onehouse

Give Up Yer Aul Sins

A distribution company has posted Give up Yer Aul Sins on youtube:

This series, including the original Oscar-nominated short, from Brown Bag Films is based upon the 1960s recordings of young children telling Bible stories in a classroom to their schoolteacher. When a film crew arrives at an inner city Dublin National School to record the children, the result is a warm, funny and spontaneous animated documentary, featuring young children telling the story of John the Baptist, The birth of Jesus, the Crucifixion, Saint Patrick and others.

Give Up Yer Aul Sins combines simple humour with clever animation to create films with a timeless quality and appeal to a family audience. Give Up Yer Aul Sins has screened in almost 50 film festivals, including The Galway Film Fleadh (where it won Best Animation), Cork Film Festival (Best Irish and Best International Animation), Cartoons on Bay (Special Award for Original Idea), NewYork Comedy Festival, Boston Irish Film Festival, Aspen Film Festival and Cannes Film Festival.

I like the Saint Patrick one.The enthusiasm shows through even when I have a tough time following the accent.

Young at Heart

Kottke blogged about the Young at Heart Choir featured at The Documentary Blog. There's a couple of clips including the youtube of of Fred Knittle singing Coldplay's "I Will Fix You" that has roared through the net. I've played this many times. If you can, click on through to you tube and get the story behind the song.

The Gleaner's and I.

Someone pointed me to the Oprah website for a show she recently did on hoarders - people who meet an emotional need by buying and hoarding stuff of all kinds.

This reminded me of a movie I wanted to recommend here called The Gleaners and I, a by film maker Agnes Varda. I found it to be a very meditative work. I passed it onto my mother and it made its way through all of her friends. It's a good discussion group film too.

Here is a writeup on the Gleaners and I that was included in Issue 14 of Beyond magazine - Possible Worlds:

The Gleaners and I (2000)

Seventy-six-year-old Agnès Varda may be the “Grandmother of the French New Wave,” but she’s also a spry, intelligent, and entertaining filmmaker; her essay film, The Gleaners and I (2000) is one of the most inspiring documentaries of recent years.

The Gleaners and I is an essay film that provides a free-flowing and thoughtful look at the way society interacts with its leftovers. Shooting on digital video, Varda travels through southern France making incisive allusions to art history, homelessness, aging, consumerism, and the act of watching movies that could otherwise fill a whole series of lesser documentaries.

She begins with a definition of “gleaning” (while leafing through a dictionary with her affectionate cat looking on) as a tradition where the poor gathered the grain left over from the harvest. Then she visits the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and regards Millet’s famous 1857 painting of workers in a wheat field, “The Gleaners,” and films the onlookers in fast motion coming and going, gazing at the work throughout the day.

From there, she associates gleaning with a physical posture (“Gleaning might be extinct,” she narrates, “but stooping has not vanished from society”) and reflects on modern day gleaning—literally (a law in France still permits gleaning after the harvest from sunup to sundown) as well as figuratively (gleaning as a mental activity: learning, listening and watching).

“What strikes me,” she notes, “is that each gleans on his own. Whereas in paintings they were always in clusters.” By comparing various people (gypsies, artists, foragers), Varda constructs a flexible metaphor for engaging life and finding valuable things that others discard. She interviews gleaners, gains their confidence, and converses with them.

“There’s another woman gleaning in this film . . . that’s me,” she says as she humorously poses with a bundle of grain over her shoulder. Throughout the film, Varda gleans images: forgotten people, rejected traditions, unused produce, even stains on her ceiling (which she compares to modern art). The film is wonderfully self-reflexive, and she herself becomes one of its primary subjects: “It might be Old Age my friend, but my hair and my hands keep telling me the end is near.”

Varda has called her film a “wandering road documentary” that creates a cinematic resistance to the world of consumption.  While other filmmakers might resort to grandstanding or ridiculing eccentric personalities, Varda s too busy celebrating life to bother. More than anything, The Gleaners and I expresses the joy of discovery, allowing the viewer to experience the company of a wise and compassionate filmmaker of boundless energy.

(Varda’s sequel, The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, is included on the DVD from Zeitgeist Video.)

- Doug Cummings

Away From Her

I saw a beautiful film tonight. Away From Her is Sarah Polley's directorial debut, an adaptation of the Alice Munro short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." I don't need to add to the reviews and accolades except to say go and see it. And if you are Canadian, see this in the theatre so we can support our filmmakers and tell the powers that be to make more Sarah Polley movies. I experienced a deep recognition of light and landscapes of all kinds.

Trailer.

Manufactured Landscapes

I highly recommend Manufactured Landscapes, the documentary on the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky.

"The film follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. Sites such as the Three Gorges Dam, which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world and displaced over a million people, factory floors over a kilometre long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai’s urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera.

Shot in Super-16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narrative streams of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. What makes the photographs so powerful is his refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions. In the process, it tries to shift our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it."

I've seen Burtynsky's photographs in magazines and in a gallery but it is amazing to see them portrayed on such a large scale. The long opening panning shot of a factory in China has lingered with me. This is truly a meditative work and should stay with you long after you leave the theatre. Because it is an NFB film, it is playing all over Canada right now (even in Saskatoon Jordon!)so  try to see it on the big screen. This one is definitely something to get lost in.

Film: Jesus Camp

Last night, I took in the documentary Jesus Camp with a full theatre in downtown Calgary. The crowd was filled with people who seemed to be a bit enamored of their own film festival presence.The festival is a fairly new thing in Calgary and I don't know if people think it's cool to be at a film festival (we don't do cool very well here in Cow and Oiltown) but there was a bit of hoot and hollering at the introduction, hissing at the Starbucks logo in the opening sponsors reel, and  making fun of the list of Hollywood films being promoted by a local rental chain. So the natives were indeed restless, guffawing loudly at the opening scenes of Becky Fischer, the Pentecostal children's pastor, who is one of the main voices in Jesus Camp. But the amazing thing was how quiet the theatre became as the film went on. The noisy crowd was nearly silent by the end, stunned by the level of manipulation and this world they sort of knew (me) or had never imagined. I heard one woman say to her friend, "I want to stop watching but it's like some kind of car crash. I can't stop."

I was completely uncomfortable. I recognized a lot of the object lessons and language from my youth but I could not remember being so pressured, so agressively pursued by fear during my Sunday School days. My lessons ran more towards cute with a getting over the sin speedbump via Jesus on my fast track to eternal life.

There were some parts of the film that seemed heavy-handed. Some critics of the film doubt the existence of these kind of people and churches thinking they were created in the editing room. Some think of them as a loonie minority. I don't think so. I have witnessed moments like this when observing older youth gatherings in my later years, stunned by the manipulation and the language. But I'll agree there was some convenient underlining in the editing. Call it the Michael Moore effect. I think the directors could have stepped back a little and still made the same point.  It would have been quieter but probably all the more horrific.

Surprisingly, Becky Fischer, the focal point of much of the film, agrees with much of the portrayal (with the exception of some of the political clilps) and is promoting the film on her website. And, some people are watching and congratulating her for her "beautiful work" with these children. Eyes and beholders.

Afternoon breeze.

This morning, after my regular visit with Carol and Evan, I changed the channel and happened on three commercials in a row from a church in Winnipeg. I guess it was the end of their TV program and they were pushing upcoming events but it was all done up like one of those cleaning ads where supposedly normal women dance around with mops and feel fulfilled by their ultra clean (and now chemically enhanced) floors. Change the kitchen product to Jesus, add a few extra white men in dress shirts and a handful of delighted children and you've got what looks like the same thing with a different product. It just made no sense to me.

Thankfully, my afternoon included a viewing of the film, Son of Man, at the Calgary Film Festival. I really liked this. The setting. The lack of dialogue. The music and dancing. And especially Pauline Malefane as Mary hearing the news of her pregnancy from the Angel of the Lord, a small South African child sitting on a desk in a destroyed classroom, and then later singing the Magnificat in her own language. I had to empty my head of what I was expecting to see and hear and try to just let it all unfold.Check your local film festival and see if this shows up.

Jesus Camp

Musician/artist David Byrne writes about the documentary Jesus Camp:

Naturally, the kids being so young, there is no questioning of any kind — they simply accept what grownups Fischer and the others say — they get pumped up, agitated, they memorize right wing and Jesus slogans and shout them back obediently. They become part of a support group — a warm, safe, comfortable feeling for anyone, for any social animal, for you and me. No one strays or gets out of line even the slightest bit. (More on peer pressure later.)

There were some perfect sound bites — at one point Pastor Fischer instructs the little ones that they should be willing to die for Christ, and the little ones obediently agree. She may even use the word martyr, which has a shocking echo in the Middle East. I can see future suicide bombers for Jesus — the next step will be learning to fly planes into buildings. Of course, the grownups would say, “Oh no, we’re not like them” — but they admit that the principal difference is simply that “We’re right.”

In another scene a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush, with his trademark smirking smile, is brought out and the children are urged to identify — many of the little ones come forward and reverently touch his cardboard hands.

End of the Spear

The Revealer takes on End of the Spear, a new film about the killings of Nate Saint and his fellow missionaries in Ecuador. This was one of the glossy myths of my childhood immortalized in Sunday School lessons, youth group sermons and the inevitable "christian" comic book. This is an interesting look at what could have been left out of the telling.

Can such a poorly designed and executed film be an effective vehicle for the Christian message? Can faith hold it together? Surely not for secular audiences. End of the Spear's Indians are too wicked, the Saints are too good and the emotional climaxes come too fast. By the time we learn that Nate Saint supposedly ascended directly into Heaven, and actually watch the missionary’s plane fly away into the sunset, the little anthropologist inside all of us is more amused than enraged.

End of the Spear is more fiction than fact, more Judas than Jesus. If there were no stakes to this kind of project -- no real Huaorani, no real missionaries, and no real anthropologists -- then this review could end here. But this film does decidedly serious work in the real world by erasing the actual conditions and consequences of the evangelical missionary work that's still occurring all over lowland South America today, largely financed by the well-meaning constituents of North American churches. It does a disservice to the Huaorani, anthropology, and missionaries by flattening out the ambiguous, anxious relationships of such riveting moments into tired dogma.

I think I started distrusting the careful stylings of church story tellers when, after reading through the Bible for the first time, I realized none of the Sunday morning flannelgraph covered the rape and mutilation of the woman in Gibeah. I never saw twelve little cloth pieces of a woman's body being sent to the twelve tribes. I was ten years old.  Somewhere inside of me I couldn't figure out why I couldn't watch certain things on TV but these kinds of stories were okay for a ten year old girl? It made me wonder what else everyone was leaving out.

Brendan and the Secret of Kells

Now this looks interesting. The Blog of Kells features "a sporadic and sort of production diary about the making of our first animated feature here in Cartoon Saloon." There's some beautiful production stills from Brendan and the Secret of Kells and you can catch a few clips over at The Cartoon Saloon website. I won't clip any here as I'm sure they wouldn't like things reproduced just yet. Just go and have a look yourself.

From the beginning of the blog:

right i've been meaning to do this as a way to record things as we go through making this film for a while now. We've been working on this in Cartoon Saloon for almost six years, just dpping into it everynow and then the development was long, meandering and ponderous. Wea re finally in full-time preproduction with a crew in place. We started in October and we'll be aiming to finish it up for Chrimbo 2007.