Rewind/Fast Forward Festival

Those quirky kids over at the Florida Moving Image Archive are at it again, throwing the third annual film and video festival that highlights their amazing stash of archival footage. Never call this festival staid. It’s always bubbling with the unexpected, from the serious to the comically frivolous. This year for instance, documentaries on the Mariel boatlift and the Weather Underground (reviewed below) reveal themselves to be important and fascinating new additions to our political history, while Creature From the Black Lagoon (in 3-D!) and clips of Popeye and Gumby reveal themselves to be of a, um, cartoonish quality. There will be two different “From the Vaults” screenings: The first includes two government-made films about Castro’s Cuba from the early 1960s; the second is travelogues from the post-World War II era, including an Eastern Airlines-produced “docudrama” about how improving our airlines will also improve our security. The big feature this year, shot here and in Havana (archival and new), is the experimental film from Miami’s own Mark Boswell, The Subversion Agency (also reviewed below). All screenings will take place from July 10-13 at the Ashe Auditorium in the Knight Center, 200 SE Second Ave.; call 305-375-1505 for more information.

Making Waves

On a recent episode of Law & Order, detectives Briscoe and Green are running down the rap sheet of a potential suspect when they happen across a crucial piece of incriminating evidence: The criminal in question came to the United States on the Mariel boatlift. When one detective makes a puzzled face, the other replies, “You know, Mariel, that time when Castro decided to empty out all the prisons.”

Here in Miami we might scoff at such a blunder, but besides the fact that the 1980 exodus brought a huge wave of Cubans to the shores of Key West and Biscayne Bay, forever changing the city’s demographic makeup, how much do we really know about Mariel?

“Those of us who are from Miami can remember the images of chaos from the news coverage of that time,” admits Lisandro Perez-Rey, filmmaker and creator of the documentary Beyond the Sea (Mas Alla Del Mar), screening as part of the Florida Moving Image Archive’s third annual Rewind/Fast Forward film and video festival. “But few people realize the impact Mariel had on Cuba. Mariel was the first and to date one of the only challenges to the revolution from inside the island until now.”

Beyond the Sea, most of which takes place in Cuba, reveals through moving narrative and a startling montage of archival footage the extent to which Cuban society turned in on itself and began to self-destruct, after one Cuban bus driver slammed into the Peruvian Embassy on April 4, 1980, and 11,000 people stormed the embassy in search of exile. As Perez-Rey discovered when he began to do research: “I was surprised to find the level of violence and social upheaval during those weeks in 1980 — people died in the streets. I didn’t know to what extent Cuba was turned upside down.”

The idea for the film began in 2000 on the twentieth anniversary of Mariel. Perez-Rey began reading about it. At that time his father, Lisandro Perez, director of the Cuban Research Institute at FIU, was doing statistical research on Marielitos as a demographic group. Perez-Rey began to run across several interesting stories and decided they would make a great documentary of one of the most critical events in Cuban and Cuban-American history. It’s easy to be bowled over by the sheer magnitude of this exodus — 130,000 people left in the summer of 1980, and most of them fled in a matter of two months. But what Perez-Rey found intriguing, and what serves as the narrative structure of the film, is the similarities in the tales of those who made the journey: “It was fascinating to piece together the stories and see how these very different people experienced the same, painful odyssey.”

The stories come from extensive interviews with Marielitos as diverse as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, an art collector, a convicted prisoner, and a transsexual. From the Peruvian Embassy to the repudiation by neighbors, the violence in the streets, the irrevocable break between family and friends, and the camps in Cuba, these survivors’ words reveal how long and arduous this journey truly was, despite the Cuban government’s “willingness” to let people leave and the U.S. government’s commitment to receive them.

The film insightfully argues that the seeds of Mariel took root in the late Seventies, when over 100,000 Cuban-Americans returned to visit relatives on the island. After twenty years of longing, anger, and separation, these visits set the stage for the upheaval that was to come. Cubans on the island had lived such an isolated existence that when they began to see there was a possibility for another life out there, it changed everything.

A good documentary is both reportage and testimony, and Perez-Rey has mastered both aspects. His exhaustive research for the film results in an enormous amount of never-before-seen footage. The editing process (in itself an arduous journey of six months) manages to sculpt out a series of stories that serve as testimony to the human experience of exodus. Beyond the Sea succeeds in diving below the surface and wrenching from the sea a startling portrait of one of the most tumultuous moments in Castro’s Cuba and a pivotal moment in American immigration. — By Mia Leonin

Beyond the Sea Directed by Lisandro Perez-Rey; free screening at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 12.

Whither the Weathermen?

A political group that takes its name from a folk song, even one by Bob Dylan, would seem to be a fairly benign and whimsical movement. But for Weatherman (from Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and the line “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows”), the modus operandi was simple — blunt violence.

Formed in late 1968 from radical elements within the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), and later changing its name to the Weather Underground, the group went on a half-decade bombing spree through 1975 that included such high-profile targets as the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol building.

Artfully documented by Bill Siegel and Sam Green (Pie Fight ’69, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16), The Weather Underground uses archival footage of news events and broadcasts, home movies, photo stills, and FBI files, along with interviews of key Weathermen like co-founder Mark Rudd and figurehead Bernardine Dohrn, to follow the arc of the movement from radical students to lethal revolutionaries. It’s a compelling look inside the shadowy, elusive group, which managed to evade the FBI for years despite landing on its ten most-wanted list.

The film deftly puts the organization in the context of the 1960s and the social upheaval of the times, which lends rationale to their actions in the face of events like the Vietnam War, civil rights, prison riots, global protests, and the killing of Black Panther leaders. In fact the harrowing and brutal footage from Vietnam — village napalm bombings, point-blank executions, the My Lai massacre — leads one to understand how the youthful, outraged Weathermen could have justified their actions and their rallying cry of “Bring the war home.”

The timing of the film’s release, in these days of secret tribunals and another duplicitous war, is an especially auspicious coincidence and an invitation to compare the world then and now in terms of politics and power. The “man” is still in charge but these days there is no intelligent, radical movement on the left, especially from twentysomethings with the sly humor of the Weathermen, creating such logos as Piece Now above a picture of an assault rifle. And as marginalized as the Weathermen were, there was still a Bonnie and Clyde mystique to them, with acts like their jailbreak of counterculturist Timothy Leary.

But the most compelling part of the documentary is the interviews with former members, now in their fifties and living regular lives as college teachers, business owners, and mainstream activists. Although most are apologetic about the violent means, the end goal of the organization — the overthrow of the U.S. government — still elicits a gleam in the eyes of a few of the interviewees. As former member Naomi Jaffe says of the organization’s violence: “If you sit in your house and live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and commit genocide, and you sit there and you don’t do anything about it, that’s violence.”

The success of the film owes a lot to the interview subjects themselves, all of them thoughtful and eloquent, with loads of insight into what they were thinking at the time, the motivations behind their actions, and especially how they feel about it now as graying grandparents. You can really feel their wrenching as they try to parse what was right from what was wrong, 30 years later. “If you believe you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things,” says former Weatherman Brian Flanagan, now a bar owner in New York City, wearing a pained and disbelieving expression through his interviews. Especially moving were stories of how it affected the families of the then-young members, saying goodbye to bewildered parents for what they believed was the last time.

But short of any kind of paean to the Weather Underground, the views of interviewee and former SDS president Todd Gitlin provide another potent perspective on their violent actions: “They came to this conclusion which was come to by all the great killers, Hitler or Stalin or Mao, that they have a grand project for the transformation and purification of the world. They joined that tradition.” — By John Anderson

The Weather Underground Directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel; screening at 9:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 12; costs $5.

Decomposing Composition

Drawing on his affinity for decaying reels of film, director Bill Morrison has spun together a fragile work of beauty and devastation in his hypnotic hour-long film Decasia. Comprising snippets of film mostly collected in the moldering vaults of newsreels at the University of South Carolina, Decasia is a cyclical barrage of images, from whirling dervishes to airplanes to geishas, all fused together by a frenzy of weird scratches and blotchy smudges: the results of what happens to film when it rots.

Set to a slow-moving and elliptical symphony by Michael Gordon, the film is full of quirky pictures of the world at the turn of the Twentieth Century. There is footage of babies in bathtubs, squeaky-clean children riding a school bus, and pastoral views of women and children walking into a monastery. But the steady drone of the music, combined with the wild and constant hurricane of spots and scratches that jump across the screen, transform these comforting scenes into discordant tableaux. In a moment the child in the bathtub looks strangely satanic. The children on the bus are infused with an aura of dread as if they are doomed, and the church procession becomes a parade of sad refugees controlled by evil nuns.

Of course, as with most meditative process films (think Koyaanisqatsi), whatever meaning is to be pulled out of the experience is purely subjective. This could be maddening in the case of Decasia, but what makes the film watchable is the crazy spontaneity of the pictures seemingly strung together without any obvious attempt at narrative control. Morrison juxtaposes incongruent pictures. In one frame there may be a group of Turks making carpets; in the next you may see a dancing 1920s flapper or a parade of Nazis. The moments are strung together almost as if by chance, giving the viewer license to let his mind wander according to the fluctuating patterns of visual ennui that eventually overtake each original image. In fact you could think of Decasia as a celluloid Rorschach test.

The result makes you think of spreading epidemics, as the most pastoral and innocent-looking portrait rapidly decays and is finally swallowed by a swarm of mitochondria. It becomes clear that Morrison is alluding to the fast blush of beauty and then decay inherent in every creation and every life force. The common denominator becomes the cyclical nature of it all. As with the film of a whirling dervish or the splotched filming of the suns on the horizon, all things spin around and transcend into one another. — By Juan Carlos Rodriguez

Decasia Directed by Bill Morrison; screening at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 12; tickets cost $5.

Welcome to the K-Zone

Attention: The revolution will be televised. And if you’re lucky, your head won’t explode as you watch. The director of this hyperreality show will be Mark Boswell, and the events will unfold at a theater nowhere near you but in the scurrilous mind of its maker, downloaded directly into your subconscious. This is the kind of thing Marshall McLuhan warned us about.

Welcome to the K-Zone Republic, the mythical Caribbean island created by Boswell and given a sort of half-life in his phenomenal first feature-length film, The Subversion Agency, a project begun nine years ago in Miami and finished several weeks ago in San Francisco. The film premieres as the main attraction on Friday night of the Florida Moving Image Archive’s third annual Rewind/Fast Forward Film and Video Festival. But for Boswell, it also represents a triumphant homecoming for the pioneer of Miami’s independent art film community during the 1990s. And the odyssey of the film’s making is almost as remarkable and variegated as the film itself.

It’s a story that begins, well, at the beginning, with a Tallahassee-raised Boswell absorbing the strange and mysterious television shows of his youth (Man From U.N.C.L.E. , The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents), eight years living and vagabonding through Europe with visits to communist East Germany, developing an appetite for counterculture literature, and finally landing in predeveloped Miami Beach in 1992. All of these influences have found their way into his films.

“When I got into East Berlin, it was like crossing over into another world,” says Boswell of his visit behind the Iron Curtain. “That really affected me, it was like a cleansing of the urban aesthetic without all this advertising, billboards, without all this extreme consumerism. It just reduced the city to the fragment of the shells of architecture. And it was really a great feeling. Plus the remoteness of the culture, the way everyone was distant, unfriendly, even rude. I really enjoyed it.”

Back in the States, Boswell was intrigued by the burgeoning art scene on Miami Beach at the start of the Nineties and volunteered to help with the Alliance Cinema’s new film and video co-op, only to find himself running the show with fellow founder William Keddell. With the co-op formed and camera and editing equipment procured, an independent film community grew up around him and Keddell, who rented out equipment and taught courses on everything from film editing to documentary production.

“He was hugely important,” says Barron Sherer, archivist for the Florida Moving Image Archive and former Alliance Cinema account manager and programmer, of Boswell’s influence on Miami’s independent film community in the Nineties. “At that time, I think it was like 1993 when the co-op started, that’s all there was. This was low-fi, low-tech, artist-heavy work that came out of the co-op. I think it was a Zeitgeist really.”

If Boswell was a catalyst at the right time and place, the facilitator of art-film dreams for a community of budding auteurs, he was also able to harness the resources of the co-op for his own film projects. And besides all the equipment to make short films, like his update of Ernest Hemingway’s short story The Killers, he had a built-in film crew of actors, camera operators, and art directors. And then there was the South Florida setting that plays so prominently in creating the otherworld feel of his films, particularly The Subversion Agency.

“Miami the Beach, and Miami at large, was really to me like a giant film set,” says Boswell from his office in San Francisco. “Especially South Beach with the plethora of Art Deco architecture, which has that austerity. It’s extremely elegant, and yet it’s very tough, and it’s even cold in a way, the sharp lines, the industrial sterility of it. At that time there were a lot of hotels on South Beach that were just empty, and I used to film in places like that.”

It’s an aesthetic that calls forth the strange worlds created by William S. Burroughs, one of Boswell’s main literary influences, with their bleak, bizarre environments and anarchistic governments. Using black-and-white film for nearly all of his projects, Boswell avoids obvious shots of contemporary fashions and technology in order to create a timeless world inhabited by wandering souls oppressed by an unseen hand, who also tend to be lawless and unpredictable.

So it’s only fitting that The Subversion Agency was financed by one slightly degenerate old friend from Boswell’s caddie days on the European pro-golf tour, David Maurice Letourneau, a man who went from owing Boswell $200 to a $100,000 inheritance. When the skeptical Boswell saw the two Porsches parked in his friend’s garage, he knew the financing offer was for real and immediately went to work on the film. “Because I could see this stuff going to Vegas, whatever was left outside of the Porsches,” says Boswell of his desire to seal the deal.

He assembled a cast from the characters he’d met through the co-op: Black actor Larry Robinson and his deep baritone voice served as the film’s narrator, wife Susanne Naugebauer played a seductive translator, grim-faced Jock Mitchell a CIA covert operative, and various bit parts and cameos went to Keddell, Paul Berry, and a man known as Robert the Rabbi. For the lead role of arms dealer/golfer Pierre Kozlov, he ran into childhood friend Gregg Shumann, who happened to ask, “So when you gonna use me in a film?” The exotic-looking Shumann, of no obvious ethnic descent, fit to a T the unfixed locale and ambiguous time of the film.

After two weeks of guerrilla filmmaking, which included scenes shot in the empty pool of the Beach’s Albion Hotel while the film’s art director, Ben Wolcott, distracted the security guard, the film was edited down to 30-plus minutes. As it was too short for a feature, Boswell began incorporating archival footage in collaboration with Sherer, who would send clips of archived material and other interesting footage he came across.

“Barron Sherer had come up with some ideas for a feature project, and one of those ideas is that he would shoot a character and then cut to an archival scene that would reference the character that he actually shot,” says Boswell. “I started to think about that concept, and at the same time he started providing me with a lot of material.”

After moving to San Francisco in 1997 and taking a job as manager of the new genres department at the San Francisco Art Institute, Boswell continued to work on his film as time and money allowed; he pieced it together with clips here and there, including film he shot while visiting Cuba over the millennial switch. He also continued to create other short works and media art projects. His recent successes, especially in Europe where his work has been well received, include the short films Agent Orange and U.S.S.A.

But it’s with The Subversion Agency that his work has taken a revolutionary leap. Reminiscent of Godard’s Alphaville and the experimental films of Bruce Conner, and with film and editing techniques inspired by the late co-op member and B-movie maven Doris Wishman, the film defies categories.

“You can trace his evolution from his early stuff, but this one is just out there, man,” says Sherer. “From our perspective we’re really excited because it’s probably the most creative use of material from our collections that I can think of in the ten years that I’ve been here. He’s cutting back and forth between what he shot and vintage Miami, vintage Cuba, to make the K-Zone. It’s trippy.”

Difficult to describe, with its often hallucinatory narrative woven together with archival footage as disparate as scenes from the Cuban revolution, police riot training film, and early Eastern Airlines ads, the movie has a visceral effect that demonstrates how powerful film and images can be when they’re artfully juxtaposed. With both film and footage in black and white, it’s sometimes difficult to tell where the movie stops and the archive begins. But then again, in the K-Zone, past, present, and future seem to be one and the same. “It’s a mythical place, and it existed in my imagination, and it really exists in Miami itself because Miami is its own world, there’s nothing like it,” says Boswell. “That’s what I love about it. It’s seedy, it’s corrupt, it’s hot, it’s unpredictable, it’s mercurial, and it’s completely anarchic. There is no fucking law in Miami.”

If the communist island created by Boswell looks oddly familiar to a South Florida audience, that’s because much of the film was shot on locations in Miami and Miami Beach, as well as modern-day and revolution-era Cuba. But it’s the intelligence and subtle satire aimed at politics both local and international that should have viewers nodding with recognition, which makes Miami the ideal place for its christening. — By John Anderson

The Subversion Agency Directed by Mark Boswell; premieres at 8:00 p.m.on Friday, July 11; tickets are $5.