The Interrupters
Radio West
Steve James made the extraordinary documentary "Hoop Dreams" in 1994. His most recent film, The Interrupters, premiered last year at Sundance and it's airing on PBS tonight. The film examines the complexities and realities of inner-city violence by following three violence prevention workers on the streets of Chicago. James spoke with Doug last year about the ideas in his films and the craft of making them.
To Listen to the Episode
Showing posts with label Gangs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gangs. Show all posts
Friday, November 1, 2013
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Jose Teodoro -- Miss Bala: Nightmare State
Miss Bala: Nightmare State
Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo upends his filmmaking to show a country torn apart
by José Teodoro
Film Comment
Most existences on earth are marginal; the majority of people live on the edges of some kind of war. That the woman and man at the center of Miss Bala swing into each other’s orbit is itself no great coincidence. She’s Laura (Stephanie Sigman), the cheerful 23-year-old daughter of a Tijuana clothing merchant, and he’s Lino (Noe Hernandez), a taciturn, hard-eyed, soft-voiced drug trafficker about whose past we glean almost nothing. Both hail from humble if not desperate backgrounds; both aspire to transcend social determinism via archetypal routes to glamour and power: just as Lino asserts himself through terror and illegal commerce, Laura, however haphazardly, hopes to embody someone’s notion of the ideal woman by entering the Miss Baja California competition. Her first, fleeting encounter with him occurs when a dance party is turned into a massacre by Lino and his confederates. They meet again when she is so naïve as to seek out the police for help. In some perverse variation on the romantic comedy, the two keep crossing paths. Laura spends much of Miss Bala in a state of shock, while Lino seems to quickly intuit how best to exploit her allure while ostentatiously exchanging favors. He can ensure she wins the Miss Baja crown; she can serve as a gorgeous decoy in his criminal dealings.
A fascinating about-face for Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo, Miss Bala—co-written by Naranjo and Mauricio Katz and loosely based on actual events—surveys the current state of play in the drug war and offers commentary through a procession of absurdities, ironies, and largely uncontextualized mayhem. The gangsters and the DEA agents are equally menacing and seem to favor the same black SUVs; a beauty contest audience bursts into wild applause for a catatonic contestant; a flaming tire rolls by during an urban shoot-out as though it has emerged from a cartoon, traversing a stretch of asphalt covered in blood, bullet casings, and gasoline. Despite an incongruous, statistics-heavy closing title card, Miss Bala can no more be reduced to a hand-wringing docudrama about the escalation of Mexico’s drug-related violence than Take Shelter can be called a treatise on overcoming mental illness. These films are personal statements about individuals ceding control to forces beyond their comprehension—personal statements that just happen to dovetail nicely with urgent social issues.
“I’d arrived at a place where I felt like I wasn’t challenging myself that much,” says Naranjo, “so I decided to do something that I really didn’t know how to do. My previous films had a little bit of social commentary, but it was from a bourgeois point of view, trying to denounce commodification or conservatism. When I started to develop Miss Bala I felt I was responding to something far more urgent that’s in the air. To the fear.” Speaking during the Toronto International Film Festival last September, by which point Miss Bala had already seen its share of plaudits and detractors, Naranjo emphasized his latest film’s conspicuous shift in both style and content from his preceding work, whether the privileged teens playing out lovers-on-the-run melodrama under a mesh of Godardian alienation techniques (the deliriously stylish and witty 2008 I’m Gonna Explode) or privileged young adults negotiating disastrous relationships (the clever but flat 2006 Drama/Mex). “The directors I admire tend to change a lot between films,” says Naranjo. “Maybe not often with regards to form, but with subject matter for sure. Before, I felt that I was a filmmaker but had yet to really show it. I trusted so deeply in the present, in improvisation. I know I’m shifting. The question now, for me, has to do with whether or not I can maintain this.”
...
To Read the Rest
Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo upends his filmmaking to show a country torn apart
by José Teodoro
Film Comment
Most existences on earth are marginal; the majority of people live on the edges of some kind of war. That the woman and man at the center of Miss Bala swing into each other’s orbit is itself no great coincidence. She’s Laura (Stephanie Sigman), the cheerful 23-year-old daughter of a Tijuana clothing merchant, and he’s Lino (Noe Hernandez), a taciturn, hard-eyed, soft-voiced drug trafficker about whose past we glean almost nothing. Both hail from humble if not desperate backgrounds; both aspire to transcend social determinism via archetypal routes to glamour and power: just as Lino asserts himself through terror and illegal commerce, Laura, however haphazardly, hopes to embody someone’s notion of the ideal woman by entering the Miss Baja California competition. Her first, fleeting encounter with him occurs when a dance party is turned into a massacre by Lino and his confederates. They meet again when she is so naïve as to seek out the police for help. In some perverse variation on the romantic comedy, the two keep crossing paths. Laura spends much of Miss Bala in a state of shock, while Lino seems to quickly intuit how best to exploit her allure while ostentatiously exchanging favors. He can ensure she wins the Miss Baja crown; she can serve as a gorgeous decoy in his criminal dealings.
A fascinating about-face for Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo, Miss Bala—co-written by Naranjo and Mauricio Katz and loosely based on actual events—surveys the current state of play in the drug war and offers commentary through a procession of absurdities, ironies, and largely uncontextualized mayhem. The gangsters and the DEA agents are equally menacing and seem to favor the same black SUVs; a beauty contest audience bursts into wild applause for a catatonic contestant; a flaming tire rolls by during an urban shoot-out as though it has emerged from a cartoon, traversing a stretch of asphalt covered in blood, bullet casings, and gasoline. Despite an incongruous, statistics-heavy closing title card, Miss Bala can no more be reduced to a hand-wringing docudrama about the escalation of Mexico’s drug-related violence than Take Shelter can be called a treatise on overcoming mental illness. These films are personal statements about individuals ceding control to forces beyond their comprehension—personal statements that just happen to dovetail nicely with urgent social issues.
“I’d arrived at a place where I felt like I wasn’t challenging myself that much,” says Naranjo, “so I decided to do something that I really didn’t know how to do. My previous films had a little bit of social commentary, but it was from a bourgeois point of view, trying to denounce commodification or conservatism. When I started to develop Miss Bala I felt I was responding to something far more urgent that’s in the air. To the fear.” Speaking during the Toronto International Film Festival last September, by which point Miss Bala had already seen its share of plaudits and detractors, Naranjo emphasized his latest film’s conspicuous shift in both style and content from his preceding work, whether the privileged teens playing out lovers-on-the-run melodrama under a mesh of Godardian alienation techniques (the deliriously stylish and witty 2008 I’m Gonna Explode) or privileged young adults negotiating disastrous relationships (the clever but flat 2006 Drama/Mex). “The directors I admire tend to change a lot between films,” says Naranjo. “Maybe not often with regards to form, but with subject matter for sure. Before, I felt that I was a filmmaker but had yet to really show it. I trusted so deeply in the present, in improvisation. I know I’m shifting. The question now, for me, has to do with whether or not I can maintain this.”
...
To Read the Rest
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Carl Freedman: The Supplement of Coppola -- Primitive Accumulation and the Godfather Trilogy
[I'll be using this in my Ethics and Cinema course this Fall -- Freedman also has a companion piece in the same issue on Goodfellas that is available at his website]
The Supplement of Coppola: Primitive Accumulation and the Godfather Trilogy
by Carl Freedman
Originally published in Film International #49 (2011): 8-41.
...
Marx sometimes describes his own surprising secret as “so-called primitive accumulation” (emphasis added), for in some ways it is not really an accumulation at all, at least insofar as that term connotes a smooth, routine, essentially peaceful operation. Primitive accumulation is, on the contrary, a process of staggering disruption, fraud, theft, and violence, one that is, in Marx’s words, “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (875). Within Europe, it was accomplished primarily by the forcible dispossession of the peasantry: the unilateral usurpation of their ancient feudal rights, the forcible seizure and privatization of their common lands, and, in addition, the forcible seizure and privatization of traditional state and church domains and of various kinds of feudal and clan property—all of which were transformed into modern, bourgeois private property. The peasant producers were left with nothing, that is, with no land and no rights save the right, as newly “free” wage-laborers, to sell their labor-power to the bosses of a newly capitalist agriculture (and, later, of course, of capitalist industry as well). The enclosure movement in sixteenth-century England, against which Thomas More, for one, protested so bitterly at the time, is today probably the best known example of this process. In leaving the discussion of primitive accumulation to the end of his book, Marx is, in a way, mimicking and satirizing the psychology of capitalism itself. For primitive accumulation remains, throughout the capitalist era, the secret that must be repressed, the thing that must not be spoken of. The system which holds the right of property and the right of “free” contract (paradigmatically the contract between worker and capitalist) to be sacred naturally tends to discourage memory of the fact that this very system is based on massive theft of property and wholesale violation of established rights by naked force. Capitalism inevitably disinclines us to recall that capital, as Marx puts it, comes into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (926).
Nor, indeed, was the foundational bloodiness of capitalism confined only, or even mainly, to Europe. Capital accumulation in the European metropolis could never have reached the level that made the “take-off” of the capitalist mode of production possible without the massive appropriation of non-European wealth: through the systematic thievery organized by Europe’s rising empires in East Asia and South Asia, through the genocidal “discovery” and exploitation of the New World, and through the large-scale and frequently lethal kidnapping of black Africans into slavery. In Marx’s own words:
One of the most frequent mistakes made in discussions of capitalism today is the assumption that “globalization” is an entirely recent development. Throughout Capital, Marx makes clear that the world market has always been the most ultimately powerful determinant in capitalist production, circulation, and exchange. But in the discussion of primitive accumulation it is evident that capitalism has been a global enterprise not only from the beginning but even, so to speak, from before the beginning. The violent plunder which produced sufficient capital accumulation to allow for capitalist take-off in Europe spanned every inhabited continent of the globe (save Australia, whose murderous “discovery” came later). Taken together, the various foundational moments of primitive accumulation may well constitute the largest and most violent crime against humanity in all of history.
If accumulation, with its tranquil and mundane connotations, thus seems a potentially misleading term for such an enterprise, the force of “so-called” applies also to the other term in Marx’s phrase, “so-called primitive accumulation.” For primitive might be taken to suggest that the force and thievery of primitive accumulation, however appalling, exist decisively and exclusively in the past: that primitive accumulation is a fact about the history of capitalism but not about capitalism as an ongoing mode of production today. It is, indeed, true that primitive accumulation is heterogeneous to the deliberately simplified model of “pure” capitalism that Marx constructs from Part One through Part Seven of Volume One of Capital. Yet as this model is fleshed out and complicated in the succeeding parts of Marx’s multi-volume “critique of political economy”—and also in important work by such later scholars as Ernest Mandel and David Harvey—it becomes evident that primitive accumulation never really ends. If it is imagined as the series of explosions that started the motor of capitalist production, then, though these explosions may sometimes partially subside during the “normal” running of the engine, they are never completely extinguished. The model proposed in Volume One suggests that, in principle, capitalism could function without continuing theft and violence, just as it could, in principle, function without ever lowering wages below the true exchange-value of the workers’ labor-power, and without ever raising prices above the exchange-value of the commodities offered for sale. But the actual history of capitalism shows that the system does not, in fact, operate without these things.
To Read the Entire Essay
by Carl Freedman
Originally published in Film International #49 (2011): 8-41.
...
Marx sometimes describes his own surprising secret as “so-called primitive accumulation” (emphasis added), for in some ways it is not really an accumulation at all, at least insofar as that term connotes a smooth, routine, essentially peaceful operation. Primitive accumulation is, on the contrary, a process of staggering disruption, fraud, theft, and violence, one that is, in Marx’s words, “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (875). Within Europe, it was accomplished primarily by the forcible dispossession of the peasantry: the unilateral usurpation of their ancient feudal rights, the forcible seizure and privatization of their common lands, and, in addition, the forcible seizure and privatization of traditional state and church domains and of various kinds of feudal and clan property—all of which were transformed into modern, bourgeois private property. The peasant producers were left with nothing, that is, with no land and no rights save the right, as newly “free” wage-laborers, to sell their labor-power to the bosses of a newly capitalist agriculture (and, later, of course, of capitalist industry as well). The enclosure movement in sixteenth-century England, against which Thomas More, for one, protested so bitterly at the time, is today probably the best known example of this process. In leaving the discussion of primitive accumulation to the end of his book, Marx is, in a way, mimicking and satirizing the psychology of capitalism itself. For primitive accumulation remains, throughout the capitalist era, the secret that must be repressed, the thing that must not be spoken of. The system which holds the right of property and the right of “free” contract (paradigmatically the contract between worker and capitalist) to be sacred naturally tends to discourage memory of the fact that this very system is based on massive theft of property and wholesale violation of established rights by naked force. Capitalism inevitably disinclines us to recall that capital, as Marx puts it, comes into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (926).
Nor, indeed, was the foundational bloodiness of capitalism confined only, or even mainly, to Europe. Capital accumulation in the European metropolis could never have reached the level that made the “take-off” of the capitalist mode of production possible without the massive appropriation of non-European wealth: through the systematic thievery organized by Europe’s rising empires in East Asia and South Asia, through the genocidal “discovery” and exploitation of the New World, and through the large-scale and frequently lethal kidnapping of black Africans into slavery. In Marx’s own words:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. (915)
One of the most frequent mistakes made in discussions of capitalism today is the assumption that “globalization” is an entirely recent development. Throughout Capital, Marx makes clear that the world market has always been the most ultimately powerful determinant in capitalist production, circulation, and exchange. But in the discussion of primitive accumulation it is evident that capitalism has been a global enterprise not only from the beginning but even, so to speak, from before the beginning. The violent plunder which produced sufficient capital accumulation to allow for capitalist take-off in Europe spanned every inhabited continent of the globe (save Australia, whose murderous “discovery” came later). Taken together, the various foundational moments of primitive accumulation may well constitute the largest and most violent crime against humanity in all of history.
If accumulation, with its tranquil and mundane connotations, thus seems a potentially misleading term for such an enterprise, the force of “so-called” applies also to the other term in Marx’s phrase, “so-called primitive accumulation.” For primitive might be taken to suggest that the force and thievery of primitive accumulation, however appalling, exist decisively and exclusively in the past: that primitive accumulation is a fact about the history of capitalism but not about capitalism as an ongoing mode of production today. It is, indeed, true that primitive accumulation is heterogeneous to the deliberately simplified model of “pure” capitalism that Marx constructs from Part One through Part Seven of Volume One of Capital. Yet as this model is fleshed out and complicated in the succeeding parts of Marx’s multi-volume “critique of political economy”—and also in important work by such later scholars as Ernest Mandel and David Harvey—it becomes evident that primitive accumulation never really ends. If it is imagined as the series of explosions that started the motor of capitalist production, then, though these explosions may sometimes partially subside during the “normal” running of the engine, they are never completely extinguished. The model proposed in Volume One suggests that, in principle, capitalism could function without continuing theft and violence, just as it could, in principle, function without ever lowering wages below the true exchange-value of the workers’ labor-power, and without ever raising prices above the exchange-value of the commodities offered for sale. But the actual history of capitalism shows that the system does not, in fact, operate without these things.
To Read the Entire Essay
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