Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:30:00 GMT

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind nicely sums up the excitement and frustration of the film festival experience. Inspired by the work of Howard Zinn but outreaching him in poetic resonance, this 58-minute film by John Gianvito is a thrilling, one-of-a-kind picture, and by all rights ought to be the election-year movie of 2008. What's frustrating about it is simply the possibility that it may not be widely seen (though the first three minutes have already made their way to YouTube; watching it can give you a taste of Gianvito's method but little sense of how powerful it is in its total cumulative effect). A noble and beautiful piece of work, it amounts to a chronological history tour of the American progressive tradition, as represented in tributes to the dead: gravestones and death markers for such figures as Crazy Horse, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Eugene V. Debs, Medgar Evers, I. F. Stone, Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, and on and on, as well as those killed in various clashes between striking workers and police. These images are intercut with nature photography, and the effect seems to be to suggest an ongoing, organic connection between some extraordinary lives and the physical environment these people were a part of. Ironically, despite its having been shot in so many graveyards, it gives you a deep, restorative sense of the continuing relevance of the American past. The movie only stumbles when Gianvito gives in to the temptation to make his point explicit with a climactic montage of contemporary political activists in the streets and a few bars of Paul Robeson singing "Joe Hill". The movie doesn't need these visual and aural cliches, and in this context, the sound of Robeson's voice is far less eloquent than the birds chirping and the tree leaves and bushes rustling in the breeze. Among the many striking quotes chisled in stone or set into plaques here, one stands out: the words of the martyred labor activist August Spies, who said, "The day will come when our silence will be more important than the voices you are throttling today." Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind makes you feel that these voices will never really be silent.

An interview with the director is featured here.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Year of the Horse (1997, Jim Jarmusch)

Paul Clark — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

For almost three decades now, Jim Jarmusch has been one of the heroes of American independent cinema. The deadpan humor and multicultural vibe of his best works have influenced directors worldwide, and his maverick sensibility has practically defined the term “independent filmmaker.” While this sensibility hasn’t endeared him to the Hollywood bigwigs (his insistence that he retain the rights to the negatives of all his films would be a dealbreaker for most studios) it’s made him something of a hero to followers of indie-film, because he’s a director who gets away with making whatever he damn pleases.

Jarmusch’s 1995 masterpiece Dead Man marked his first collaboration with legendary rocker Neil Young, of whom Jarmusch was a longtime fan. Young’s mindbending score was divisive- Roger Ebert famously likened the sound to Young dropping his guitar over and over- but the film cemented a friendship between the two artists. So for his next film Jarmusch decided to go on the road with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, with the goal of making the concert film Year of the Horse. It was Jarmusch’s first documentary.

A few weeks ago I spotlighted in this column The Dark Wind, the sole fiction feature from master documentarian Errol Morris. For Jarmusch, Year of the Horse is no less misbegotten. Now, I don’t begrudge filmmakers- least of all gifted, independent-minded ones like Jarmusch- their attempts to break out of their filmmaking comfort zones. However, with Year of the Horse, Jarmusch shows almost no affinity for the documentary form.

In its opening credits, Year of the Horse proclaims that it was “proudly made in Super-8,” and the film is suffused with a lo-fi aesthetic that’s similar to most of Young’s best work. However, in such films as Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Dead Man, Jarmusch’s style is tight and deliberate, with little room for the kinds of accidents that one normally finds in a documentary of this sort. As a result, the film feels less like a charmingly hardscrabble Young work than a sloppy, amateurish mess.

Part of the problem is the music in the film. While I prefer Young’s rootsy albums like Harvest to his Crazy Horse work, the songs in the film are pretty solid. However, their concert performances have a tendency to drag on (and on and on), with lots of onstage improvisation between Young and his bandmates. While jamming can make for a great concert experience, it’s tough to make it interesting to those who aren’t actually in attendance, and Jarmusch never figures out how to make it work. Rather than focusing on the audience’s reaction to the music or really zeroing in on the musical chemistry between the band, Jarmusch too often cuts away from the concert to often random and usually uncompelling images.

Some of these images are merely distracting, as when Jarmusch intercuts footage of clouds or a passing train into the songs. But others are downright puzzling, as when the film cuts away from an onstage performance of “Fuckin’ Up” to show some decades-old footage of Crazy Horse bassist Billy Talbot shoplifting and getting arrested, a hamfisted attempt on Jarmusch’s part to turn the song into a music video, another form he isn’t particularly good at. Either way, the cutaways don’t help. Whereas Jarmusch seems to intend them to add interest to the stage performance, they merely serve to remind us of how the song is dragging on well past its logical end (one number finishes with the band playing the same chord nearly two dozen times). The only time the cutaways actually serve their intended purpose is when Jarmusch juxtaposes the 1996 concert performance of “Like a Hurricane” with footage of the same song taken from their 1986 tour. In this footage, in which Young already looks haggard, Jarmusch comes closest to illustrating the idea of how long Neil Young and Crazy Horse have been in the game.

At several times during the (mostly superfluous) band interviews in Year of the Horse, Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Pancho” Sampedro remarks that Jarmusch will never be able to compress three decades of Crazy Horse history into a documentary. However, based on the evidence on display in the film, two hours seems far too long. I’m sure there were plenty of vivid experiences in the history of the band, but few of them appear to have been “proudly filmed on Super-8.” Seeing as how the most memorable thing that happens offstage in Year of the Horse is a floral centerpiece catching on fire, perhaps Jarmusch would have been better off sticking to the music itself.

But as I said, he’s always marched to his own drummer, and fortunately for his fans his next film was 1999’s fascinating Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, that wonderful one-of-a-kind combination of aging wiseguys and Hagakure-reading lone gunmen. In other words, definitely a step in the right direction. Jarmusch’s next film, The Limits of Control, is currently on track for a 2009 premiere.

The Screengrab : crazy horse

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind"

When Good Directors Go Bad: Year of the Horse (1997, Jim Jarmusch)