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ABC's of watching wisely
By Dennis HarveyTHE NOTION OF letting children find their way and encouraging good behavior rather than punishing bad is pretty much a post-World War II thing. It can be laid largely on the doorstep of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, by Dr. Benjamin Spock, which some blamed for the decline of Western civilization – especially once that terrible phenomenon called "the Sixties" came along, suggesting an entire generation had been spoiled by lack of caning. (President Nixon actually accused Spock of corrupting America's youth. How else to explain those Vietnam War protests?) The tome's 1946 arrival coincided with that of educational cinema's golden age. Umpteen subsequent reels schooled K-to-12-ers in everything from safe driving to anthropology to personal hygiene. Most beloved by millions of snarky students were those involved with social conditioning, whether in the realm of dating dos and don'ts or that inevitable path to hell, Junior's first marijuana toke. As styles and attitudes rapidly changed, these movies dated fast. But they didn't leave curricula at anything like the same speed. Omnipresent in American life yet entirely unregulated, the educational subgenre could accommodate anybody with a Bolex and some entrepreneurial zeal. No one was checking at the AV Department door for teaching degrees, let alone artistic vision or independence from commercial tie-ins. (Many a high schooler was surprised to find the circa-1970 "ecology" film he'd just watched, for instance, had been funded by Exxon.) Thus some weird and wonderful mindsets crept into the prevideo public school system, possibly warping the young gray matter they purported to improve. A star among them was Sid Davis, rogue producer of more than 120 films between 1950 and 1972, whose corrective nature is suggested by such titles as What Makes Sammy Speed?, ABC's of Watching Wisely, and The Bicycle Clown. Perils of motion represented the benign end of his cautionary oeuvre, however. More often, his crudely indelible films provide an alarmist, Dickensian counterpoint to the Spock era's psychological soft-pedaling. They don't say "Be good and all will be well!" so much as "The world is a terrifying place, and if you don't watch your every move, kid, you too will be gristle in some lion's mouth." The centerpiece of Other Cinema's Sid Davis program at Artists' Television Access this weekend is Todd Southern's newish documentary SidVision, which pays awed (and earnest) tribute to the man who, long since retired, at age 90 still takes a certain pride in his lingering mantle as social-guidance cinema's "King of Calamity." Qualified by his 6'4" stature to be John Wayne's stand-in, Davis says his startup educational-film business was actually seeded by the Duke. Already father to a young daughter, Sid had been shaken by the 1949 LA news report of a same-aged local girl who'd been molested. Wayne loaned him a cool thou, and the resulting 16mm finger-waggle, Dangerous Stranger, was a sensational (in every sense) hit on the national crayon-and-Pledge-of-Allegiance circuit. From there Davis went on to vividly – if simplistically – limn the booby-trapping evils of alcohol, drugs, Communism, VD, hitchhiking, hot rodding, malicious gossiping, being a smarty-pants, playing with scissors (not to mention abandoned refrigerators), and the proverbial accepting of candy from strangers. Perhaps most notorious in his prolific body of work is 1961's Boys Beware, 10 minutes of deadpan hysteria in which male homosexuals, possessed by "a sickness of the mind," are categorized as pederasts whose young victims usually end up dead. What remains hypnotic and disturbing about Boys Beware – as well as about much of the Davis filmography – is a lack of style so complete it becomes a sort of creepy abstract-minimalism. Monotonously authoritative narrators, flat amateur performances, and flatter camera and editorial styles all create a numbed-out reality in which worst-case scenarios become insinuatingly credible as a societal norm. As SidVision points out, lone gun Davis also made some "mental hygiene" films that were more carrot than stick. Gang Boy (first shot in 1954, then remade several times with successive generations of real-life "actors") was a rare naturalistic depiction of rival southern Californian Caucasian and Mexican American gangs, underlining the pointlessness of violent juvenile prejudice. And 1955's stark Page 13 has been compared to Los Olvidados for its sympathetic portrait of an adolescent who's angry, confused, and gun-bearing, yet not past salvage. Ephemeral cinema archivist and scholar Rick Prelinger will offer at least an hour of fascinating Davis educational antiques whole, in addition to Southern's in-person introduction of SidVision. 'Sid Davis Retro!' plays Sat/10, 8 and 10 p.m., Artists' Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. $6.66. (415) 824-3890, www.othercinema.com. |
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