Weathering 'Underground'
The phone rang nonstop at the Free History Project office, a.k.a. the back room of Sam Green's San Francisco railroad flat, the day the Oscar nominations went public last week. But there was one important call Green, the producer, codirector, and editor of The Weather Underground, did not receive that day: the call from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences telling him he had been nominated for a Documentary Feature award. He found out the way the rest of us did – he read it on the Internet.
Green is headed off to the Directors Guild of America Awards this weekend and has been digging his way out of an avalanche of kind words, so he didn't have too much time to worry about the missed connection. (The Academy later tracked him down.) And while a publicity campaign is underway, in a sense – Independent Television Service immediately sent out a press release – one imagines it's an uphill battle against the sophisticated marketing behind other nominees in the documentary category, two of which conveniently rolled out in U.S. theaters at the same time voting takes place (The Fog of War and My Architect) and another of which (Capturing the Friedmans) released its DVD version the day the nominations were announced.
Many of the films in the documentary category are embroiled in, or speak to, ongoing controversies and unresolved cases, and the Bay Area entry is no exception. As A.C. Thompson reported in the Sept. 24 Bay Guardian, a Federal Grand Jury, which convened to revisit the 1970 bombing of the Park Police Station and a 1971 shooting at the Ingleside Police Station, was contacting associates of the Weather Underground and other long-lost radical organizations. Former Weatherperson Bill Ayers, whom I spoke to in December, said he and his partner, Bernardine Dohrn, had not been contacted. But they had other news: their cohort Kathy Boudin was released from prison Sept. 17 and was reunited with her son, Chesa (now a Rhodes scholar), whom Dohrn and Ayers raised while Boudin was behind bars. Ayers said he was happy that discussion about the film raised deep parallels between then and now for audiences: the question of people resisting the government passionately and with force.
Discussion will undoubtedly continue and not just in movie theaters. Apparently, the FBI Training Academy bought a copy of The Weather Underground from its distributor's Web site just last week. "Those fuckers," Green said in his office Thursday, "at least they paid the institutional rate." (Susan Gerhard)
O Henry
Henry Darger, film star. The idea seems absurd: he died in 1973 and couldn't have been more hermetic while alive. All three known photographs of Darger – who secretly penned a 15,000-page novel and created vast tableau works using small pieces of paper – can be glimpsed during Jessica Yu's new documentary portrait, In the Realms of the Unreal. Faced with a mystery, Bay Area native Yu leaves art critics and other "experts" out of the picture. Instead, she dramatizes (via voice-over) the world of Darger's writing and animates his art.
It's a bold move that, despite some cutesy touches, sheds light on Darger's life, or lives. "Artists can try and create a different world, and Darger is an extreme example," says Yu, now based in Los Angeles. "He was populating this whole separate fantastical existence for himself. There's something fascinating and poignant about that, because you wonder in the end, was it enough? Could it replace actual human contact?" That's a question Yu's doc (which played Sundance and will eventually air on public television through ITVS) allows the viewer to answer – if he or she wants to. Interviews with people who "knew" (in other words "lived near") Darger during the last years of his life expose a number of basic disputes. Some neighbors pronounce his last name with a hard g, while most opt for a j sound; different observers argue that he always sat in the front pews, the middle pews, and the back pews of a local church.
Darger's work first made a strong impression on Yu 15 years ago at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "The images are so indelible," she says. "These naked little girls with little penises and rifles running around shooting at men with mortar boards on their heads – describe it to someone and it sounds like the most perverse thing you could imagine." Her film traces, as best it can, the biographical factors behind Darger's vision, and in doing so, engages with a theme – institutional (mis)treatment of illness – that also figures in two of her earlier docs, 1999's Living Museum and 1996's Oscar-winner Breathing Lessons (the "when your dress costs more than your film" project coproduced by Pacific News Service). When Yu visited the Lincoln Asylum for Feeble Minded Children, the institution an orphaned Darger was sent to as a child, she found it had been renamed the Lincoln Developmental Center. Times have changed. Indeed: now that Darger's work is ensconced in the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan, a man who lived and died near the poverty level is reaching audiences with money. Yu says one of his paintings recently sold for close to a half-million dollars, before joking, "There's going to be a children's clothing line." Thanks to a new wave of Dargermania – in addition to Yu's film, this winter also sees the debut of The Vivian Girls, by Seattle-based choreographer Pat Graney – the idea isn't that far-fetched. (Johnny Ray Huston)
