Cineaste by Chris Cruz

EDITORIAL: Editors and Staff Founder and Editor-in-Chief  Gary Crowdus Editors  Rahul Hamid  Cynthia Lucia  Richard Porton Consulting Editor  Dan Georgakas Contributing Editors  Roy Grundmann  Leonard Quart  Robert Sklar (In Memoriam: 1936-2011) Dennis West Assistant Editor Joe Margolis (In Memoriam: 1944-2011) Editorial Intern  Amelia J. Byrnes Diana Wade Associates  Robert Cashill  Tom Doherty  John Hill  Andrew Horton  Adrian Martin  Louis Menashe  Martha P. Nochimson  Jared Rapfogel  Jonathan Rosenbaum  Deborah Young Production Assistance  Vicki Robinson Advertising Representative  Barbara Saltz  6 University Drive, Suite 206, PMB 161  Amherst Massachusetts 01002  Phone 413-230-3488  Fax 413-230-3367  cinads@hotmail.com

Cineaste is published quarterly at  Cineaste Magazine  243 Fifth Avenue, Suite #706  New York, NY 10016  (212) 366-5720 cineaste@cineaste.com Subscription address:  P.O. Box 2242,  New York, NY 10009-8917. All articles represent views of their authors and not necessarily those of the editors. Subscription rates:  $22 for four issues ($27 Canada/ Mexico and $40 overseas); libraries and institutions, $40 for four issues ($50 Canada/Mexico and $75 overseas). Indexed by FIAF in International Index to Film/Television Periodicals, Art Index and Film Literature Index. For permission to photocopy material from Cineaste, write  Copyright Clearance Center,  222 Rosewood Dr.,  Danvers, MA 01923.  ISSN 0009-7004. Microform editions of Cineaste are available from  Bell & Howell Information and Learning,  300 North Zeeb Road,  Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Publication of Cineaste is made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. All material copyright © 2011 Cineaste Publishers, Inc.

editorial

CONTENT DARK DEEDS - 04

A RATHER ROUGH FELLOW - 08 CONTEMPORARY THAI CINEMA - 12

THE PRICE OF SEX - 17 CHASING MADOFF-18

he “ABC Movie of the Week” Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973) is a touchstone for horror fans of an impressionable age. One of those was a nine-year-old .Mexican lad, Guillermo del Toro, who grew up to make audiences afraid of the dark with a string of horror and fantasy hits that began with 1993’s Cronos and include Hellboy (2004) and its 2008 sequel The Golden Army. His most resounding success, finding an audience beyond its genre while staying true to its roots, was Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), which, like his earlier ghost story The Devil’s Backbone (2001), finds monstrousness of several varieties amidst the Spanish Civil War. A best foreign film nominee at the Academy Awards, Pan’s Labyrinth won three Oscars and earned del Toro a best original screenplay nomination.

C ineaste : W hy remake the T V movie ?

Del Toro: If you know the original it’s a completely different take on the same anecdote. I really wanted to emphasize the fairy tale-gone-wrong aspects and play off a dysfunctional family dynamic. While I’m not saying that our film is in its league, I love the way Hitchcock’s The Birds uses the birds to manifest unhealthy aspects of the mother, played by Jessica Tandy, and how they eventually go out of control, attacking everyone, including her. I liked starting the film with the girl in an ambiguous place—is it make-believe, is it real?—and little by little the anger and resentment in the family lash out. But, changing the situation from The Birds, she and the woman find a bond. Katie Holmes found a great partnership with Bailee Madison, who was very good at the fundamental element of acting, which is playing make-believe. P e a rc e : I never saw the original movie. I saw some of it, but Troy told me that this was going to be darker and in a totally different style and I didn’t want to fall into the trap of thinking about it every time we did a take. Sometimes it’s good to look back at the original; it was for Mildred Pierce, which was so much older and so vastly removed from what we were doing that I could separate myself. What drew me to the film was Guillermo and Troy’s involvement. This genre is not an avenue I’ve ventured down too often, and it’s one of those cases where it’s less about the role and more about the film. But, funnily enough, I just completed a five-year renovation of our home, so the pitfalls of being an architect were present in my mind. I was very hands-on in the design, so I felt I had something to bring to the part. Cineaste: It’s a tricky role, in that the character isn’t very hands-on about his daughter’s fears. Pearce: What was important was finding a justified reason as to why this guy couldn’t give his daughter the attention he should have. I didn’t want him to be coldhearted, or a nice guy who was just too busy at work. It was about finding the balance, and we played with a couple of ideas. We made the stakes high, so that

interview

his panic would seem completely rational to him, while for Katie and Bailee’s characters it’s clear that he’s not a great father at this point in time. We needed to have that as an underpinning so that Bailee really felt lost and lonely in this home. Bailee was quite a force to be reckoned with, which I mean in a positive way. She’s just a smart little kid. So much of acting comes down to being childlike and allowing your imagination to be free and to be open to whatever kind of emotions might come up at any time. That’s tricky even for an adult to do. But kids are more honest about that stuff; they’re not trying to protect anything and haven’t had years of learning to be polite and all that.

BAILEE MADISON AS PEARCE’S DAUGHTER

Cineaste: How did you develop the backstory for the creatures? Del Toro: I love the Welsh author Arthur Machen and his idea that fairy lore comes from a dark place, that it’s derived from little, pre-human creatures who are really, really nasty vermin but are magical in a way, living as they do for hundreds of years. His books are what compelled me to do this. And I’ve always been creeped out by the tooth fairy. I always wondered, “What does she want with the teeth?” Fairies have always disturbed me; you can see that in Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth, too. Cineaste: The Pope is involved, too. Del Toro: When you read books on occultism and the paranormal you find that the church was actively involved in these matters, almost like traffic cops for evil forces. You can read that the Bishop of Bologna exorcised fifty vampires found in a cemetery—it was part and parcel of daily life in and around the Dark Ages. And popes took it upon themselves to help with vampiric plagues, werewolves, and demonic possession. We thought that would make a great backdrop.

O ne of the creatures

Cineaste: How did you develop the look of the creatures? Del Toro: I put the design squarely on Troy. All I was adamant about was respecting the design from the original movie, where the creatures have hairy backs and faces wrinkled like prunes. But I didn’t want to do them as man-in-suit characters; I like the deformed, elongated limbs, which were better suited to digital. Pearce: What was clear to us as actors about the creatures was that we were supposed to be spooked, that these weren’t cute little gremlins running about. Guillermo, who was just delightful to work with, said, “I want this film to be terrifying.” I wasn’t sure what to picture in my mind. But once we started rehearsing we saw the art department’s drawings of the house, then drawings of the creatures, and we said, “Oh, OK.” Cineaste: Some filmmakers shy away from showing the monster in their films, but you tend to be upfront about it. The creatures get a lot of face time here.

Machen, Lovecraft, and all the horror literature, so I thought he would be a good choice to direct.

Cineaste: Though it takes place in the U.S. the film was shot in Australia. Was it difficult maintaining an American accent? Pearce: It was a hurdle that I didn’t realize existed. I’d been in the States for some time before I started making the film, and had a few weeks in Melbourne for costume fittings and the like. Talking to the production crew it suddenly dawned on me that this American accent that I was going to do was going to be this lone little figure hanging out there without a lot of support, whereas when I’m in Connecticut or Austin, TX, I’m surrounded by it. I swim in the musicality of those accents. I almost needed to say to the crew, “Do me a favor and try not to talk to me too much in between takes.” But once we started filming on set I found myself in this bubble with Bailee and Katie and Troy, who’s Canadian but whose accent has a general cadence and shape that’s more American than Australian. Accents are such tenuous things.

P earce and K atie H olmes as A lex and K im

Del Toro: They do in the original, too. I think it depends on the movie. In a movie like The Orphanage, you try not to show anything. But this movie becomes a battlefield—at some point you have to see the enemy soldiers.

Cineaste: Besides Ravenous (1998) there aren’t, as you mentioned, a lot of these types of films on your resume. Do you like horror movies?

Cineaste: That said, visually it’s one of the darkest films I’ve seen recently. Del Toro: That comes from the title, of course. All of the films that I’ve produced or directed are based on a strong layer of black. They’re that way shamelessly, so things can emerge from them.

Pearce: When I was younger the Halloween and Evil Dead and Freddy films really drew me into their worlds. I’m just not as interested now, so it was a bit of a surprise to me that I chose to do this film. But I liked the domestic story within this one as well. So horror films aren’t really my genre, but whenever friends are watching one and I’m there I still find myself engaged and taken.

Cineaste: The house in the film looks like your own “Bleak House,” your self-described “man cave” where you keep your personal trove of fantasy-related material.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is distributed by FilmDistrict, www.filmdistrict.com.

Del Toro: I’ve heard that, but I must say that it was conceived entirely to Troy’s specifications. It all comes down to a similar creepy esthetic. Troy is an incredible graphic artist, and his short film, Latchkey’s Lament (2007) is so powerful. He knows

rather rough

de sign e d by c h r i s c ru z

a fellow

Time Warner Home Video has also released, on DVD, Never Apologize (2007). The engaging film is drawn from McDowell’s one-man stage show, in which he reminiscences about Anderson, his friend and mentor, and reads from his letters (a so-called “apology” to Alan Bates, whom Anderson had slighted at a party, is a highlight). The film is directed by Mike Kaplan, who, full circle, met McDowell during the Clockwork Orange shoot and produced Anderson’s last theatrical feature, The Whales of August (1987). The show also gives McDowell, who good-naturedly tweaks Kaplan repeatedly in O Lucky Malcolm!, the opportunity to crack wise about the famous folk in their orbit. Reporting for duty on Caligula (1979), Alex’s most notorious side effect on McDowell’s career, he encountered costar John Gielgud, who, by way of introduction, said, “I’ve never seen so much cock in all my life!” Rarely at a loss for words, given so much material to work with, McDowell recently spoke with Cineaste in New York.—Robert Cashill

Cineaste: When you made A Clockwork Orange, did you realize you were making a film that would have such continuing impact? Malcolm McDowell: I’d like to call myself a prophet but I don’t think anyone, least of all the people who made it, including Stanley, had any idea that it would become so iconic. It’s taken all of us by surprise, including its distributor, Warner Bros.—it’s become a movie that kids find, and have to have. They go to college and, boom, up on the walls go the poster, with Alex’s face. Cineaste: What do you think they get out of it? McDowell: That’s changed over time. What they get out of it is the political side of the movie, not the violence, and the look of it, which everyone copied. Look at all the videos, with the guys wearing bowler hats and the white backgrounds, there’s always someone ripping it off…well, that’s not the right term, it’s influenced a lot of people. And a lot of social behavior, from punk rock to groups named the Korovas and Heaven 17. Not to mention the generations of filmmakers it’s inspired. Cineaste: The impression you tend to get of Kubrick is as a taskmaster and martinet, but the production shots used in the disc supplements suggest a lot of waiting around for inspiration to strike.

interview

McDowell: It was unique, and I’d say that only a director with the confidence of Kubrick could wait. He would wait until something came, until there was something there to shoot, that he loved. You’d present certain things to him, some he liked and some he didn’t, and that was it, really. I must say that the ones he liked I generally agreed with, and the ones he threw out I almost agreed with in every single case. Cineaste: You act the final scene so amusingly, when Alex is being spoon-fed. It’s beyond a simple eating scene, you open your mouth so outrageously at one point… McDowell: That one gesture is the one that’s remembered. The minister is basically wrapping up the movie, and giving us all this stuff that we need to know. How could we deliver this, and still keep the movie watchable and fun? I could see Kubrick thinking, “Oh, this is long,” and thinking about cutting it. So I just threw that one in. And it happened to be the perfect gesture; it made the actor hurry up and feed me while he’s still talking away. It became a treat to watch. Cineaste: Coincidentally, after I watched the disc I went back to the TV and there you were, as a high-school principal in the movie Easy A (2010). The idea of either Mick or Alex as a high-school principal later in life was very funny. Did the filmmakers cast you for those associations? McDowell: It is funny to think that but, no, Will Gluck, the director, lives in my hometown and I think he was embarrassed to pitch me in the coffee shop. We had the same agent at the time and I went and did it just because of that.

M c D owell and L indsay A nderson Cineaste: In terms of how A Clockwork Orange might have affected you, it brings to mind an anecdote from Never Apologize. In 1984 Lindsay Anderson approaches you to star in an Off Broadway production of David Storey’s play In Celebration, which he had previously directed with Alan Bates. You’re talking about the qualities of actors, and mention that Bates has a lot of charm. You ask Anderson what quality you might bring to the role, and he says, “You’re a rather

rough fellow.” “No charm?,” you say. “No.” Did a perceived lack of charm influence the direction of your career? McDowell: No. I mean if you’re lining me up “and he says, “You’re a rather with Alan Bates you’d have to say that Alan Bates rough fellow.” “No charm?,” you was way more charming, because he was. I worked say. “No.” Did a perceived lack of with him a few times and it was always such fun, as charm influence the direction he had tremendous ego, but in a lovely way. He used of your career?” to look at himself in the mirror for hours. I’d say, “What are you looking at? What is so fascinating?” And he’d say, “Don’t you find this face of mine rather beautiful?” “Well, yeah, it’s alright, but for an hour?,” I’d respond. And we’d laugh. I don’t know anyone who knew Alan who didn’t love him.

I had seen Alan in the play fifteen years earlier and he was amazing, as was Brian Cox. I was intimidated about even trying it, and about doing it justice. Then I remembered that the play was the thing and that it was stronger than my insecurity. What Lindsay was saying was, “You could bring danger to it.” It wasn’t charm that I brought to that particular production.

{top} A Clockwork Orange

Cineaste: With Alan Bates… McDowell: With Alan Bates! There you go. Certainly a way better movie than ours. Some you win, some you don’t.

F ilming L ocally , T hinking G lobally : T he S earch for R oots in C ontemporary T hai C inema by K ong R ithdee

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives It was an odyssey, a long, seafaring voyage through international oceans, islands of worries, local uncertainty, the lure of sirens, nostalgic soul-searching, Technicolored dreams, infernal nationalism, fists and elbows—through fears and doubts and hopes and optimism. In the opening decade of the twenty-first century, Thai cinema traveled the Earth in search of itself. It has found, in a sense, what it once lost, and yet, with the wobbly march of a rural ingénue set free in the global showground, the search blissfully continues. When Apichatpong Weerasethakul defied the Croisette odds, thanked all the ghosts, and teased Tim Burton on that May night he rose like the darkest horse to win the Palme d’Or, the decade of insecurity seemed vindicated. The history of cinema now embraced Thailand. Welcome to the club, says the world, or at least the Western world. Fittingly, it was on the same stage, Cannes, nine years prior, at the dawn of the new millennium, that a barnyard Siamese cowboy, half-drunk on eighty-proof moonshine and manic possibilities, surged from obscurity to grab the world by its balls. In 2001, Fah Talai Jone (Tears of the Black Tiger) announced the arrival of contemporary Thai cinema and ambushed unsuspecting observers with its mad cocktail of nostalgia and anachronism. That film by Wisit Sasanatieng set up one half of the parentheses that was completed by Apichatpong’s Loong Boonmee Raluek Chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) in 2010. A lot happened between them, and then beyond. On the surface, the two films hardly share a trait, let alone a cinematic ideology—one is a gleefully lurid pastiche, the other a metaphysical pondering in sober hues. On a closer look, however, both films are grounded in something shared by a number of Thai filmmakers of the past decade: a collective subconscious, which attempted to retrieve and redefine the identity of Siamese cinema through both the lenses of local film history and newfound influences of the globalized epoch, through the legacy of our hazy past and the pressing, tangible present. Shot to fame at an international arena like Cannes, both films were actually an attempt to find and bring Thai cinema home. Take a recent exhibit. The film series “Blissfully Thai,”1 put together by the Asia Society in New York this past May-June, in which eight films made after 2000 were screened, including Uncle Boonmee and Tears of the Black Tiger, captured that spirit and hinted at the running threads shared by directors who are seemingly disparate in purpose and temperament. Also showing

expository

in that program were Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Monrak Transistor (2001) and Ploy (2007), Mingmongkol Sonakul’s Isan Special (2002), Yongyoot Thongkongtoon’s The Iron Ladies (2000), Aditya Assarat’s Hi-so (2010), and Apichatpong’s 2002 film Blissfully Yours. Not that these titles by mavericks and young auteurs represent the vast ovum of contemporary Thai cinema that has also spawned trashy horror flicks, arm-flapping transsexual curios, repetitive action sagas, and chest-thumping nationalist epics—we’ll get to them later. But for those eight films (and many more) that began traveling the world since the last year of the 1990s, they put forth the image of “Thai cinema” as international observers perceive us. In the process, they also represent the effort to locate Thai cinema as part of a shifting global esthetic, as part of Asian film culture, and, most importantly, as a fixture in the domestic consciousness that has been groomed to regard movies as mere amusement that merits no cultural scrutiny.

Y ongyoot T hongkongtoon ’ s T he I ron L adies R erooting Before directing Tears of the Black Tiger, Wisit Sasanatieng wrote the scripts for two films that resuscitated the near flatline of his homegrown cinema. For his friend Nonzee Nimibutr, in 1997 Wisit wrote the retro-fitted Daeng Bireley and Young Gangsters, a hoodlum escapade set in 1956; then in 1999 he rerooted the oldest Thai ghost yarn from the mid-century and gave Nang Nak a nostalgic push that endeared contemporary viewers. It worked beyond their expectations—Daeng Bireley was a major hit, and Nang Nak shot to all-time-high box-office earnings (to be broken later) and spent years touring the festival circuit. The two films succeeded in reconnecting the audience—among them the new middle class who had for a while displayed a deep-seated mistrust for inane local productions—to the visual adaptation of familiar narratives and made cinema matter again among Thais. But while Nonzee’s image of vintage Thailand is a straightforward re-creation of lulling canals, lovelorn banshees, and the elegantly lost past, Wisit’s own plan of rerooting went far beyond postcard realism and into metacinematic exploits. Channeling his fetishistic passion for old Technicolored films, he went prepop and posteverything in his directorial debut that rocked Cannes yet tanked disastrously at home. Tears of the Black Tiger reaches back into the treasure trove of Siamese-cinema antics and flaunts its artificiality like a badge of honor. It’s not an exhibition of nostalgia; it is a cosmology of Thai film history rebooted and retooled with a good mix of love, care, and

lunacy. When that dementedly colorful film flopped at home yet thrilled (or bewildered) critics worldwide, earning selective releases in many territories—this was the early 2000s when Asian films were making an onslaught on the world stage—the long and giddy search for the identity, or identities, of contemporary Thai cinema, kick-started by the two Nonzee films Wisit previously wrote, became the silent discourse among upcoming Thai directors at the turn of the century. Apichatpong made his Mysterious Object At Noon in 2000, followed by Blissfully Yours in 2002. Both movies, especially the first, drew on the reservoir of old-fashioned storytelling tradition unique to Thai melodrama—radio plays, rural performances, oral tales—as well as the formalism of Western experimental filmmaking. The filmmaker’s fusion of Third-World surrealism, Siamese candor, and sci-fi/spiritual contemplation would later launch an ongoing debate on the meaning of “Thainess” in the globalized period when those themes reincarnated in different forms in his subsequent Tropical Malady, Syndromes and a Century, and Uncle Boonmee. At around the same time, Pen-ek Ratanaruang surveyed the wreckage of Thai genre films left smoldering after the gloom of the 1990s, and cooked up the cheerfully cynical Fun Bar Karaoke (1997) and 6ixtynin9 (1999). But it was Monrak Transistor, which was screened at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2002 and partly inspired by an old Thai musical film from the 1960s, that contributed to the collective search for our lost Eden.

P en - ek R atanaruang ’ s L ast L ife in the U niverse The New York-educated Pen-ek half-joked on several occasions that with Monrak Transistor he was remaking Woody Allen’s Radio Days in upcountry Thailand. Sure, we got the joke: here’s a very Thai narrative told with Thai wit (and beautiful Thai songs), yet it has this dash of style that’s not quite culture-specific. The most startling thing about the film, which recounts the misfortune of a poor country singer, is that we can’t pinpoint in which period the story is set; it looks like now, but it might just as well be twenty or fifty years ago. This timelessness, this casual defiance of being detained by the exactness of history and moment, makes the film a precious memento of the past—like the transistor radio in the title—and also a shining relic of the present. Later on, Pen-ek would take his local wit and Thai in-jokes on an international expedition in Last Life In the Universe (2004) and Invisible Waves (2006), both starring Japanese characters lost in the Thai labyrinths, before the filmmaker found the home-court advantage again in Ploy (2007) and Nymph (2009). He had branched out, but it’s the root that he has always been looking for. This search for roots is not a conscious labor to return to the established, or “official,” culture—such effort belongs to the Thai Culture Ministry, a reliable source of laughter and bewilderment. Rather, it’s an expedition of young men and women who’ve rummaged through the old boxes in the corner of the attic to find what’s still useful for their new ventures. And these boxes have yielded a disparate content. Aditya Assarat, a Thai who grew up in the U.S., is well known for his post-tsunami ode Wonderful Town (and his new, semiautobiographical Hi-So), but it was his two short films in the early 2000s that represented his homecoming rite. Motorcycle (2000) is set in a poor rural village—an environment very remote from the director’s city life—and the mournful

narrative involves a farmer who receives the news of the death of his son. In Waiting (2003), Aditya tells the story of a country man who travels to the village of his old lover. This near-literal attempt to reconnect with “Thailand”—and not just “Bangkok”—is also manifest in Isan Special, a 2002 film about an eventful bus trip to the poor Northeast by Mingmongkol Sonakul, who also spent years studying filmmaking in the U.S.

U ruphong R aksasat ’ s A grarian U topia Yet some filmmakers have never left home. Without having to make a detour across the continents, Uruphong Raksasat seems to have carried his roots around in his pocket, and his brand of pastoral cinema is a synthesis of family history and neoclassical penchant. Uruphong’s series of short films in the mid-2000s all took place in the bucolic farmland of his northern hometown, culminating in the startling Agrarian Utopia (2009), a nonfiction feature that distils the fifty years of our failed economic development into two hours of the bliss and agony of the farming existence. Told through two families of rice growers—rice, Uruphong reminds us, is the ancient monument of Southeast Asian glory much taken for granted by Southeast Asians themselves—the film is bracketed by noisy political protests that offer a bitter critique of the society without appearing supercilious. Movies about farmers basically disappeared from Thai screens around the late 1970s; what Uruphong did, and is still doing, is fighting for a fair share of screen time for the country’s most important profession. His farmers aren’t the stuff of nostalgia, and he dusted them off from the attic not because they’re old, but because it’s almost a crime for contemporary Thai cinema to have forgotten them for so long.

L ove T hy N ation While the films mentioned above went around the world, the narrative at home carried the whiff of a parallel universe. With the international acknowledgement of Thai filmmakers such as Apichatpong, Pen-ek, Wisit, and Uruphong came another discourse, one that continues not so silently today. Following the flop of Tears of the Black Tiger and other auteur films of that period, the complaint was that new Thai filmmakers were making movies for foreign audiences and bypassing the taste and preferences of the locals. If we look at the eight films shown at the Asia Society, for instance, only The Iron Ladies made serious money. Even Pen-ek’s Monrak Transistor, which carried a commercial flavor, was a disappointment at the Bangkok box office. Uruphong’s Agrarian Utopia, despite support from the local cultural agency, had to wait over a year to get a release on one screen. Likewise with Aditya’s Wonderful Town and Hi-So, all of Apitchatpong’s films, as well as Anocha Suwichakornpong’s multiple award-winning Mundane History—they exist on the periphery of the mainstream money-making machine.

Trying to find the long road home, those films found the home padlocked (granted, the decadelong ignorance was slightly improved after Apichatpong’s big win at Cannes last year). In general, the mainstream Thai film scene was enlivened by the popularity of Nonzee’s Nang Nak, which proved that a Thai film could still court Thai audiences, and also by Yongyoot’s The Iron Ladies, which proved that a blatantly commercial endeavor could pay off handsomely. While the mavericks were busy rerooting, the skillful workmen of the multiplex venues found their own way to bring Thai films into the local consciousness and to spin the wheel of the industry. In the past decade, Thai movies have exploited recurring formulas in slapstick comedy starring TV comedians, ghost stories that rode on the wave of Asian horror, and, with the arrival of Ong-Bak and Tony Jaa in 2001, a series of fist-and-elbow action showcases that rely on the sweaty exoticism of Third-World hard men. Of the more notable names, directors such as Yuthlert Sippapak wired those elements with a touch of cynicism; Pakpoom Wongpoom and Banjong Pisanthanakul made Thai horror films like Shutter that became global hits; Prachaya Pinkaew transformed cheap kick-boxing flicks into lucrative exports; and Poj Anont, unheard of elsewhere, has built a cultlike following around his brand of gay comedy, trashy ghost yarns, and gay/ghost camp hybridity that’s as uniquely Thai as Apichatpong’s reincarnated monkey ghost.

N ational and historical epic T he L egend of S uriyothai by C hatrichalerm Y ukol

expository

{top} Yongyoot Thongkongtoon’s The Iron Ladies Rerooting {left} Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe

d esi gn ed by ch ris cruz

Sitting above all of this merry-go-round is something else entirely. The rerooting took on a literal approach and the reconnection with the (imagined?) glorious past received a nationalistic treatment in a series of historical epics. At times they seemed more than just movies; they were like national projects, funded largely by tax money. As of last year, the three highest-grossing Thai films of all time are historical epics made by Prince Chatrichalerm Yukol—Suriyothai in 2001, Legend of King Naresuan Part 1 and Part 2 in 2007, and, after a long delay, Part 3, which was released this April (Part 4 and 5 are coming soon!). Suriyothai came out the same year as Monrak Transistor and Tears of the Black Tiger, and a year after Mysterious Object at Noon. And while Pen-ek, Wisit, and Apichatpong seemed to be searching for the home of Thai cinema at a metaphysical or contextual level, Prince Chatrichalerm, a respected figure, straightened that idea out, mobilized a troop of war elephants around it, and plastered it with the gold leaves of sixteenth-century palaces while the Burmese army, our perennial cinematic villain, stood watching (or smirking). While Uruphong sang the song of rice in Agrarian Utopia, the royal director erected a monument of official history populated by a kingly presence and dashing court warriors. Upon its release, Suriyothai was a phenomenon unseen before by Thai cinemagoers: it was huge in every respect, and, seriously, its record $17-million gross is unlikely to be broken in my lifetime. In the covert contest to define “Thainess,” this traditional interpretation easily won. Interestingly, however, while there was a clear attempt by the authorities to promote this image of Thai cinema at the international level, Suriyothai and the King Naresuan films were hardly seen outside the country. In 2001, after the film was released, Francis Ford Coppola, an old friend of Prince Chatricharlerm

â&#x20AC;&#x153; P o j A non t , u n h ear d of e l se w h ere , h as b u i l t a c u l t l i k e fo l l o w in g aro u n d h is b ran d of g a y co m e d y , t ras h y g h os t y arns , an d g a y / g h os t ca m p h y b ri d i t y â&#x20AC;? 15

from their college years, came to Bangkok and reedited Suriyothai for a U.S. release. Still, these historical monuments seem understudied by critics in their discussion of New Thai Cinema, despite the fact that these expensively-made quasipropaganda and “official” cultural artifacts occupy a prominent place in the local consciousness and reflect, to an extent, the political climate in Thailand during the past decade. Pairing Suriyothai with Monrak Transistor, or King Naresuan 1 and 2 with Agrarian Utopia or Ong-Bak, we can glimpse the inner dialog that courses through contemporary Siamese cinema, probably the same way that Tears of the Black Tiger and Uncle Boonmee constituted the parentheses and outlined the scope of Thai movies of the past ten years. Like the study of other national cinemas, the topography of Thailand and its cinematic representation—esthetically, anthropologically, and politically—doesn’t yield a neatly-wrapped conclusion. The question of “Thainess” is as intriguing as it is futile, and as tempting as it is unnecessary, especially when filmmakers like Apichatpong, Pen-ek, and Uruphong are testing so many real and imaginary borders of cinema that transcend nationality, when they’re not making films just for Thai people, but for anybody who still cares about the possibility of cinema. Uncle Boonmee didn’t mark the end of the odyssey, because the sirens are still calling, because more Naresuan movies are coming out, and because Tony Jaa is shooting a new ass-kicking blockbuster with the aim to conquer the world. Is the rerooting finished? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it never will be. For further information on the Asia Society “Blissfully Thai” film series, including videos of talks with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mingmongkol Sonakul, and Pen-ek Ratanaruang, visit the Asia Society Website at http://asiasociety.org/blissfullythai.

D istribution S ources : Wonderful Town and Nang Nak are distributed by Kino International, www.kino.com. Ong-Bak, Tears of the Black Tiger and The Legend of King Naresuan, Parts 1 and 2 (retitled Kingdom of War, Parts 1 and 2) are distributed by Magnolia Pictures, www.magpictures.com. Isan Special is available from www.objectifsfilms.com. Last Life in the Universe and 6ixty9 are distributed by Palm Pictures, www.palmpictures.com. Mysterious Object at Noon is distributed by Plexifilm, www. plexifilm.com. Blissfully Yours, The Iron Ladies, Syndromes and a Century, Tropical Malady, and Uncle Boonmee are distributed by Strand Releasing, www.strandreleasing.com. An

expository / review

abbreviated version of Suriyothai (retitled The Legend of Surioythai) is distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, www.sonypictures.com. Kong Rithdee writes for The Bangkok Post, Thailand’s leading English-language newspaper, and also directs documentary films. Copyright © 2011 by Cineaste Publishers, Inc. Cineaste,Vol.XXXVI No.4 2011

Sex

The Price of by Dennis West and Joan M. West

Written, Directed and Produced by Mimi Chakarova Edited by Stephanie Challberg; Photographed by Adam Keker;Music by Christopher Hedge; Executive Produced by Stephen Talbot; supported by the Center for Investigative Reporting. Color, 72 min. priceofsex.org.

The Price of Sex presents portraits of Eastern bloc women, ensnared in the post-Soviet sex trade

In her moving and informative The Price of Sex, Mimi Chakarova picks up with documentary force where The Whistleblower leaves off. Chakarova is an award winning investigative photojournalist and a skilled still photographer. Born in Bulgaria into modest socioeconomic circumstances, shortly after the fall of Communism in 1989 she immigrated (age 13) to the United States with some of her family. Visiting her small rural hometown two years later, she was surprised to learn that many of her childhood playmates were no longer there—they had disappeared into thin air. Where had they gone? Seeking an answer to this question over the years brought her to a brutally distressing understanding: many Bulgarian and other Eastern European women of her generation and the following had fallen prey to international sex traffickers. So in 2003 Chakarova

embarked on an ambitious photo-reportage project that would shed light on the dirty open secret of sex slavery and endeavor especially to break the silence and shamed anonymity that surround the few women who manage to escape their captivity and return home. Her website (www.priceofsex.org) reveals just how her investigations and photographic skills culminated in this documentary feature after she had previously completed several other mixed media, educational videos and other artistic projects dealing with this urgent topic. Chakarova’s own origins undoubtedly led her to focus on women trafficked internationally from Eastern Europe. Four appear in The Price of Sex; and their spoken narratives, along with Chakarova’s own personally committed investigative journey, form the film’s basic structure. Many visits and hours of conversation were required on the filmmaker’s part to gain the trust of these victims to the point that they would agree to speak on camera about such intimately personal and often humiliating matters. Their riveting accounts implicate deceptive recruiters, greedy pimps and madams, and corrupt police and officials. The specific information revealed concerns the ages and numbers of clients; why and how trafficked women are repeatedly sold; the primitive living conditions of such sex workers; the fabricated debt foisted onto captive victims to pay their keep and “earn their freedom;” deportation; and health issues involving birth control, pregnancy, and AIDS. These disturbing accounts serve doubly: we come to regard the women as individual human beings struggling

Much screen time is devoted to Chakarova’s on-site investigative journey in the source countries Bulgaria and Moldova, as well as the destination countries Greece, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. In the source nations, the filmmaker encounters depopulated, shabby, down-and-out towns; amidst the geese and goats in the lonely countryside occasional elderly residents do appear—and one or two do not hesitate to flaunt their hard-hearted lack of interest in just where so many of their country’s young people have gone. In Moldova’s capital, a clearing house for exporting women, Chakarova visits a hard working NGO, La Strada, dedicated to assisting the victims of trafficking. The director of this organization succinctly and precisely spells out the deep-rooted socioeconomic causes of the trafficking phenomenon in her country: the huge gap between rich and poor, high levels of corruption, and unequal access to justice. The director convincingly contends that while the work of La Strada does at least temporarily aid many victims in Moldova, trafficking will nevertheless persist unless these root causes are addressed. A particularly dramatic aspect of The Price of Sex is Chakarova’s personal journey into the destination countries, where most officials, victims, and traffickers are unwilling to speak on camera and where in many places the camera’s presence is strictly forbidden. Before leaving, we see the filmmaker/protagonist—just as in many commercial fiction features involving a dangerous trip—preparing herself both psychologically (the conversations with a friend retired from the FBI) and physically (the work-outs in the boxing ring). Then, on location in Istanbul, Athens, and Dubai, we follow the extraordinary efforts the committed Chakarova dangerously undertakes in order to converse meaningfully with the worst of the worst amongst the traffickers themselves, or to go undercover as an apparent prostitute herself and use a hidden camera to record actuality footage in the shady milieus where trafficking and savage capitalism in general flourish, where one AK-47, one kilo of cocaine, and one Moldovan girl are all the same: commodities to be bought and sold.

C hasing M adoff By Maria Garcia Produced by Jeff Prosserman, Jeff Sackman, Randy Manis and Anton Nadler; directed and written by Jeff Prosserman; cinematography by Julian Van Mil; art direction by Harrison Yurkiw; edited by Jeff Bessner; music by David Fleury. Color, 91 min. A Cohen Media Group release, http://cohenmedia.net.

Chasing Madoff allows Harry Markopolos, a wouldbe whistleblower, to do what he does best, which is talk about his decade-long effort to expose the Bernie Madoff investment scandal. Markopolos began his investigation in 1999, after his boss, Frank Casey, asked him to design a financial instrument that would match Madoff ’s double-digit returns. At the time, Casey was chasing Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet’s billions, and the Frenchman told him about the profits he was realizing through his investments with Madoff. Markopolos ran Madoff ’s numbers and immediately suspected fraud. It’s a story the financial analyst turned investigator also recounts in his best-seller, “No One Would Listen.”

Peruse the La Strada website (lastradainternational.org), which reveals, for instance, that “In Bosnia and Herzegovina, there are signs that trafficking has increased and is shifting. There is a great deal of internal trafficking, and trafficking into BiH of foreign women from high risk countries (Ukraine, Moldova, Romania) has increased, and international sex trafficking persists as a serious problem in Eastern Europe.” And see Chakarova’s well crafted The Price of Sex for yourself in order to learn more about these repugnant criminal activities as well as the unsettling outcome of the documentarian’s risky infiltration of notoriously off-limits enclaves, such as Istanbul’s Aksaray red-light district. Dennis West is a Contributing Editor at Cineaste and Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho. Joan M. West is a Professor Emerita (University of Idaho).

review

Mimi Chakarova’s The Price of Sex

The Securities and Exchange Commission ignored Markopolos, a pistol-packing patriot who says in Chasing Madoff that he conducted his independent investigation on behalf of his country. The gun was to protect him from the Russian mob and other international criminals he believed were Madoff customers and accomplices. To his credit, Markopolos also admits, with a modicum of conviction, that he was not successful in bringing down Madoff, and does not deserve much of the praise he has received. Apparently, firsttime filmmaker Jeff Prosserman, who compares Markopolos to Eliot Ness—and, rather enigmatically, the 2008 unveiling of the Ponzi scheme to the 1929 stock market crash— thinks just the opposite. In fact, where the audience might view Markopolos’s story as nothing new and something of a snore, Prosserman introduces it with canned music typical of a Hollywood thriller. Journalism is kept to a minimum, the writer-director remaining as befuddled as Markopolos about why the SEC failed to examine Madoff ’s investments years earlier, when they were provided with considerable evidence of fraud. An agency employee who appears in the documentary admits that the SEC regulators were at fault, yet Prosserman does not push him to explain their inaction. Footage of a congressional committee hearing into the Madoff affair is similarly dissatisfying. SEC executives are seen testifying, but Prosserman does not include any substantial part of their responses; instead, we repeatedly see an outraged congressman badgering the witnesses. Actually, that sequence sums up Prosserman’s aim in the documentary, which is to stir emotion rather than probe the facts. His profile of Markopolos sticks with the analyst’s bizzarre paranoia, and never discusses the information that was contained in the reports Markopolos prepared for the SEC. Prosserman lines up his talking heads and moves the camera screen left or right, stopping on the one who will speak next. (Think interactive Web page design or scroll and click.) For visual relief, there is the recurring and cheesy graphic of blood dripping on a call slip, which opens the documentary and remains unexplained until the end. It is the filmmaker’s vision of Villehuchet’s suicide, which occurred two weeks after Madoff ’s arrest. The call slip represents the phony ones Madoff sent to his customers. A chart that looks like an exploding firework depicts the “feeder funds” not clearly defined in the documentary. These were investment firms and banks that were paid higher than average fees by Madoff to deliver the steady stream of customers required to sustain a Ponzi scheme. Other ubiquitous images are of a bonfire, a matchbook being ignited, and paper money falling from the sky, their incoherence marked by percussive musical punctuation.

appalling score in which anonymous victims of Madoff ’s Ponzi scheme lament to soaring violin accompaniment. In the end, Chasing Madoff is about a whistleblower who did not succeed, yet made money by writing a book. The people on whose behalf Markopolos professes to have acted are Madoff ’s unfortunate clients, mostly rich institutional and private investors who consistently earned above-market returns and then claimed exorbitant losses. Rounding out the documentary’s interviewees are know-it-all buddies of Markopolos, fellow Wall Street types who dubbed themselves “the foxhounds.” It is a problematic cast of characters for average American viewers who, if they have any portfolio at all, invest modestly, hoping for a return consistent with the market. No sympathy there. Markopolos claims he untangled the Gordian knot that held together Madoff ’s financial empire in “five minutes,” and detailed these findings in his multiple reports to the SEC. Chasing Madoff takes ninety-one minutes and delivers nothing more than what it hopes to pass off as the story of an unsung, working-class hero. Maria Garcia is a New York City-based writer. Copyright © 2011 by Cineaste Magazine. Cineaste,Vol.XXXVI No.4 2011

In the mind-numbing style of infomercials, everyone in Chasing Madoff says nearly everything twice, and Casey continually parrots Markopolos. Similarly, reenactments immediately follow events described by the fraud investigator. Repetition can serve many artistic purposes in documentary filmmaking, as it did in Errol Morris’s Thin Blue Line, in which testimony is reenacted to prove a false conviction, but in Chasing Madoff it is a cover for the film’s lack of content. Prosserman continually underlines innocuous facts or remarks with a “link” or a diversion, rather than a “cut,” a cinematic ellipsis followed by a meaningful transition. For instance, Casey says Markopolos told him that if Madoff were a baseball player, he’d be hitting .984. Prosserman, who worked in interactive media before making a documentary, immediately cuts to a clip of Ted Williams at bat. Williams has held the record for the highest batting average in a single season for seventy years. In cinematic terms, the juxtapositioning of the remark and the image sets up a comparison between Williams and Madoff—but not in digital terms where “batting average” would be underlined in, say, a Wikipedia article, providing a link to its definition. The intent of Markopolos’s remark was to posit a ridiculous number—Williams’ record is .406—highlighting the improbable return on investment Madoff provided. Instead, Prosserman uses it to point out singularity. This intellectual sloppiness and amateur filmmaking are exacerbated by an

F ilm P reservation : A C ritical S ymposium A large part of each issue of Cineaste is devoted to coverage of films from throughout the history of cinema. That the films under discussion can be seen and studied is something that many people take for granted. As increasing numbers of films are released on DVD, however, the misapprehension grows that most significant films of the past are accessible. While those seriously engaged in film culture are aware that vast numbers of films remain unavailable on home video, even such specialists harbor the illusion that these films are simply waiting to be transferred to DVD or scanned for digital streaming. The sad truth is that countless numbers of films have been irremediably lost. It is estimated that as many as seventy to ninety percent of films made during the silent period no longer exist. As for noncommercial and nonnarrative filmmaking (e.g., home movies, avant-garde cinema, industrial, educational, scientific, and medical films), it’s safe to say that a similar percentage of these sound-era works has vanished. While the ever-increasing number of films released on DVD has been an indisputably positive phenomenon, with movies appearing from throughout film history, from around the world, and even from previously neglected realms of films production (thanks to initiatives like Kino’s Classic Educational Shorts” DVDs and the National Films Preservation Foundation’s ambitious series of treasures from American Film Archives” box sets), the continual evolution of digital formats and their proven instability means that even works released on DVD are not entirely safe from the threat of loss. The Critical Symposium on Film Preservation in this issue highlights the institutions and individuals who struggle to save artistically, historically, and culturally significant cinematic works from the ravages of time and neglect. We’re all used to seeing films identified or marketed as “preserved” or “restored,” but few of us probably spend much time considering exactly what this means in terms of the processes by which films are brought back from the brink of deterioration or even extinction. Even most cinema scholars and hard-core buffs are unaware of the particular challenges and ethical quandaries confronting the professionals responsibly for this work. Our critical Symposium is therefore designed to shed some much-needed light on this crucial realm of film culture. From it’s inception, the cinema has been haunted by the specter of decay, and even self-destruction, for decades, films were printed on nitrate stock, which was notorious for its extreme flammability—prints exposed to excessive heat would simply burst into flame, sometimes during projection—and which proved to decompose quickly when stored in –less-than-ideal circumstances. In the 1950s, a transition was effected from nitrate to acetate stocks, which were far more stable and safer than the earlier prints, but were subject to their own forms of decay, such as a color fading, melting, and breakage. Counterbalancing this potential for disintegration is the capacity to copy film prints many times over. For most Hollywood production, for instance, hundreds, and even thousands of prints were produced for distribution throughout the world Few of those prints, however were saved once a film’s initial released had run its course. Outside of the commercial realm, the story is very different. When it comes to home-movie and avant-garde filmmaking, most of those films were shot on 8mm or 16mm reversal stocks, which result not in a negative, but in a single, not-easily-reproducible print. These films are thus unique, and hence closer to the status of paintings are sculptures than to that of a photograph or film. Furthermore, with the medium today in the throes of a transition from celluloid film prints to digital media, the cost of striking prints has risen so dramatically that the likelihood of films being reproduced photochemically (i.e., in their original, celluloid format) remains more a theoretical possibility than a practical option. The digital revolution is a central theme of our Critical Symposium. Its impact in the realm of film preservation is complicated and multidimensional. While our contributors almost unanimously agree that digital media are not yet capable of replacing celluloid as a preservation format (since they cannot begin to compete with a film print’s ability, under proper storage conditions, to resist deterioration for more than a century), they also concur that digital techniques have made possible previously unimaginable methods of restoration. On the other had, these methods are prohibitively expensive. Perhaps the most significant role played by the digital evolution in films preservation is as an invaluable tool for providing access. After all, as the Critical Symposium respondents take pains to emphasize, preservation is rendered virtually meaningless if the films cannot be seen, by scholars at the very least, and ideally by the public at large. As a tool for access, digital video is doubly beneficial—not only does it allow for far wider distribution than possible with film prints, it also allows movies to be seen without risking damage to the original films materials. While most preservationists share (and are to some extent motivated by) a conviction that films should ideally be seen as originally intended, they are also deeply aware of the extent to which film history—just like other kinds of history—is determined by which films (or texts or artifacts) survive to be experienced, studied, and integrated into contemporary culture. The mission to preserve films, in other words, is not a matter of safeguarding obsolete relics, but an activity that depends our understanding of the past in order to enrich our present-day culture. —The Editors

THANK YOU FOR READING.