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John Anderson On Movies
As Jack Nicholson said in "Terms of Endearment," we were this close to a clean getaway. The Sundance Film Festival was over. The really inferior films would, with luck, become dim memories. The overall implications, which seem to hover over independent cinema like Linda Tripp over an errant Democrat, might just evaporate entirely.
And then filmmaker Lisa Lewenz - who'd made a really wonderful Sundance documentary called "A Letter Without Words" - called up and asked an innocent but pungent question. Since she was taking her movie to the Berlin Film Festival next month, should she hire a publicist?
My reaction was mixed: part horror, part terror. Given the state of independent movies, the idea of her having gone to Sundance without a publicist seemed the height of idealistic folly. Because like anywhere else, thems that's got will get: If you can afford them, publicists (nice people generally, but they have a job to do) will force-feed your film to press and distributors alike. If you can't, you'd best be satisfied having at least one audience for your movie and maybe go skiing.
Those are the facts about publicists. On the other hand, the idea that I would actually tell someone to hire one seemed equally grotesque.
Lewenz, let us caution, is no babe in the woods. A respected multi-media artist, she's worked with such divergent talents as the artist Christo and the filmmaker Katherine Bigelow, won fellowships and assisted on documentaries on such heavy subjects as Three Mile Island. But she took her first film to Utah with an attitude that might have been lifted from a Sundance press release.
"I naively thought that once I got out there, there'd be a buzz about the film, and it would take care of itself," she said. "And there was a buzz. And people reacted really positively to the film. But as far as getting anywhere, meeting anyone, there was nothing."
What she found was an atmosphere fueled by multimillion-dollar deals and a lot of filmmakers more interested in who they know than what they've made. but that's the reality of much "independent" film, which continues to enjoy the cachet of artistic divinity while being totally rooted in Mammon. It might not be fair to call it a scam, exactly, but it is pure business, purportedly searching for non-conformist "vision" when in reality what succeeds is largely the same old thing in a new package, replete with tattoos and nose rings.
On the other hand, there are films like Lewenz', made mostly with heart and a fistful of maxed-out credit cards. They deal with prison life ("The Farm") or disabling injuries ("Moment of Impact") or, as the in the case of "Letter Without Words," can be dismissed either as subjects overdone or simply unpleasant, which is something she understands.
"It's easy to see how it would be perceived as a Holocaust film, and I think people are Holocaust-filmed out, she said. "But in fact, the film is something very different."
The impetus was the work of her German grandmother, Ella Arnhold Lewenz, a lifelong amateur filmmaker who died shortly before Lewenz was born. The older woman's footage, shot while she was raising children, living through a World War and becoming persona non Nazi, was rediscovered in an attic a few years ago, and it's simply remarkable - Einstein in Berlin in 1929, the bliss of pre-Hitler Jewish life in Germany, the gradual disintegration of a society that finally forced the family to flee to America. Plus, a lot of great stuff shot in New York in the '30s (a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, for instance, and a virtually open skyline). Some of it shot, too, on the earliest color film.
"She was this kind of Zelig character, and you wouldn't believe what wound up on the cutting room floor. Eleanor Roosevelt on the cutting room floor... some of my favorite scenes..."
Lewenz, who didn't find out she was Jewish till age 13, pauses. "Here was this woman, a German patriot, who identified herself as a filmmaker, who risked her life. ANd in a time when women weren't recognized as filmmakers. And to make that kind of commitment with your lief, and realize that you're never going to be recognized for it is very powerful. I think if I'd found the footage at a garage sale, I would have felt just as committed to it."
She would, in fact, have made a longer film, or a sequel, if she'd had the money. "But the thing is, people at Sundance said, 'Oh, no, the kiss of death, don't make another film about this, move on'" she said. "The idea is, not that I've gotten this done I can prove myself further by making something else."
The careerist attitude has always been out there in independent film, not as virulently or shamelessly as it is now, perhaps, but film is about money as much as it is about anything else. If there was something to remember about this year's festival - beside the work of Ella Lewenz - it is that the medium will always be capable of bringing people together, in some cases relatives who have never even met.
Newsday, February 1, 1998
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