Long Pauses

Tag: Sojourners

  • Lee Isaac Chung: The Storm of Progress

    Lee Isaac Chung: The Storm of Progress

    This interview was originally published at Sojourners.

    * * *

    In early 1940, just months before he would die while fleeing the Gestapo in Spain, the Jew­ish-German literary critic Walter Benjamin assembled his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” a brief collection of observations that is equal parts theology and Marxist analysis. In Thesis IX, he studies Paul Klee’s modernist painting “Angelus Novus” and finds in it a usable metaphor for history. Klee’s work depicts a magnificent, expressionist angel whose face is turned toward the past. His mouth is agape and his wings are fully extended as he concentrates his gaze on the ever-growing catastrophe behind him. The angel wishes to pause so that he might revive and redeem human history, but “a storm is blowing from Paradise.” “This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” Benjamin concludes, “This storm is what we call progress.”

    Lee Isaac Chung alludes to “Angelus Novus” when describing his first feature-length film, Munyurangabo, a poetic and beautifully humane snapshot of Rwanda as it exists today, nearly a decade and a half after the genocide. The film, which premiered in May 2007 at the Cannes Film Festival and has since played at fests in Toronto, Los Angeles, London, Rotterdam, Berlin, and elsewhere, adopts a view of “progress” similar to Benjamin’s. “One audience member in Berlin challenged us for ending the movie on a note of hopefulness,” Chung says. “But it’s not a naive or simple hope. Any progress made in Rwanda will come from the hard work of reconciliation combined with a wide-eyed acknowledgment of the past. That’s why we conceived of this simple story of two young boys. Munyurangabo is, in part, about how memory shapes the formation of identity—personal, cultural, and national—and how that identity shapes our behavior.”

    The heroes of Chung’s film are ‘Ngabo (short for Munyur­angabo, played by Jeff Ruta­gengwa) and Sangwa (Eric Ndo­r­un­kundiye), teen­age boys who became friends while working as porters in a market in Kigali. At the start of the film, they set off together on a journey, stopping first at the remote village that Sangwa had fled three years earlier. They intend to stay for only a few hours, but Sangwa’s reunion with his mother and father is promising, and the glimpse of domestic happiness it offers leaves him increasingly unnerved about the real purpose of their trip: to avenge the murder of ‘Ngabo’s father by finding and killing the man responsible. “I heard so many similar stories from children their age,” Chung says. “Eric’s father was killed in the genocide, and Jeff’s went missing as well. Like so many of the orphans who can be found in the ghettoes of Kigali, they’ve both really struggled. The film is a composite of their stories and others like them.”

    CHUNG GAINED access to the orphans of Kigali through his association with Youth With a Mission (YWAM), a relief organization that provides Christian discipleship training and ministers to children, widows, and people suffering the effects of HIV/AIDS. “Soon after we got married, my wife decided that she wanted to spend another summer in Rwanda. She’d volunteered with YWAM several times already and was eager to return. Rather than continue agonizing over the stalled plans for my first big film, I decided, instead, to just drop it completely and go with her.” Taking with him two friends from college and a camera he’d bought on eBay, Chung set out to teach filmmaking. “I’d taught some classes as a graduate assistant in film school and figured this was something unique I could offer.”

    Chung’s goal was to make a film there—in Rwanda, with a small budget and a small crew made up of orphans and others he’d met in Kigali. “After looking at the types of films that were coming out of Rwanda and finding no narrative films that Rwandans could claim as their own, it became clear to us that we should treat this project seriously with the goal that it could be a Rwandan film, primarily for their audience.” He and one of his partners, Samuel Anderson, composed a treatment for the film but never fully scripted it, choosing instead to improvise the dialog during rehearsals with their cast of first-time actors. As the project evolved, Chung, Anderson, and their other partner, Jenny Lund, also decided to shoot the movie on film, a relatively risky and expensive proposition in this age of cheap, high-quality digital video. “It just kept getting bigger,” Chung laughs. “Our ambition for the production, I mean. The more we talked, the more we wanted it to look a certain way. We needed film.”

    Presumably, Munyurangabo’s in­clusion in the lineups of so many prestigious festivals can be attributed in part to Chung’s photography. It is a strikingly beautiful film. And, particularly for a first-time director, Chung demonstrates a genuine talent for an essential aspect of his craft: He knows where to put the camera. When I ask about my favorite shot in the film, a simple image of Sangwa’s and ‘Ngabo’s faces in profile, he thanks me for the compliment but seems reticent to talk at length about the scene. “I knew what shots would come before it and what would come after it, and I knew I needed to break the rhythm with a quieter moment.” Chung’s humility can actually be felt in the image itself. Like the filmmakers to whom he owes the greatest debt—Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne—Chung has a sensitive curiosity about the human face, and the style of his film invites viewers to reflect upon their shared dignity rather than to simply pass judgment, as films so often do.

    With some embarrassment, Chung admits another reason his film has found an audience at international festivals: “Several programmers have told me the film isn’t what they expected it to be.”

    “Which is what, exactly?” I ask.

    “I guess they expected another film about white guilt.”

    We both laugh.

    CHUNG WAS BORN in rural Arkansas, where his Korean father had moved to raise his children and establish a farm. “I guess it isn’t the typical immigrant story,” he admits. “Most leave the land in order to find economic opportunity in the city, but my father had other ideas.” After getting his first glimpse of New York City as a teenager, Chung followed his older sister to Yale, where he pursued his interests in politics and studied biology. His long-term plans changed, however, after he and a group of friends began watching foreign and classic art films together. Instead of medical school, Chung moved to Salt Lake City to study film at the University of Utah.

    “Munyurangabo is a tricky movie for the festivals to categorize,” he continues. “It’s usually programmed as an African film, and I guess it is in many respects. In fact, it’s the first narrative feature film ever made in the Kinyarwanda language. But I’m an American, obviously, and so that complicates things.” Recently, several Hollywood productions have taken on the subject of African genocide, including the Oscar-nominated films Hotel Rwanda and The Last King of Scotland, the latter of which reimagines the murderous dictatorship of Idi Amin through the eyes of a young white European doctor. The film adopts that perspective to a fault, I think, turning the people of Uganda into incomprehensible and exotic curiosities. As a result, Scotland’s most affecting moments appeal to sentiments like pity and horror—and to our shared guilt—but at the expense of lasting understanding or empathy.

    What distinguishes Munyuran­gabo from the slew of “white guilt” films is best typified by a scene in which Sangwa, hoping to regain his father’s respect, joins his neighbors in the fields. Chung’s camera watches from a distance as they work together to till the hard, packed soil. Sangwa’s movements are labored and unnatural; his father raises and drops his hoe with a practiced grace. (“I joke that what Akira Kurosawa did for rain-soaked samurai battles, I want to do for farming scenes.”) Were it not for Chung’s tasteful use of traditional Rwandan music and several seconds of slow motion, the scene could be mistaken for documentary footage. Jean Marie Nkurikiyinka (the father) really is a farmer, Ndorunkundiye (Sangwa) really has raised himself on the streets of Kigali, and, regardless of the fact that Chung’s story is manufactured, all that real human history and experience is captured there in his images of bodies in motion. “Here,” the father says, “like this,” demonstrating for his son the proper technique. And with that unexpected moment of encouragement, the possibility of hope is suddenly made tangible.

    INSPIRED BY A Christian survivor of the genocide who once quoted the passage to him, Chung uses Isaiah 51:19-20 as an epigraph for the film: “These double calamities have come upon you; Who can comfort you? Ruin and destruction, famine and sword; Who can console you? Your sons have fainted. They lie at the head of every street, like antelope caught in a net. They are filled with the wrath of the Lord and the rebuke of your God.”

    “Is this an Old Testament film or a New Testament film?” I ask.

    After a slight pause, Chung answers: “I have great respect for people who put all of their hope in a future in which the world has been redeemed and made perfect. I have a faith in that future, too. But we’re here now, and the world is far from perfect, and we’re required to work. It’s complicated. It’s like that storm in ‘Angelus Novus.’ Are you familiar with it?”

  • Ron Austin’s In a New Light: Spirituality and the Media Arts

    This review was originally published at Sojourners.

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    Even at a length of just under 100 pages, Ron Austin’s In a New Light: Spirituality and the Media Arts is four or five books in one, a quality that proves to be both an asset and a considerable stumbling block. Jumping hastily from theological aesthetics to film history to personal testimony, while also proposing a particular, collaborative approach to film production, Austin sounds an important wake-up call to inattentive consumers and creators of popular entertainment. That he moves too quickly at times, leaving certain parts of his argument in sketch form and making occasional factual errors along the way, is perhaps excusable in a book of this length and scope, but it’s a disappointment nonetheless. In a New Light is otherwise a significant little book—not to mention a pleasurably readable one—that reintroduces much-needed terms like “transcendence,” “imagination,” “empathy,” and “art” into a dialogue too often dominated, instead, by celebrity gossip, box office returns, and, particularly in Christian circles, simple moralizing.

    Part one reads like it might have been written by Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, who rambles through the suburbs of post-war New Orleans while on “The Search” for some vaguely holy sense of permanence and wonder. For Austin, art should ideally be an open exchange between the artist(s) and audience, both of whom are “awake” and “attentive” to the sacred “present moment.” This is a moral and spiritual issue, he argues—one demanding a selfless and disciplined approach akin to meditation. The goal, ultimately, is to participate in a creative act that transforms our understanding of violence, human worth, and grace. “If a drama does not lead us to the discovery that our own lives are as enmeshed as those of the protagonists in desire and delusion,” Austin writes, “then we will either have to purge our complicity at the expense of someone else, or wallow in self-loathing and the despairing assumption that there is no way out.”

    Austin fallows his opening treatise by spotlighting 13 exemplary film directors who “responded to the spiritual needs of the time by advancing the art form.” Beginning with the silent era (Charlie Chaplin and Carl Dreyer) and covering several important movements in film history (Italian Neo-Realism, French New Wave), Austin’s primer is a handy introduction for readers who are new to the spiritual tradition in cinema. As in the first section of the book, where Austin’s borrowings from scholars such as Martin Buber and René Girard necessarily oversimplify their ideas, here he again speedily glosses over the formal innovations of his chosen filmmakers. Devoting only a half-page to Dreyer while according six times that much to Eric Rohmer is an especially odd but typical choice.

    Austin’s at his best when he positions a filmmaker in a particular religious or philosophical tradition (Jean Renoir and François Truffaut’s humanism, Ingmar Bergman’s existential despair, Robert Bresson’s icon-like photography), but his tendency to make idiosyncratic and hyperbolic pronouncements gets him in some trouble. Calling Bresson the “most truly avant-garde filmmaker in film history,” for example, would be difficult to justify, as would his dismissal of Jean-Luc Godard. While Austin acknowledges the Western-centric makeup of his list and drops the names of Asian directors Satyajit Ray and Yasujiro Ozu (who he incorrectly calls Sanjiro Ozu), the absence of world filmmakers can be felt here, as can the fact that the youngest artist he spotlights, Martin Scorsese, is now in his mid-60s.

    While the blurbs on the back cover of In a New Light tout Austin’s professional résumé—his background as an actor who once worked with Chaplin and Renoir, and his time as a writer and director on network television—the real inspiration for this book, presumably, is his more recent experience as a teacher, workshop leader, and counselor. When, in the first appendix, Austin shares his “personal reflections on faith,” his writing becomes more assured and compelling. He identifies his readers as fellow media artists (directors, writers, actors, technicians, etc.), but his lessons are applicable to us in the audience as well. “What art, including films, revealed to me,” he confides, “was a unity deeper than the disunity of the discordant world around me.” That a film might inspire awe and curiosity in a viewer, rather than consumption and gross spectacle, is a surprisingly radical idea in America right now. With In a New Light, Austin offers encouraging, first-person advice to anyone who would desire to “wake up” at the movies.

  • Fallen Creatures in a Fallen World: The Films of John Cassavetes

    Fallen Creatures in a Fallen World: The Films of John Cassavetes

    This essay was originally published at Sojourners.

    – – –

    Superficiality is the curse of our age.” So begins Celebration of Discipline, Richard J. Foster’s classic defense of traditional spiritual practices such as meditation, fasting, study, simplicity, and solitude. Published in 1978, Foster’s book offered a corrective to America’s increasingly alienating and shortsighted cultural values – values that had inevitably infected the life of the church as well. Three decades later, Foster’s critique of the “doctrine of instant satisfaction” is more vital than ever, for technology now mediates all aspects of our lives, putting gigabytes of information in our hands (or handheld devices) but offering us little incentive to process it meaningfully. As a result, we are a people driven to distraction by trivia – by facts and figures, sound-bites, and rhetoric divorced from meaning or human consequence.

    The traditional Hollywood cinema is a direct contributor to this superficiality. Most films playing at your local multiplex – like most television shows, political speeches, and pharmaceutical advertisements – actively reinforce the comforting notion that all determining forces, whether social, political, economic, or biological, can be overcome through some combination of will, effort, and, if need be, superhuman or transcendent goodness. The assumption is that a narrative can and will be written that will discover a perfect order amid the filmed world’s chaos. Think of the standard comic book blockbuster, murder mystery, courtroom drama, or police procedural. The clues will all add up in the end. The dissonances will all be resolved. And in two hours or less.

    John Cassavetes, best remembered for his starring performances in such films as The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary’s Baby, countered Hollywood’s lazier, dehumanizing tendencies in a series of landmark films made between 1959 and 1984. Serving variously as writer, director, actor, financier, and all-around master of ceremonies, Cassavetes crafted a handful of films that, collectively, give lie to Hollywood’s faith in melodramatic plotting. Instead of stock character types, his films are populated by people who exist in constant flux, defining and redefining their social roles in relation to ever-changing circumstances. Rather than plotting a traditional narrative arc, Cassavetes’ films resist resolution (and often exposition, climaxes, and denouement as well), offering us poignant glimpses of recognizable lives, messy details and all.

    The Criterion Collection’s recent release of a Cassavetes DVD box set offers the perfect opportunity to discover five of his most important films: Shadows (1959), Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1977). The collection also features an impressive, if regrettably uncritical, assortment of DVD extras, including a new documentary, interviews, and archival materials that provide further insight into Cassavetes’ working methods and his defining preoccupations.

    CASSAVETES WAS BORN in New York City in 1929, the son of Greek immigrants. After graduating from the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts and finding moderate success on stage, on television, and in the movies, he opened a method-acting workshop in Manhattan that attracted a core group of young talent. Recognizing the dramatic potential in his students’ improvisations and eager to explore alternative approaches to filmmaking, Cassavetes scavenged $20,000 and over a two-year period developed Shadows, a jazz-scored, Beat-infused document of disillusioned youth and race relations. In doing so, Cassavetes essentially gave birth to America’s independent cinema.

    Shot with a handheld 16mm camera, Shadows feels at times like a documentary, and indeed Cassavetes’ early methods owe more to the work of documentarian Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) and to the Italian Neorealists (Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti) than to the classic Hollywood studio system. Shadows achieves additional verisimilitude by means of its improvisatory nature. Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney offers a useful distinction between our typical understanding of “improvisation” – that is, an actor spontaneously inventing dialogue – and Cassavetes’ approach, which, though meticulously scripted, captures the performative nature of our daily lives, those moments when we improvise conversations, struggling to find the right words and too often stumbling upon the wrong ones instead. His characters, Carney writes, “are not denied moments of zaniness, inconsistency, or improvisatory inspiration because these would violate some tidy, coherent, package of ‘character’ – an entity, it is easy to forget, that exists only in certain forms of art and almost never in life.”

    This preoccupation with capturing the complex rhythms of “real life” extends to the structure of Cassavetes’ films as well. The average movie is composed of 50 or more brief sequences, each typically lasting less than five minutes, and each is designed with a particular end in mind – say, to move the plot from point G to point H or to develop a significant aspect of a character or relationship. Faces and A Woman Under the Influence, both starring Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands, throw off this traditional plotting and are instead built from a relatively small number of extended scenes. The result can be disorienting for the first-time viewer. Without the familiar tropes of melodrama (good vs. evil, love triangles, comedic relief, etc.), viewers are freed to explore the film without bias. As Carney writes, “every moment becomes as potentially important, interesting, and worthy of our attention as every other.” The multiplex is where we go to “lose ourselves” for a few hours at a time. Films like A Woman Under the Influence deliberately frustrate this tendency at every turn, forcing us to participate actively in the lives depicted onscreen.

    The films of John Cassavetes will never be accused of being “mindless entertainment.” His characters are, like the rest of us, fallen creatures in a fallen world who suffer the consequences of their behavior, deserved and undeserved, but who hold out hope despite it all, egged on by occasional encounters with love and something like grace. That makes them rare finds among American movies: characters deserving of our time, our patience, our empathy. “I am a moralist,” Cassavetes once said, “in that I believe the greatest morality is to acknowledge the freedom of others; to be oneself and to not be in judgment.” He extends that freedom to his audience as well. It is a powerful corrective to Hollywood’s superficiality.