Jacob Bricca, Film Editor, Director & Teacher

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

My students in “Documentary Advocacy” have been busy!  Beginning in September with virtually no production experience, they are now putting the finishing touches on remarkably accomplished short docs with topics ranging from innovative prison education programs to the exploits of a unique wheelchair basketball team.  Their work will be screened for the public at the Wesleyan Center for Film Studies in late January 2012–watch this space for details!

The Destiny Of Lesser Animals (Sibo Ne Kra, Dabo Ne Kra), a narrative feature I co-edited with Lisa Molomot, had its California Premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival on October 14 and 16, 2011.  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 earlier this year, and has also screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival.

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.

Last Train Home is an extraordinary new documentary by the Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan.  In it, he follows two of China’s 130 million migrant workers as they struggle to provide their children with a better life by working in far flung factory cities hundreds of miles away from their home.

Fan manages to achieve a portrait that is simultaneously intimate and sweeping in scope.  From its exquisite panoramas of the countryside to its astonishing rendering of the teeming crowds waiting for days on end at the train station in Guangzhou for a chance at a ticket home for New Year, its visuals are majestic.  Long sequences depicting the texture of place are interspersed with finely drawn portraits of the film’s characters, and we are left with a sense that we understand both the scope of this migration on the macro scale and its emotional consequences on the micro level.

Some of the film’s most enduring images are the looks on the faces of its main characters as they struggle to cope with what happens to their family.  Father Zhang Changhua tries to be stoic in the face of challenges great and small, but every bit of his longing and pain shows through.  His daughter’s upper lip quivers with emotion when her parents finally visit, and his mother dispenses little pearls of wisdom meant to ease the suffering they all so plainly feel.  The patience and solemnity with which the camera treats its subjects turns their journey into the stuff of tragedy.

I fear that giving more details may reveal too much, so I will simply urge you to go out and find a way to see this fantastic film!  The film’s website is here, and an interview with the director is here.

Con Artist, a new feature doc that I edited, premiered in Los Angeles at the Leammle Sunset 5 April 1-7, 2011.  This is a hilarious portrait of infamous ‘business artist’ Mark Kostabi and the strange universe of self-promotion, self-flagilation, and (in)sincerity  that is ‘Kostabi World’.  Cameos from Michel Gondry, Jeff Koons, Bill Clinton, and Pope Benedict XVI (!).  Read the LA Times review and the LA Weekly feature.

Tucson was a weird place to be last week.

I was still groggy-eyed on Friday morning when Ari burst in to the editing room and told me the news.  A congresswoman, shot.  Was she dead?  How many others were involved?  What was the motive?  Normally I don’t have much use for minute-by-minute news updates, but the fact that it had happened right across town made this a little different.  All morning long we were on the phone with subjects from our documentary, some of whom were wondering whether they should fear for their lives as well.

Precious Knowledge is a film I’ve been cutting for Ari Palos and Eren McGinnis about teachers trying to improve academic outcomes for Latino students in Tucson.  Their “Raza Studies” program has been remarkably successful, and one might expect a feel-good, Stand and Deliver type storyline.  But given that this takes place in Arizona in 2010, it’s much more complicated than that.  It is also about an unseemly mix of fear, ignorance, and political opportunism colluding to outlaw the classes and possibly shut down the department.

Just the night before, we had been blithely congratulating ourselves on the power of the “climate of fear” section of our film.  Ominous music + threatening statements from 1070 supporters + Raza Studies administrators talking about death threats = compelling sequence.  But now the sense of dread we had been working so hard to craft seemed to be more than just a construction of editing.    It felt all too real.

Turns out the violence may have had nothing to do with overheated political rhetoric–just a mentally unstable kid with some strange ideas in his head.  But given how we all felt that day, it was hard to disconnect the two.  Walking down the streets of Tucson, it was hard to define where the sense of unease in the air was coming from. A political culture poisoned by hate? Too many hours in the editing room?  Side effects of the media echo chamber?

It made me contemplate our role as filmmakers.  Should we be presenting a calm, cool analysis of the situation, detached from the passions of the moment?  In creating that sequence, was I a part of the problem by accentuating this feeling of fear?  To hear Jon Stewart talk these days, anyone who strays more than a couple steps from the moderate tones of a Parliamentary debate is going too far.

I prefer to think that we’re doing our job as documentary filmmakers by pointing out injustice and dramatizing the stories of people who have been told to wait silently in the background for too long.  The film will be out soon, and if you get a chance to see it I think you’ll see what I mean.  What’s happening with the demonization of Latino immigrants in Arizona is a tragedy, and it deserves our attention.

The simmering debate over the Raza Studies classes at six Tucson high schools made it onto the front page of the NY Times last Tuesday, as Arizona’s incoming Attorney General Tom Horne declared them illegal.   The classes, which have been responsible for a huge rise in graduation rates among Latinos, were denounced as “brainwashing” by Horne, who objects to their “radical agenda.”

The controversy is the subject of Precious Knowledge, a highly anticipated documentary edited by Bricca and directed by Ari Palos, which will have its World Premiere at the San Diego Latino Film Festival in March.