Jacob Bricca, Film Editor, Director & Teacher

Precious Knowledge, a documentary I edited about the furor over the Mexican-American Studies program in the Tucson public schools, will screen at the Speilberg Theatre at the Egyptian this coming Friday evening 4/27 at 7:30pm.  I will be there with director Ari Palos and producer Eren McGinnis for the Q&A after the screening. Come join us and see the full-length (75-minute) version ahead of its broadcast premiere on Independent Lens next month!

Jon Stewart ran a great segment on the banning of Tucson High School’s Raza Studies program last night on The Daily Show.  Correspondent Al Madrigal conducted new interviews with school board member Michael Hicks and teacher Curtis Acosta, but nearly all the rest of the footage in the segment is straight from Precious Knowledge, a documentary I edited that will premiere on PBS on May 17.   The NY Times is also running a discussion about the issue on their ‘Opinionator’ blog.

The Destiny Of Lesser Animals (Sibo Ne Kra, Dabo Ne Kra), a narrative feature I co-edited with Lisa Molomot, will screen at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute on March 27, 2012.  Shot on location in Accra, Ghana, Destiny features a breakout performance by its lead actor and co-writer Yao B. Nunoo, and is the directorial debut of filmmaker Deron Albright.  The film showed at Lincoln Center’s New Directors New Films last year, and has also screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival, and the Seattle International Film Festival.

For those of us who grew up watching Woody Harrelson as the lovably boneheaded Woody Boyd on Cheers, there is something irresistible about seeing him so fully embody the tortured characters he’s taken on of late.  That winning smile that once seemed so innocent now hides something menacing and dangerous.  This attraction fully in play, I contemplated spending two hours and twelve bucks to see him as an irredeemably corrupt cop in Rampart.

I then listened to Elvis Mitchell’s interview with Rampart director Oren Moverman on KCRW’s “The Treatment.”  Moverman, who directed Harrelson in 2009’s excellent The Messenger, spoke of his unusual process in creating the film, one in which the script was used only as a loose guide during production and sometimes thrown out altogether.   Harrelson and the rest of the cast were free to improvise, and sometimes came up with new dialogue—even entirely new scenes—on the spot.  Amassing some 100 hours of material, they ended up with a shooting ratio more common to documentaries than to narrative features.

The result could, of course, be a mess.  But it also sounded tantalizingly close to genius. Moverman promised that narrative would take a back seat to character, overwhelming convention and cliché altogether.  Excited by his seemingly experimental approach, I was sold.

Too bad those promises aren’t kept by the finished film.

Rampart is not a disaster, but it’s a long, long way from genius.  It’s a flawed experiment in which narrative is surprisingly, frustratingly intact, and often an albatross that holds the film back from its true potential.

The frequent deviations and omissions from the original script result in a story that is thin.  The plot can be summed up in one sentence: an internal police investigation is uncovering rampant abuse and misconduct in the Los Angeles Police Department, and veteran officer Dave Brown (Harrelson), a bad man getting badder by the day as his paranoia intensifies, keeps getting hauled in to explain himself.  That’s it.  Brown is in trouble with his superiors at the beginning of the story, in deeper trouble in the middle of the story, and in really deep trouble at the end, but since the fine points of the plot have been scrubbed away the details no longer have any bite, and nothing really develops.  Sigourney Weaver as an LAPD higher-up keeps getting madder at him, and Ned Beatty as a retired officer keeps mumbling ominous words about his future, but since we never grasp the particulars and the words don’t have any identifiable result, they feel remote and disconnected from Brown and his world.

With the right choices, this confusion could have been made productive.  Moverman wants to create a subjective point of view in which we, like Brown, wonder what is real as the story progresses.  Some of Moverman’s camera choices (which feature cinema verité handheld camera and many shots in which Harrelson is blocked from easy view) seem to reflect Brown’s paranoia.  As we watch him, it feels like he himself is being watched.

But Moverman doesn’t take his own ideas seriously enough.  In order to really enter Brown’s head, the background plot elements needed to recede much further into the background; they are portrayed too clearly to play as subjective, and are too omnipresent to allow us to get very far into Brown’s head. For the “throw the script out the window” approach to work, we needed to understand less about the facts of the investigation, not more.  We needed to be put in a situation much more faithful to the principles of true cinema verité, in which ambiguity produces a tantalizingly partial account of a story in order to fully engage the audience in their own search for answers.  There are so many hypnotic scenes of Harrelson—brooding in his car, drinking in bars, staring red-faced at his daughters in a tragically inept attempt at reconciliation—that the mundane particulars of the investigation are simply much less interesting to watch.

Another question: does a pure character study mix well with a script by James Ellroy?  Judging from the result here, it seems the answer is “no.”  Ellroy’s hardboiled dialogue is always one step away from pure silliness, and while there are some real winners here (“I’m not racist, Brown states matter-of-factly.  “I hate everyone equally.”) there are far more losers.  One also has the the uncomfortable suspicion that the film’s ostensible condemnation of Brown’s brand of vigilante justice is laced with an undeniable glee in watching him perform it.  Brown is certainly no hero, but neither is he an effective anti-hero, and the fact that the Rampart scandal is an all too real part of the LAPD’s history makes one all the more uneasy seeing it portrayed so casually.   One only has to go back to the baldly racist portrayal of African-Americans in LA Confidential to find evidence of difficulties in translating Ellroy to the big screen.

I walked out of the theater still intrigued by what else was hidden in those 100 hours of footage.  Was there a way to treat this film more like the hyper-subjective descent into madness that Moverman hinted was his intention?  Would the omission of 15 minutes worth of exposition in the final product have helped achieve the same thing?  Ah, playing armchair quarterback is so easy compared to the messy, complicated work of directing…

Last night a crowd of 90 gathered to watch the premiere of films created in Documentary Advocacy, a course I teach for beginning filmmakers at Wesleyan.  The work this class did was extraordinary, and is already having an impact. (The film about WILD Wesleyan, a student group that is rebuilding a huge swatch of campus with environmentally sustainable landscaping, has over 2500 hits on YouTube and has led to a substantial donation of seed from a company that heard about the project online.)

Other films feature the teachers and scholars of the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education, a championship wheelchair basketball team, one of the country’s oldest college radio stations, and Middletown’s own treasure of a children’s museum, Kidcity.  Watch the films here!

Huge congratulations to three former students of mine, director Benh Zeitlin ’04 and Producers Dan Janvey ’06 and Michael Gottwald ’06, who have won this year’s Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for their film Beasts of the Southern Wild.    Fox Searchlight Pictures has acquired the film for distribution, and the film will likely arrive in theaters later this year.  The stories I’ve heard from the production of this film are epic, but I’m sure I haven’t heard the half of it.  In this little Sundance video, Benh describes auditioning 3500 children before they decided upon their 8 year-old lead Quvenzhane Wallis.  This sounds par for the course for a guy who lived in an abandoned squash court (thus the title of their production company “Court 13″) at Wesleyan for months in order to shoot the stop-motion sequences for the making of his thesis film Egg.  

Last year at this time, I was complaining about the mystifying critical praise being heaped upon David Fincher’s entertaining but empty film The Social Network. Its vague wisps of social commentary were being treated like grand statements, and Fincher was being hailed as a genius who had tapped the zeitgeist.  Lately the question struck me: what have recent documentaries had to say about the issue?  I recently watched two newish docs that have also attempted to define the Facebook era, Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public (2009) and Henry Joost and Ariel & Nev Schulman’s Catfish (2010).  Each tries to say something about the way social media have changed the way we relate to each other, with different results.

The titles give clues to their different strategies.  Catfish has an oblique moniker that invites speculation about its origin, and the film plays out as a juicy mystery of the same stripe.  “Catfish” is just the MacGuffin leading us to the bigger question: what will 22 year-old Nev Schulman find when he finally drives across the country to meet the young woman who has friended him on Facebook, boldly called him on the phone, and since become the object of his intense fascination?   Here is a case in which a character is revealed to us (and Nev) exclusively through Facebook and phone interactions.  All we know about her is from what she’s posted on her wall and in her profile, plus the tantalizing sound of her voice through the limited bandwidth of a cell phone line.  Nev is fascinated, and so are we, largely because so much is unknown about her.

We Live In Public is also a great title, but it leaves less to the imagination:  it’s literally about a guy who took this phrase and made it into a way of life.   As its internet millionaire protagonist Josh Harris spends the 1990s devising ever more elaborate ways of documenting every second of his existence for public consumption (surveillance cameras by the dozen, viewable 24/7 on the web), he never tires of telling whoever will listen that he’s ahead of his time.  The fact that it turns out to be true proves less interesting than it ought to be, partly because the film declines to keep the same airtight controls on its flow of information that Catfish does.  And whereas Facebook allowed Megan Pierce to show her own (idealized, curated) story of her life and thus capture Nev’s imagination, Harris’ Big Brother-like experiment left the burden of narrative to the audience, and Timoner’s narration is often forced into the role of telling us what it all means.

To be fair, the directors had very different levels of access to the emotional lives of the characters that they profiled.  Catfish has the advantage of nearly unfettered access, as the film was made in part by one of its protagonists.  This approach can have all sorts of pitfalls (navel-gazing is a pretty dull sport), but Nev is likable and his character feels genuine, so we go along for the ride. The fact that he also invites a certain amount of self-reflexive criticism of the endeavor (“should we really be making this film?”) only adds to the perception that the filmmakers understand the ethical dilemas that they’ve invited upon themselves.

We Live In Public’s protagonist is more prickly, and while he’s quite forthcoming about what he’s thinking at any given moment, this ends up working to the film’s detriment: when everything about Harris has already been revealed by Harris himself, what is left to find out?  (And how much more do you really want to know about a guy who has installed a webcam inside his own toilet?)  Harris is an open book, which turns out to reveal more than we may want to see.  This may be a flaw in the way his character is drawn in the film, but more fundamentally it’s a test of an audience’s tolerance for non-“relatable” characters, as well as the limits on our desire for truly unvarnished versions of ourselves on social media.  By now it’s no secret that most of us tend to put forward our “happy face” online, such that the level of interaction only occasionally rises above water cooler intimacy.

The way the films deal with the visual logic of the online world is also revealing. Catfish feels instantly immersive: it marries the virtual world with the real one, integrating Google Maps graphics into many of its driving sequences, and fully exploiting Facebook’s layout circa 2009 as a way of driving the drama forward.  (Status updates and “likes” become significant events as the story unfolds.)  Some clever observers have noted that the Facebook iconography in the film is slightly more current than it should be given the stated timeline of the film; I take this as a forgivable error in the staging of the online reenactments, rather than a piece of incriminating evidence that calls into question the fundamental credibility of the story.  Regardless, it is thrilling and mildly creepy to see the “real world” as just another level in some sort of interactive video game, and it’s a great reminder that this is, in fact, the way many of us live now.  We peak out at the “real” world from the digital bunker we inhabit. This is the zeitgeist film that The Social Network never was.

We Live In Public’s Josh Harris had dozens of cameras operating at once in his Manhatttan apartment, and the film chooses the metaphor of a grid of television screens (a la banks of surveillance monitors) in many of its animated montage sequences.  This is completely appropriate for its subject, and is used as background for some fascinating sequences, in particular one in which Harris and his girlfriend immediately check the message boards after a fight to find out who “won” rather than contemplating their actions in private or trying to make up.  In the end, though, the film is somewhat confused about what this all means.  It never really decides whether he’s a sociopath or a genius, and seems content to call him both without getting too deep into what this means.  And when Public tries to equate Harris’ experiment to living on Facebook, the assertion feels like a stretch.  Facebook isn’t a panopticon, it’s more of a multimedia tabloid where the stories are about friends and family instead of celebrities and the ads are custom-generated.

In the end, it is Catfish that asks the more meaningful questions about how well we really know each other online, though neither film speculates about the deeper questions of where all this is heading.  What does it truly mean to channel social life through the commercial byways of Facebook and its competitors?  Does it change our idea of ourselves in the “real” world, too?  What part of our personal lives remains sacred, and does it matter?  Put another way, would Mark Zuckerberg’s famously derisive attitude toward old notions of privacy be any different if there were no money to be made from their obliteration?

The NYC Premiere of Ben Stechschulte’s new documentary Small Farm Rising took place before a packed house on December 7 at the Tribeca Cinemas.  I was one of the editors on this gorgeously shot verité look at the struggles and triumphs of three small farms in upstate New York.  We just received word that the film will be distributed for public television by the National Educational Telecommunications Association, and more distribution arrangements are in the works.   WATCH THE TRAILER

Actor Edward James Olmos joined the sold-out crowd in giving Precious Knowledge a standing ovation last Tuesday at the Los Angeles International Latino Film Festival. I joined Producer Eren McGinnis and two of the students profiled in the film onstage as we took questions from the audience about the extraordinary battle over the Ethnic Studies program in the Tucson public schools.  It screens next at the HBO New York Intl. Latino Film Festival on Aug 17 & 18.

Sean Arce, director of the Mexican American Studies program at Tucson Unified School District, was on hand at the LA screening raising money to fight Arizona HB 2281, which banned the classes last year.  For a glimpse into the editing process of the film, check my post here.

Jeff Biggers just reviewed Precious Knowledge in the Huffington Post, and concludes that “[its] riveting pacing and compelling portraits will astonish, infuriate and inspire viewers.”  I edited the film, which continues its nationwide tour with a stop in LA on July 19 at the Egyptian Theater and in NYC at the HBO New York Latino Film Festival in August.   On the surface it’s about the fight over Ethnic Studies classes in Tucson, but the film is really about something much more fundamental: justice.  Read the review.