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fff winners
Audience award winners for the 9th Floating Film Festival:Jay Scott Award for Best Feature: "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" (Tommy Lee Jones) Runners up: "Sophie Scholl -- The Final Days, "Fateless" Brian Linehan Award for Best Documentary: "The Last Mogul" (Barry Avrich) Runners up: "Shakespeare Behind Bars," "51 Birch Street" Best Short: "Big Girl" Runners up: "Pen Pals," "West Bank Story" photo gallery
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Only at a film festival would you see a documentary at 4 o’clock exposing the institutional corruption of the secretive Motion Picture Association of America (Kirby Dick’s “This Film Is Not Yet Rated”), followed at 10:30 (after dinner) by a historical drama, using actual interrogation and court transcripts, depicting the prosecution and execution of a political dissident in Nazi Germany (Marc Rothemund’s Foreign Film Oscar nominee "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days”)… and come away feeling that they’re essentially about the same thing.
The scale and severity are, of course, significantly different – and one film is about the system of releasing, exhibiting and advertising movies, while the other is about the machinery of state totalitarianism and repression of free speech during wartime. But they are connected in their in their depiction of secret tribunals built on inscrutable rules and closed-loop, Catch-22 logic. (Joseph Heller’s Great American Novel came out of World War II, too, after all.)
After the screening of “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” Toronto Sun film critic Bruce Kirkland said he did not hesitate to use the “f-word” for describing MPAA head, studio lobbyist and ratings system founder, Jack Valenti: “He’s fascist-like because of his hypocrisy of his position on censorship,” Kirkland said, echoing what October Films co-founder Bingham Ray says about the ratings system in the film. Valenti, who only recently retired, is indeed the villain of the piece – a fierce and influential proponent of big studio interests at the expense of due process and free marketplace expression. Hence, the “f-word.” (You can read Roger Ebert’s coverage of Dick’s film from Sundance 2006 here).
As a film, and as a polemic, “This Film” has weaknesses (whereas Dick’s earlier “Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist” is absolutely super). Too much time is devoted to the relatively trivial efforts of a private investigator, her partner and her daughter, hired to discover the secret identities of the MPAA Ratings Board (and why the film makes superfluous references to her sexual orientation is downright baffling). And it focuses almost exclusively on the ratings process itself, rather than the most damaging aspects of the system: the studio contracts that demand filmmakers deliver a film that will meet the MPAA’s unwritten, unknown and unknowable standards; and the collusion of big-chain theater owners and major newspapers that can make the release of non-MPAA-rated pictures regardless of content, and/or non-pornographic films intended for adults only, difficult or impossible in a given market.
What “This Film” does say is that studios receive more lenient and accommodating treatment than independents, and that, despite Valenti’s persistent talking points since the ratings began, most of the people on the ratings board itself today are not, in fact, parents of children under the age of 18. The question arises: If the public doesn’t know who they are, or what standards they apply when coming up with their ratings (and filmmakers are not allowed to make comparisons to any previously rated films in their “appeals”), whose interests do these people represent? (Answer: Sony, Time-Warner, NBC/Universal, Disney, Viacom, Newscorp…)
Because the MPAA is a private and supposedly voluntary system (one is not legally required to submit a film for a rating – though one may contractually required to do so), it tries to pretend that it is not a censorship board. But, in reality, it is. And its Kafkaesque “rules” and guidelines (none of which are available for review by anyone outside the organization itself) makes a mockery of due process. Imagine if the Food and Drug Administration were a "voluntary" private enterprise, only in order to get your drug into any of the major chain pharmacies, you had to submit it for approval. Now imagine that the FDA had no published rules anyone could consult when developing a new drug and no open standards for its decisions about which were allowed to be sold by prescription only, which were to be kept in a locked box (like sudafed in the U.S.), and which were to be available on store shelves. That is not "free-market" competition by any stretch. Now let's say the system itself was set up and privately funded by Big Pharma and the big chain drugstores to avoid government regulation, but the result was that smaller pharmeceutical manufacturers and retailers got unequal (and inferior) treatment. Sounds like a deeply flawed and unfair process to me. But that's how the MPAA works.
The post-Hays ratings system began as a good idea in 1968 – with the emphasis on providing guidance for parents when films were pushing beyond the old Hays Code restrictions on sex, violence, language, and depiction of taboos. But today, when kids have access to these very same movies and much more explicit material (from free porn to photos from Abu Ghraib) on cable/satellite, DVD and the Internet, and when movie theaters themselves decline to turn away underage paying customers (you think they’re really going to turn away business?), the “parental guidance” role is relatively insignificant. (If parents want real details about what is actually in the movies, beyond the MPAA’s vague squibs, they should turn to the free marketplace the anti-government types extol and check out the extensive and unbiased information at www.screenit.com.)
The system is really about maintaining big-studio leverage over filmmakers in return for keeping the government from regulating the film industry, as is the case in Canada and Europe and elsewhere in the world. Why the citizens of the U.S. should prefer a closed system with no public scrutiny or responsibility to anyone but the corporations who fund it to over an open one – that would have written guidelines, standards and fairly implemented decisions and appeals available for the public to scrutinize – is a mystery to me, and to many of the Canadians aboard the FFF. As one of the former Ontario Film Review Board members said after the screening, the press and public finally got the politicians to craft a process in that province that is transparent and accountable in the way democratic government is theoretically supposed to be.
Do Americans really trust (or even care about) the MPAA ratings system? It’s hard to tell. The MPAA boasts that, according to its own polls, something like 70 percent of Americans say that the ratings are fairly to extremely useful, whatever that means. But these polls don’t ask about alternatives, and if the only options presented are between the existing ratings system and none at all, I’m not at all surprised that the majority would back the status quo, especially since most people don’t know – and have never been informed about -- how the system is rigged.
(Interesting side note: “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” was produced by IFC Films and NetFlix. I was fascinated to learn from Scott Wilson that Netflix has struck a revenue-sharing deal with the major studios for DVD rentals that included giving the studios stock in Netflix. The problem is, the members of the Screen Actors Guild who are entitled to residuals on DVDs are not getting anything under this deal. Litigation is pending.)
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Sophie Scholl is a national heroine in Germany, and rightly so. She stands as a quintessential symbol of opposition to everything the Third Reich represented: unrestricted dictatorial power concentrated in a small cadre of “insiders”; abandonment of legal due process; brutal quashing of any views that differed from the Official Line… In 1943, when the war was not going well for Hitler, Scholl and her brother Hans printed and distributed leaflets detailing the otherwise un-disseminated truth (direct from soldiers at the front) about the disastrous Stalingrad campaign and calling for an end to what they saw as an unwinnable war and a restoration of citizens’ rights for all Germans. Apprehended as suspects after leaving stacks of fliers in a building at Munich University, they were interrogated, tried and executed with an astonishing speed and efficiency that reminds you of the similarly ruthless, well-oiled genocide factories of the death camps.
“Sophie Scholl – The Final Days” moves with pulse-pounding speed through the process that terminated Scholl, her brother, the writer of the leaflets – and, of course, thousands of others like them who resisted the Nazi government from inside the country. Much of the film’s dialog comes from recently discovered transcripts of Scholl’s Gestapo interrogation and trial by swastika-emblazoned Kangaroo Court. In that sense it parallels the extensive use of actual TV broadcast transcripts in George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck.” But what we see here was never intended to be seen by the public. This is an unprecedented peak into the inner workings of the Gestapo.
Although Scholl has been the subject of two other German films – Michael Verhoeven’s “White Rose” and Percy Adlon’s “Five Last Days” – “Sophie Scholl” conveys you inexorably through the bowels of the fascist machine along with its heroine. Mary Corliss, who presented the picture at the Floating Film Festival, said that the final scenes, from the trial through execution, are portrayed in the film in real time. The events depicted took half an hour.
In her (as always) eloquent introduction to the film, Corliss said:
Heroines, especially one like Sophie -- who is so pure, and so SURE of her purity -- can be hard to bring to life on screen. Often they are saints made of plaster. But this Sophie is real, troubled, human. She has the perfect portrayer in Julia Jentsch, the young stage and screen actress who has been seen in “The Edukators” and in the Hitler movie “Downfall.” It’s a stark and subtle performance that… coupled with the actual words of Sophie Scholl gives the film its unique impact… [“Sophie Scholl”] has relevance not only for the times of the Third Reich but for today's world with its wasted wars, human rights violations, genocide, and vast indifference. As the film’s producer has said, “Our film is not primarily about the Third Reich, but rather civil courage: a theme that is always relevant.”
In short, to speak the truth should never be an act of treason.
