undressing women, I would say that what Zahedi is doing in this film takes almost as much courage as what James Longly does in his.

Technical observation: There are briefly animated scenes that show the characters flying across the Atlantic, really simple, just stylized head shots of the characters flying over a map. It works. And in some of the acted sequences, Zahedi looks at the camera and reveals that the scenes aren’t really where they purport to be – which is endearing and somehow makes the rest of the film more believable.

When looking for ideas to turn into a film, it’s tempting to think “life is elsewhere.” I’m a big fan of filmmakers who can take something that is right in front of them, and turn it into a compelling story. Zahedi certainly has done that with this film. That’s the takeaway, perhaps: good films are made with ingredients that are right in front of you.

I’m reading a book right now called Making Documentary Films and Videos by Barry Hampe. The author devotes a lot of space in the book to defining what a documentary is and what it isn’t. For him, documentaries are more related to journalism than they are to Hollywood. “The difference between television journalism and serious documentary filmmaking is the difference between a newspaper article and a book,” he says.

According to Hampe’s definition, a film like this is clearly not a documentary. And Hampe is quick to dismiss even Michael Moore’s films as “Docuganda.” But I disagree. I think it’s up to every documentary filmmaker to define the word for themselves, and let their reputation speak for itself. If, like Hampe, you want to keep both feet squarely planted between the goal posts of verifiable fact, go for it. If you want to take me on a fact-based flight of fancy, I’m down for the trip.

On January 1st, I kicked off  my 100 films in 100 days personal challenge by screening a film loaned to me by Jeff Leisawitz, my friend who is also the Seattle musician who scored Shine. The film, titled What is Indie? is by first-time filmmaker Dave Cool, who hails from Canada (where I grew up).

What I immediately liked about this film was the intentions of the filmmaker. Here’s a guy who set out to explore a topic by making a film, funded by credit cards, no less. And the result is a totally credible contribution to our understanding of what it means to be an indie musician. Along the way we get to hear a lot of good music, meet a ton of musicians, and learn a bit about Cool, who narrates the film. I’m not sure that personal narration was the right way to go for this film. But it gets the job done.

The film succeeds in deepening our understanding of what it means to be an indie musician – if you are an indie musician or someone already interested in the topic. Cool lists Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) as one of his major influences, and I could really see that in the film’s narrative approach. Except for one thing: this film doesn’t manage to launch nearly as compelling a story train from the beginning, the way Super Size me did. If it had, I think this film could have appealed to a wider audience and made it easier to stick around to find out what happens while sitting through all of the many interviews. But if you’re into the topic, you’ll definitely stay with the film and enjoy it.

This film is spectacularly successful in one crucial way: it got made. It took Cool a year to make this film, and the fact that he did it is hugely inspiring to a beginning filmmaker like me. Making any film worth watching is a huge undertaking (it took us 8 months to complete Shine), and if more would-be filmmakers stopped thinking about the obstacles and just started doing it, we’d have a better understanding our our world.

This film’s run time is just under an hour. I’m guessing that made it hard to program at festivals, since all the advice I’ve received from people like SIFF programming manager Beth Barrett is that 30 minutes is the absolutely maximum for short docs. Otherwise, she said, if it’s in the 30-60 minute zone, it must be a truly extraordinary film in order to get selected for festival screening, because it will have to compete with feature length films (generally at least 80 minutes). Our first cut of Shine was 47 minutes, and it felt like the “right” length for the film. It was painful editing it down to 24 minutes. But I’m glad we did, and I ultimately I think it’s stronger because of it.

Key filmmaker takeaway: On the DVD, Cool added a lot of worthwhile extras, and the one labeled “Advice” really caught my attention. This section features people like CD Baby founder Derek Sivers giving advice to aspiring musicians about how to navigate the business side on their way to becoming a successful indie artist. I’ve got a TON of similar footage that we were not able to use in the final 24-minute edit of Shine, so I’m going to borrow this idea and create an Advice category when we make our DVD for Shine, where I’ll put the best of that stuff. Thanks for the idea, Dave, it’s a brilliant way to share helpful footage that would otherwise never see the light of day.

I discovered two noteworthy websites while writing this post, where you can purchase this film for immediate download or buy the DVD. Here’s links to purchase this film on bside.com (DVD $12.99; low-rez download $2.99; high-rez download $7.99 ) and also on filmbaby.com (DVD $14.00; download $9.99). On first glance, it looks like these sites are hints of a bright future in which documentary filmmakers can self-distribute their work directly to their audience. I’ll likely be looking for an online distributor for Shine after it’s festival debut later this year, so will take a closer look at these and post a more thorough review. Meanwhile, if you know of any compelling options for online and/or DVD self-distribution, please share them in the comments.