Moving Pictures

Music Making

SHIRLEY CLARKE’S ORNETTE COLEMAN DOCUMENTARY IS AS DARING AND EXPERIMENTAL AS ITS SUBJECT

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

Everything about the documentary Ornette: Made in America is fringe-y: Jazz legend Ornette Coleman always pushed his music beyond the boundaries of popular music, from his 1959 debut, The Shape of Jazz to Come, and throughout his half-century-long career. Director Shirley Clarke was a pioneer of early American independent cinema, and her best known work is a feature about a drug deal (The Connection, 1964) that minted the found footage film form nearly 40 years before The Blair Witch Project (1999). This documentary itself is unlike any other music bio, but its elliptical, non-linear style and off-beat pacing are a perfect match for Coleman’s unpredictable and expectation-upsetting compositions, performances and recordings.

Clarke’s evocation of Coleman’s childhood in Fort Worth, Texas is one of the most original and striking aspects of the film. The movie opens at a citywide celebration for the opening of the Caravan of Dreams performing arts center in Fort Worth in 1983. Clarke and her crew were on hand to film a mayoral declaration, dubbing September 29, 1983 “Ornette Coleman Day.” It’s a pretty standard documentary device to catch-up with an artist receiving some honor before diving into the backstory of how they arrived in such a celebrated spot. But Clarke also casts young boys to play

Coleman at various ages as a child — their clothes look like they're from the 1940s and they walk down abandoned streets and along railroad tracks near Coleman’s boyhood home. One boy wears a saxophone hanging from his neck. A local bank’s electronic sign announces the film’s title sequence in the amber glow of vintage LED lights.

Clarke mimics the sign’s pixelated messaging, scrolling information across the bottom of the screen throughout the film to set up various scenes and announce locations. It’s a playful touch that echoes Ornette’s open and even childlike approach to music making. Clarke worked on this film on and off for two decades, and one of the movie’s highlights is footage from 1968 that features Coleman playing with his 12-year-old son Denardo and double bass legend Charlie Haden. The trio made their debut with The Empty Foxhole (1966) when Denardo was just 10 years old. Coleman himself played violin and trumpet on the album despite being untrained to play either instrument, and we hear examples of both in the film.

Clarke blends her decades of footage into an elongated montage of Coleman waxing about his life and “harmolodic” music philosophy, street scenes, live music footage, and inventive recreations with her young actors. They’re all tied together with an editing style that varies from rapid-fire cutting, synchronized to Coleman’s boiling-over arrangements to lingering shots that capture everything from the urban doldrums of Fort Worth to the intensities of improvisational musical performance.

Ornette: Made in America includes cameos by weirdo luminaries like William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and R. Buckminster Fuller. Coleman explains that Fuller’s geodesic dome designs are to architecture what his compositions are to music, and he calls Fuller “my best hero.” A Shirley Clarke film is the perfect milieu for a cross-disciplinary meet-up of this mid-century avant garde supergroup, and it’s to her credit that Clarke’s movie starts offbeat and only becomes more challenging and experimental as it unwinds over its 77 minute watch time. Coleman’s music and Clarke’s filmography both serve to remind viewers that the best art will always come from unique individuals with novel messages, delivered through innovative expressions. Ornette: Made in America was Clarke’s last film. She died from a stroke at the age of 77 in 1997.

Ornette: Made in America is streaming on Amazon Prime

Fun and Fright

UMMA BRINGS CHILLS TO A MOTHER-DAUGHTER STORY OF INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

Family trauma and horror films go hand-in-hand. There’s a special kind of terror that can only come from those we’re closest to, and movies from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane to Hereditary have showed us that scary sisters and mean mommies can be the biggest monsters of them all. Umma is a 2022 Sam Raimi-produced supernatural horror film, directed by Iris K. Shim and featuring Sandra Oh, Fivel Stewart and Dermot Mulroney. It’s a film about mothers and daughters, intergenerational trauma, and the forever pains of growing up. Umma is Shim’s debut feature film following her well-received true crime documentary House of Suh (2010). Umma premiered on screen in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood, but then went to digital VOD platforms as theaters were still struggling to attract in-person audiences during the ongoing pandemic this spring. The movie’s arrival on Netflix gives horror fans a second chance to discover its unique blend of fun and fright, its strong central performances from Oh and Stewart, and its unique twists on the evergreen theme of daughters coming to grips with the sins of their mothers.

Korean immigrant Amanda (Sandra Oh) and her daughter Chrissy (Fivel Stewart) live offthe-grid on a small farm where Chrissy is homeschooled. The pair raise chickens and run a thriving bee-keeping business to produce their in-demand honey. Amanda claims to be allergic to electricity so the pair do without computers and cell phones, and negotiate their farmhouse’s nighttime hallways with candles and lanterns. Amanda arrived in America with her mother as a toddler, but after years of emotional and physical abuse she broke-off contact with her family and even dropped her Korean name. She raised Chrissy as a typical American kid, without any Korean traditions or Korean language. At the beginning of the film Amanda is trying to break the cycle of abuse she inherited from her Umma (mother in Korean), but by not resolving her past she only drags her trauma into the future. And when Chrissy starts making plans to leave the farm for college, Amanda shows how irrational, overbearing and cruel she can be.

The supernatural elements of the story start to emerge when Amanda’s uncle unexpectedly arrives at the farm to deliver the news that Umma has died. He berates Amanda for her neglect and for abandoning her family name and traditions. He leaves her with a suitcase containing a traditional Korean gown (hanbok), a burial mask for warding-off evil spirits (tal) and an urn containing Umma’s ashes. Soon after the suitcase arrives Amanda is haunted by visions and voices: tormented ancestor spirits roam the farm; Umma’s voice torments and berates her; ominous bee swarms obscure the farmhouse’s windows; an appearance from a kumiho — an evil spirit in Korean lore that appears as a nine-tailed fox — means bad news for the chickens, but gives us one of the best fox cameos since the one in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist reminded us that “chaos reigns.”

The best aspect of Umma is its fun/scary tone, and its fun/scary take on the notion of becoming one’s own mother. I think the fun/scary tone has found the film in trouble with fans and critics who find the movie not as scary as a movie like Hereditary, but also not as twistedly zany as a Sam Raimi picture. I really enjoyed the balance of the family story with the supernatural elements, and maybe I’m also a bit of a sucker for jump-scares. Umma reminds me of the PG-13 horror trend we saw in the 2010s. It might have made its horror elements as unique as its Korean-American family story, but it’s a solid and entertaining watch that deserves a bigger audience.

Umma is currently streaming on Netflix