Wholphin No. 3
The third issue of Wholphin will feature the early, rediscovered work of Alexander Payne and Dennis Hopper; new-found talent from abroad, including Jonas Odell and Alice Winocour; the strangest Japanese film we’ve ever seen, from the three-man directing team Naisu No Mori; a documentary about a thirteen-year-old Yemeni girl who refuses to wear her veil; and “The Popcorn Effect” of trap-jaw ants.
12 films. 162 minutes.
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LINER NOTES
The Russian Suicide Chair
Performance by Dennis Hopper
U.S., 2003
A Brief History of Dynamite:
1866
—Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel invents dynamite by mixing kieselguhr with nitroglycerine.
1983
—Dennis Hopper surrounds himself with seventeen sticks of dynamite and lights the fuse.
THE PASSION OF MARTIN
Written and directed by Alexander Payne
U.S., 1991
Q: Fifteen years later, do you feel Mono No Aware “melancholy at the fleeting nature of things”—more or less strongly?
ALEXANDER PAYNE: I feel it more strongly—how could I not?—but the increased sensation is now accompanied by increased acceptance of it, and of death. I think in my twenties, when I made this film—and stole the term from discussions of Ozu’s work—I was looking at it more than feeling it. What I was feeling more at the time was something I feel less of today—the jealousy and rage and insecurity that can follow in the wake of first love, if you can call it love. The film served as a way for me to try to gain distance from all that by turning it into a comedy. A couple of my closest friends still prefer Martin to my feature films so far because, despite its primitiveness or perhaps because of it, they feel I am more naked here.
Q: Fifty minutes is an uncommon length for a film. Did you ever feel pressure to lengthen Martin or shorten it? Do you ever wish you could release a forty-minute feature?
AP: While I was making The Passion of Martin at UCLA Film School, I was very aware that it would be probably the only time in my life I would be completely free as a filmmaker and have no imposed guidelines of any sort. The film’s odd length is a result of that. I wanted the film to be exactly the length it wanted to be. Later of course, I found that its duration—too short for a feature, too long for a short—hindered its being accepted into certain festivals, and more than a few times I was encouraged either to cut the film down or shoot additional scenes. But that was out of the question—what steps would you take if your child was too short or too tall? As for commercial feature films, well, I do wish we still had B pictures that could be around sixty-two minutes like in the old days. Films are best when they are exactly the length they want to be, and I dislike prejudice against either short films or long films based solely upon perception of their length. The Canadian short Ryan gives you the world in thirteen minutes, as does Paths of Glory in eighty-eight, Godfather II in two hundred. These are all perfect films.
Q: Anything else to add?
AP: I must add that The Passion of Martin is very much inspired by the landmark Argentine novel El Túnel (The Tunnel) by Ernesto Sábato. I wonder whether it is as widely read today as it was twenty-five years ago, when I was in college. It is to Latin American letters what The Stranger is to European—the terse, jolting, existentialist post-war novel that can be read as a monstrous comedy.
A STRANGER IN HER OWN CITY
Directed by Khadija Al-Salami
Yemen, 2005
A Stranger in Her Own City follows Nejmia, a thirteen year old girl, who flouts custom by not wearing a veil, by playing in the streets with boys her age, by riding a bicycle, a scooter, and generally by doing whatever she likes. She is cursed, ridiculed and threatened, but, buoyed by a truly indomitable spirit, she perseveres with incredible good humor and sense of perspective. Below, an interview with the director, Khadija Al-Salami.
Q: First and foremost—a year later—how and where is Nejmia? Do you keep in touch with her? What is she like now? What has been the effect of this documentary on Nejmia? On the town?
KHADIJA AL-SALAMI: Seven months after shooting the film, Nejmia’s father stopped her from going to school and ordered her to wear the veil. A year later, this film won first prize at the Beirut Film Festival. The president of Yemen was visiting France at that time and heard about the prize. He asked me to show him the film. I thought he would not like it because it shows society looking down on women, but I was wrong. He was drawn by Nejmia’s personality, and at the end of the film he asked me to tell Nejmia’s family that he would like to pay for her education. I was very happy to hear that and thought that was the best prize I could ever get for the film. Now, Nejmia is back at school. I think it is the most important element for a better and independent future. The more a woman is educated, the more she knows her rights and is able to defend them, the more useful she will be to her family and to society as a whole. The film was not screened on Yemeni TV because they are not accustomed to such controversial subject matter.
Q: Were you ever worried for Nejmia’s—or your own—safety, while filming?
KS: This film was shot without any preparation. One day I was walking around the old city of Sanaa with a group of French journalists I had brought with me to Yemen to promote my country as part of my job at the embassy. Suddenly I saw this young girl struggling to live her life freely and naturally in a society full of so many restrictions when it comes to women. Fortunately I had my camera with me and started shooting spontaneously. The second and third days I went to find her in her neighborhood and filmed as she struggled to defend herself. I did not have a problem filming because I was by myself and discreet and Nejmia’s personality put her in the spotlight because the people are not used to a strong girl like her.Though people were against her, I noticed a feeling of admiration as they joked and laughed with her.
Q: You, like Nejmia, were born in Sanaa, Yemen. It’s incredible that despite oppression, you and Nejmia have such strong senses of self and entitlement. What inspired that strength?
KS: I think the strength came from the desire to live free and with dignity, and to have our destiny in our own hands, not in the hands of tradition and culture. All human beings are born free, but unfortunately certain traditions and cultures in some countries impose a lot of restrictions, especially when it comes to women’s rights. It imprisons their dreams and goals in life. If a woman decides to break through and prove that she is equal to men and has the same abilities as men do, the consequences are heavy. She can easily lose not only her reputation, but the whole family will be badly criticized.
Q: After escaping an unhappy arranged marriage at the age of eleven, you realized the importance of education as a gateway to freedom. How did you ensure yourself an education? And what do you think would have become of you had you not?
KS: The road to my rebellious personality was not easy in a very traditional country like Yemen, where I was considered a woman at eleven years old and my family forced me to marry. At that moment, I realized that I was alone and decided to win this battle at any cost. When I saw there was no other choice, I decided to commit suicide. Fortunately it did not work out and at that moment my mother stood by me and helped me to get divorced. The marriage only lasted three weeks—during summer vacation—but I knew from an early age that education is the key to success and to independence. I did all I could to pursue my education and also to work at the same time. Those who opposed me very strongly when I was very young, especially family relatives, nowadays praise me and say they hope their daughters will follow in my footsteps. Instead of being the bad example, I became a good example. This change makes me happy, like I at least contributed toward the evolution of women in my country. Now we see women participating in political life and working in different fields. They have proven they are capable of making a great change in the society. If I did not do what I did, I would now be a grandmother with at least six children. Some women are happy with this life, but I would not be. Every woman should be able to choose. For me, I would be living miserably, not having the chance to travel and meet interesting people and learn so many things and appreciate life and what it has to offer.
Q: I was surprised that the nearby mosque’s Imam was so supportive of
Nejmia. Why was that?
KS: The mosque Imam was so supportive of Nejmia because he does not interpret Islamic teachings to mean that women are inferior to men. He does not use religion as an excuse to deprive women of their rights, or use religion to justify their ideas whenit is really local customs and traditions.
THE BEE AND THE CIGARETTE
Directed by Bob Odenkirk
U.S., 2005
This is the second in a series developed by Bob Odenkirk, noted writer, director and co-star of the late and beloved Mr. Show. In Wholphin No.
2, we showed The Pity Card, the pilot of Derek and Simon. In The Bee and the Cigarette, Derek and Simon meet two young women on the beach, and seem to be having impossibly good luck wooing them, until an encounter with a bee illuminates why our heroes have so little success with women.
FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT
Special Bonus Interview with the directing team, Naisu No Mori (Ishii, Miki and ANIKI)
Q: How did the collaboration between your co-directors work? Did each of you take a section or did you all work on all sections?
Ishii (I): We are all doing whatever we like. Especially Aniki is the one doing what pleases him the most.
ANIKI (A): No way, not just me, everyone is doing what we darn well please.
I: We did not split our jobs or anything did we?
Miki (M): We all did whatever we wanted to do, and then gave it consistency to it afterwards. We talked about how we would combine the stories afterwards. The reason why we started this was because we wanted to do something that we liked; however if it was just that, the film would be just a compilation of shorts films. So we still wanted to do whatever we wanted to do the most, but at the same time make it into one connected film.
I: If we make rules such as limiting the piece down to certain amount of minutes, it becomes producer driven. Even if we are told that the piece should be 20 min., the piece that you want to make might not be 20 min., so it was like, who cares about stuff like that! That was our mentality.
M: The overall impression was that we want to give it some compassion, human warmth throughout the whole entire film.
I: Humanity = Downtown Neighborhood sitcomish (From Ai: Downtown Tokyo is often depicted as story with a human touch, do you know the Tora-san series? If you can find the right word to explain it please change it) that’s what I was aiming for.
M: Dance & Music was Aniki’s theme. And the kind of grotesque gags and jokes are mine.
I: The ones you want to grunt “Woo, gross…” on a physiological level are usually yours.
M: The characters appear and interwine through out all the stories, so it might be confusing, but that would be the basic distinction among us.
Q: The visual effects are astounding. How did you achieve the “small-headed bloodsucker” effect?
A: Thank you very much. The Tamotsu Yamada effects was made possible by first creating a special effects plastic art figure. After it was shot with that, the face of the actor was morphed on to it with CGI. The sticks that were used to move the figure was erased at the post production stage.
Q: Are you willing to explain the meaning of the name stamp?
A: In Japan, name stamps are very commonly used in place of a signature. For contracts, we often use name stamps instead of signatures. So we thought it would be funny that something like a name stamp came out in that situation. There is no deep meaning to it.
Q: I’ve seen reviewers describe this film as experimental or expressionistic, but it seems to me to be less of a surreal fantasy than a literal translation of a traumatic sexual experience as perceived by a child. Are either of us close to right?
A: Thank you. We really did not give it much thought and just created stuff that just popped in our minds. We really did not think things through that deeply. All we did was enjoyed the entire process.
Q: My assistant is curious to know what is the most vivid dream you have ever had?
I: For some reason, I was living in a castle full of reason, I was living in a castle full of mice. We all were supposed to protect the castle from a gigantic broomstick ghost. I was the head of the strategic department, and fought with together with all the mice. I saw this dream two nights in a row, so I remember this clearly.
M: Ishii-san and Aniki were taking a bath with all these beautiful women from all around the world. But myself being a stoic guy decide not to join, and go outside, but while I am climbing up the hill and come to this huge front gate, I regret to myself, “I should have gone inside the tub…”
A: I become a bubble in the middle of space. I go back and forth from ballooning up to shrinking to a smaller size, so it was a ticklish dream. (I used to see this dream a lot between first grade to third grade.)
Q: What is the best film you have seen this year?
I: It is not a film, but there is a Japanese Animation DVD series “Aim to the Top 2 (Japanese title: Top Wo Nerae)” Vol. 1-6 (Produced by GAINAX). This series quite amazing!!
M: I also think it’s “Aim to the Top 2″ It is just super great. If you watch “Aim to the Top” and then “Aim to the Top 2.” It’s even more amazing.
A: I can not decide on a favorite, so the film that I saw most recently favorite, so the film that I saw most recently was Mikio Naruse’s “When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.”
And Coming Soon: A full CG version of the Mole Brothers (5 eps of 7min)!
NEVER LIKE THE FIRST TIME!
Directed by Jonas Odell
Sweden, 2006
Q. How many interviews did you conduct in total?
JONAS ODELL: Benjamin, who did the interviews for the film, conducted around thirty interviews.
I selected ten that he then went back and interviewed according to my instructions. I edited seven
interviews and out of those I chose the four that are in the film. All the thirty stories were of course worth telling; the selection was more about which ones I thought I could do justice on film, and also which four would work together as a film.
Q: Did you know the people you asked?
JO: He started with people he knew and worked his way out toward friends of friends, neighbors, etc., and eventually to people he hadn’t met before.
Q: BBC News reports that “nearly a third of sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds lost their virginity below the age of consent (sixteen).” How old were you when you lost your virginity?
JO: I think I was just over the age of consent.
Q: What was your experience like, and how would you draw it? Black and white? Cut-outs? Finger painting?
JO: It was quite matter-of-fact. Since it ended in a tent on a beach it might be done in sand animation, I guess. It wouldn’t make a very good film, though, I’m afraid.
Q: There’s talk nowadays about revirginization. One year of celibacy equals born-again virgin. There’s even “hymen restoration” surgery, in which the thin membrane is reconstructed. If you had the chance to lose it all over again, what would you do differently?
JO: I guess “revirginization” would be pointless unless you erased all memory of previous experiences. After all it’s not about membranes; it’s about the experience of doing something for the first time. So, I guess if I had no recollections of whatever mistakes I made before, I would be more than happy to make them again.
Q: Did you learn anything from this experience?
JO: What I thought was the biggest challenge for me was working with documentary material for the first time, and I think I’ve learned a lot about structure and narrative through working with the limitations you impose on yourself by telling someone else’s story.
KITCHEN
Directed by Alice Winocour
France, 2004
Q: The obligatory question first: How many crustaceans died during the making of this film? At the afterparty? Do you eat meat?
ALICE WINOCOUR: We used thirty lobsters in the making of this film. They were usually resting in their “caravan,” which was a huge aquarium where we fed them. None died, but one committed suicide on camera. We buried him with a lot of respect. Acting is a tough job. Another one was nicknamed Leonardo, like DiCaprio. He was the best. The afterparty was very calm. I do eat meat, but I don’t eat actors.
Q: Did you know that Whole Foods—a conscientious and very expensive U.S. grocery store—has stopped selling live lobsters on the grounds that it’s inhumane, and instead have overseen the development of a giant, supposedly close-to-painless lobster-killing machine that immediately pressurizes the little fellas right out of their shells? Other companies sell a little lobster electric chair called the Crustastun. Which would you choose?
AW: Had I been a Texan lobster, I would have had no choice: the electric chair. But being a French lobster, I think I would prefer the “killing machine” by Whole Foods. As Françoise Sagan said,
“It’s better to cry in a limousine than on the subway.”
Q: I read that Caribbean spiny lobsters can detect the disease PaV1 in passing lobsters, even if the other lobster shows no detectable signs of sickness. What was the most vicious illness you’ve endured?
AW: I’m a hypochondriac, so I have a lot of vicious illnesses: imaginary and real ones. The worst illness was a chagrin d’amour, which was the break-up that inspired Kitchen.
Q: Have you heard of the Robo-Lobster? It’s a two-foot-long, seven-pound crustacean made out of industrial-strength plastic, which the U.S. Navy plans to employ to detect and destroy mines buried under the surf zone. What is your favorite possession?
AW: My favorite possession is my boyfriend’s body. I’ve never heard of the Robo-Lobster.
Q: Have you ever seen a line of lobsters, two-hundred-strong, scuttling across the ocean floor on their way to deeper water? They do this to escape storms. The sand bothers them; it gets under their shells. While making this wonderful film, did anything get under your shell?
AW: When I’m shooting a film or writing, I try to avoid having a shell. Without one, everything hurts, and this is the hardest (but very important) part.
Q: The woman in your film is struggling to communicate with her husband. She doesn’t beg and cry, or scream and throw fits. She’s composed, although clearly unfulfilled. Why did you choose passivity for her character? Which emotional response (rage, apathy, neediness, etc.) do you think is the most common in unsatisfied humans and why?
AW: I decided that the female lead, Elina Lowensöhn, should be passive, but only in appearance.
The starting point of the film is a short story by Roald Dahl, called “Lamb to the Slaughter,” which is about a woman who kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb. I saw it first as part
of a Hitchcock TV series. But when I started thinking about a woman who fantasizes about killing her husband, I couldn’t identify with the violence and murder. The action of killing in a short movie can be hard to believe. I was more interested in insidious and perverse violence: one contained and withheld, and part of a bourgeois world. I think that rage and revolt are the most common emotional
responses for unsatisfied humans. However, I believe that these feelings can also result in an inner struggle, as in the case of Elina. Her desperate effort to kill the two lobsters is a metaphor
for her struggle with her own demons. In taking action and killing them, she allows herself to escape from the prison of her own kitchen. She’s free to march toward her destiny.
Q: Is Kitchen based on a true story? Have you gotten in a fight or ended a relationship over food preparation?
AW: Kitchen is not based on a true story, but it does have some autobiographical inspiration. One day, my grandmother told me about how she’d used a hammer to smash a dying pigeon on the head, on her balcony. She also smashed its eggs. She spoke of the incident naturally, and coming from her mouth the drama seemed comical. So I decided that in Kitchen, Elina’s violence would have to be
motivated by an object. This is how I came up with the idea of the lobster à l’américaine. My starting point would be a day in the life of a woman who is determined to kill a living entity—in particular,
her marriage. At that time I was going through a difficult break-up. When the film was finished, I realized that the story was also about the difficulty of killing something that is still alive—like
my relationship. I have to tell you that the recipe that is in the film is the real recipe of homards à l’américaine, which says that the lobster should be alive when cut into pieces before it’s fried.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to share with us?
AW: A shrimp! And of course my latest short film, Magic Paris, which tells the story of a woman who meets the love of her life and then loses it the following morning on her way to buy croissants.
BALLISTIC JAW PROPULSION OF TRAP-JAW ANTS
Edited by Encyclopedia Pictura
From Sheila Patek and Joe Baio of the Department of Integrated Biology, U.C. Berkeley; with Brian L. Fisher of the California Academy of Sciences; and Andy Suarez of the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
U.S., 2006
While the Society To Save Pluto as a Planet was battling the International Astronomical Union over the semantics of roundness, there was another scientific throw-down brewing in Berkeley, one that
could only be solved with a $60,000 video camera shooting 100,000 frames per second. The contenders were the Myrmecologists versus the Stomatophore Researchers, and when it was over, there was a new world record for the fastest predatory strike in the animal kingdom
and a film that, if we meditated, we’d meditate to. The results: the fastest predatory strike in the animal kingdom is no longer the brutal claw punch of the peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus). The peacock mantis can punch its raptorial appendage at over sixty miles an hour, producing a force one thousand times greater than its body mass, capable of shattering snail shells, pâté-ing small fish, and creating a cavitation wave known to crack aquarium glass three feet away. But the mandibles of Odontomachus bauri, a.k.a. the trap-jaw ant, are faster.
The trap-jaw ant has a pair of jagged scythes growing from its head that, when triggered by tiny hairs, can smash down at 145 cricket-decapitating miles an hour. The motion pushes the boundaries of physics, and often causes the ants to do a thing not unlike flying.*
WHO’S WHO
Brian Fisher, the man at the ant frontier, brought with him the little box of ants. Andy Suarez, trap-jaw visionary, made the journey from east-central Illinois. Joe Baio, the chemist turned biologist turned ant-filmmaker did the hardest work for the least salary. Sheila Patek, fast animal movement guru, made sure the team worked hard in her lab and collected enough data to publish something.
In Patek’s high tech UC Berkeley laboratory, Dr. Fisher wielded the pooter (yes, the term for the state-of-the-art ant retriever suction device used by ant biologists in the know), Prof. Suarez flourished jump-inducing ant tools, Mr. Baio set up the shots, and Prof. Patek reviewed the footage. All participants danced with the ants when they saw the jumps for the first time.
—Sheila Patek
INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN FISHER AND ANDY SUAREZ
Q: First, why did you get into myrmecology?
BRIAN FISHER: There are 20,000 species of ants, each one with an amazing story of their own. Ants invented farming (leaf cutter ants), refrigerators (honeypot ants), herding (tending aphids); they turn more soil than earthworms, and if you put all the ants in a big pile and at the other end of the scale put humans, they would weight about the same. Thus, it’s only ants that compete with humans for dominance of the planet. We have all met an ant, but it’s their unknown and untold stories that interest me. ANDY SUAREZ: I was working on horned lizards in San Diego, California, for my PhD thesis trying to figure out why they were declining throughout most of their range. It turns out their diet was mostly ants so I got interested in how ant communities were structured. Then we noticed this invasive ant species from Argentina was displacing the native ants (including the food source for the lizard). I never looked back from there.
Q: How did you become interested in the ballistic jaw propulsion of trapjaw ants?
AS: When I was at Berkeley, a colleague of mine was investigating the kinematics of snapping shrimp. She found that they were the fastest animal. I had seen trap-jaw ants in the field and was fascinated by how they appeared to jump around with their jaws (I also had read some work on them by Gronenberg) and told her that I thought the ants were faster than her shrimp.
Q: What is most intresting to you about the ballistic jaw propulsion of trap-jaw ants?
BF: That unknown to humans, there are animals experiencing the world of fast time, a rate of time imperceptible to us. With the assistance of high speed cameras, this world is being revealed. In this case, the process is happening with simple, miniature structures that have direct application to nanotechnology.
Q: Is there any faster, more powerful motion in the animal kingdom?
AS: Diving falcons with the help of gravity can move faster, and there are crabs that can close their claws with more force.
Q: How would you compare the force of their jaws in human terms?
AS: It would be like a human using its mouth to propel itself forty feet up in the air or 120 feet horizontally.
Q: Don’t they hurt themselves when they land?
AS: Because they’re so small, they don’t.
Q: What other remarkable qualities do these ants possess?
AS: They have a pretty painful sting, and some species can use their jaws as high-speed scissors to cut up prey.
Q: It seems that for most older, successful social species (bees, termites, ants, that one Argentinean species of orb spider, whales, dolphins, elephants), there is a natural evolutionary progression toward a single-sex, femaledominated, hierarchical social structure. Hell, even dolphins kick male children out of the pod once they reach adolescence. Will humans ever go this route?
AS: Based on my experience, they already have!
BF: A female queen ant mates only once and stores the sperm in a organ from that encounter for her entire life, up to twenty-five years. The male ant is just a flying sack of sperm and after mating,
dies. The queen then hides in the safety of her nest, never leaving again, and thus is not available to other males. All the workers and the queen are female. The males play only a small but vital role.
Could humans do this? If females could find a way to develop a society away from males and have little freezers for sperm, they could mate once and leave males behind after the first mate.
Q: Which species of ant do you most fear?
AS: Dinoponera and Paraponera because of their painful stings.
BF: The driver ants of Africa, which can invade your tent at night,
and start removing flesh.
Q: Leaf-cutter ants construct climate-controlled underground fungus farms the size of football fields, complete with rotating crops and waste composting, presided over by generations of queens that live twenty-plus years and communicate via a thousand unique chemical signals. They’ve
been domesticating aphids like cattle for millions of years before we even existed, yet they have tiny brains and are seen by most myrmecologists as little, distributed-system robots that operate by instinct alone. Isn’t that arrogant considering an ant hive is basically one giant brain and we humans operate as semi-distributed intelligences ourselves what with our free-thinking stomachs full of bacteria and our pheromone-manipulated mating instincts?
AS: Yes, ants have had sophisticated agriculture for millions of years longer than we have. They also have metaplueral glands that produce antibiotics. The cool thing about the ants’ collective behavior is that each individual is following simple decision rules without central control, yet collectively they can form very complex behaviors. I find this facinating.
BF: We are just now beginning to understand how ants self organize and accomplish a great deal. But one thing is true, ants can’t do it alone. Why doesn’t an ant just stay out in the forest eating the caterpillar it found? Because it can’t. The stomach of the colony is the brood, the larvae. An adult ant can’t eat solid food so it must take it back to the nest, feed the larvae, then the larvae burps up liquid the adult ants can lick up. This is just an example of why ants needs to be social. Ants also have lots of other relationship with bacteria (in their skin) to help them fight off disease.
Q: Without ants to churn the soil, the environment would collapse and we’d all die. Why don’t they get more respect?
AS: Good question. I’m hoping to change people’s attitudes toward ants a little at a time.
Q: Adam Ant had a great song called “Ants Invasion.”
AS: How about Alien Ant Farm?
Q: I hated the movie Antz.
AS: I need to take ant movies where I can get them.
WALLEYBALL
Directed by Wholphin
Edited by Encyclopedia Pictura
U.S., 2006
A human-rights lawyer told us we probably wouldn’t get within a mile of the wall. Even if we did, she said, it would likely be double or triple-fenced with razor wire, not to mention patrolled by trigger-happy Neanderthals.
The carload full of players we’d recruited to share this historic moment got a late start and, after discussing the likelihood of being tagged in the head by a rubber bullet and/or arrested, bailed. We’d heard that sending anything across international borders without clearing customs could result in a felony charge, which meant that after three hits of the ball we’d all be subject to mandatory life imprisonment under California’s three-strikes law.
At the border we held up our volleyball and called out the Tijuanans we could see through the slats in the unfinished wall: “Pelota?” Before we could remember the world for “play,” a kid on the other side said, “Yeah yeah, we speak perfect English. Just serve.” And so, as six half-curious members of the border patrol watched through binoculars from the hill above, we did.
–Brent Hoff
FLOTSAM/JETSAM
Directed by David and Nathan Zellner
U.S., 2005
DAVID ZELLNER: It was Labor Day Weekend of ’04 when we set sail into the Gulf of Mexico. One year before Katrina, almost three years after 9/11. On our new motion picture we were striving for something with resonance—something with depth, as deep as the Marianas Trench itself if we were to be so lucky.
FLOTSAM
At risk of sounding snotty, there’s really no point in dissecting the similes, metaphors, and razzmatazz imbued within Flotsam, the fictional, lyrical portion of our film. If you have to ask why our lonely protagonist (Nathan Zellner) is trapped at sea upon a pile of luggage with nothing but a vacuum cleaner and a pregnant chicken, then you just don’t get it. No offense.
JETSAM
Initially our production began without a hitch; good weather, a reliable ship captain, ample suntan lotion. It was about midpoint in the fourteen-hour shoot that our wet dream turned into a
nightmare. After all mankind has done for Mother Nature, you think she’d respect us. Bitch. Out of nowhere, an eight-foot man-eating Bull Shark caught us off guard, leaping from the choppy waters with his ten thousand razor-sharp teeth. Second only to the stingray in terms of its profound lust for human blood, we learned that day the mighty shark will stop at nothing to seek out and masticate whatever it deems tasty. Sure, he got the best of us, we’re man enough to admit that, we were on his turf. But I guarantee that if he was out of his comfort zone, somewhere he wasn’t used to, like the mountains, it would’ve been a different story. Despite this major setback, we did what we could to retaliate. Great friend and greaterer animator Bob Sabiston rose to the occasion by egging the shark
along its back and dorsal fin. Although this didn’t seem to have much affect, it’s important to address that this was the first documented instance—IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD— where a human has successfully egged a shark. By the time it was over Nathan required 144 stitches and a rabies vaccination. He was in a wheelchair for three months, crutches for two, then back in the wheelchair for a lazy afternoon. “Nickelback,” our beloved egg-laying, ammo-producing chicken was lost at sea, never to return. And the recoil on the flare gun made my thick skull look like the Stan Freeberg-voiced “one lump or two” puma in that Bugs Bunny cartoon.
BONUS FACTOIDS
-Rock ’n’ Roll group The Octopus Project provided music for the film.
-For fear of weirding-out the ship captain, we failed to mention the actual purpose of our voyage until we showed up at the docks, equipment and props in hand. Though a very good sport, he was a little weirded-out.
-Nathan got seasick on the unwieldy luggage raft and vomited his Waffle House breakfast into the ocean, leaving behind an oily-yellow mass that was visible for miles.
TACTICAL ADVANTAGE
Directed by Daren Rabinovitch
U.S., 2006
Q: Do you believe in God? Is he as wrathful and Old Testament as you portray him?
DAREN RABINOVITCH: I’m not really a believer in a God resembling the one in the movie. I think what we were more about doing was to make a kind of living cartoon of how he is casually represented in popular western culture. Then we offer a possible explanation for how death and misfortune might fit with that image.
Q: I imagine he’s aiming for endangered rhinoceros. When he shoots, where does he aim?
DR: Before we came up with a title someone came up with the idea of calling it God, Guns, and Gays, after the trinity of Republican hot-button issues. That would have given it a whole other dimension. In the end I think it works better leaving what he’s aiming at unspecified.
Q: Does he ever miss?
DR: I think so, but only when he means to.
Q: What inspired you to make this beautiful, blasphemous piece?
DR: The summer before starting this project I had gotten an e-mail from a couple of guys, Sean Hellfritsch and Isaiah Saxon, interested in what I was doing with my photographs. They had been
studying film abroad and then formed a sort of collective in San Francisco. They had seen my work here and there. I think we had a mutual aquaintance who gave them my e-mail. The weird thing was that it turned out that we had all grown up partially on the same commune in Santa Cruz, California, founded by this sort of spiritual, eccentric guy named Mangello Tipperary. He and Isaiah’s family had some land they were building a big house on, and my mom and I lived there in a tepee. I’m a little older, so I only really knew them as toddlers running around with no clothes on, but I remembered their families. Isaiah and Sean have been more or less in touch all along, but my mom had moved away and lost contact with their families for more than twenty years. Mangello left Santa Cruz in the eighties and disappeared. The three of us had all pretty much taken a similar approach to art since then, which has made me form some more definite ideas about early childhood and
creativity. Since his influence was so strong on all of us we named our group Mangello Tipperary, after him. I hadn’t made a movie before and wanted something that we could finish relatively quickly, a simple set with just a couple of characters. I wanted each shot to have a kind of monumentality,
and, like a staged photograph, to be elaborate but entirely unreal. Keeping costs low probably had something to do with setting the movie in the sky; I felt we could make it work using polyester
pillow stuffing and a painted backdrop. It wasn’t really about blasphemy for me. I was interested in using a character that was so highly overdetermined. The image of him firing off the cloud evoked a lot of things and worked as a striking still image. It made sense that if a still of the movie could convey a lot of the message, that directness could hold the thing together. Then we were free to build on that and have a good time designing and fussing with details.
Q: This is the second-most-blasphemous film ever made. Do you know what the first is?
DR: The Life of Brian?
Q: How did you make the veins in God’s hands?
DR: The character of God is wearing a full rubber prosthetic over his hands and face. We took a life casting of the actor and sculpted clay over that (including the veins) then took a mold of the sculpt
and removed the clay. Then we replaced the life casting inside the mold and poured flexible silicone into the void made by the removed clay. This created a rubber glove made of silicone that was painted to look like skin. A similar process was used for the face. Creating prosthetics for all the visible skin probably took two weeks altogether.
Q: How much did this film cost?
DR: Between $1,500 and $2,000. We were able to keep the sum relatively low thanks to friends helping on set, loans of space, lighting equipment, etc., and shooting it digitally.
Q: Besides a lifetime of death threats, what do you hope the reaction will be?
DR:Wonder and amazement. Followed by almost fanatical praise.
BOBBY BIRD (in THE DEVIL IN DENIM)
Directed by Carson Mell
U.S., 2005
In the middle of a blazing Arizona July, I met Bobby Allen Bird at “Saguaro,” his secluded Sonoran estate that shares its name not only with the iconic pillar-esque cactus native only to Arizona and Mexico, but with Mr. Bird’s recently finished biography as well. Nestled in a living room looking out onto a desert patio where a twenty-something in cotton shorts fed dried mango to a domesticated
camel, Bobby and I shared French champagne and Saltines. —Carson Mell
Q: Can you tell me a little bit about your estate here?
BOBBY BIRD: Fifteen acres, eighteen full-time employees, wine cellar, bowling alley, secret passageways, and out in the main yard we have a masseuse in a caboose, just because it rhymes.
Q: And is it just you who lives here?
BB: Me and him.
[Bobby points to a uniformed man standing stone-still down the hallway, a fly swatter in his hand, his eyes locked on the woman and camel.]
Q: But do any non-employees live here?
BB: That’s Vilichez, and I guarantee you I pay that stoic son of a bitch more money just to stand around smoking cigarettes and swatting flies than your boss does you for making this whole movie.
Q: That’s interesting. Okay, first I wanted to ask you why it is that you never came forward to let your loved ones and fans know that you were alive and well in Thailand for all those years?
BB:Well, I only had one loved one back then and he knew I was fine, so no problem there. As for my fans, I knew that when I came back they’d get a little Jesus thrill and that. Besides, my death was not without purpose. It was a lesson to the Satanists.
Q: What Satanists?
BB: The Satanists on the cruise ship I was on. That’s where I met Vilichez, but he wasn’t into the devil. He’s actually a Jehovah’s Witness. But the main Satanist, this little potato-man asshole, he pushed me and… Well, see, this is all in my documentary.
Q: You mean in your biography?
BB: Bingo, McSweeney.
Q: What else is in your biography?
BB: I put in some about when I was a little lunatic kid, some about New York in the sixties, getting all famous, lots about me and my bastard—how we got along. It’s my whole life, really. Lotsa girls.
Q: So do you have a message for the children?
BB: What?
Q: Is there anything you’d like to tell the children of the world?
[He stands.]
BB: You trying to be cheeky on me, man? Is that what this is? You trying to wind me up, big dumb-fuck rock star, for you and your other friends with glasses?
Q: No, I just—it’s just a question.
[He sits back down, takes a deep breath.]
BB: Fine. Kids, go make your bed and comb your head.
Q: Good advice. Lastly, how do you, as an artist, define success?
[Bobby smirks, raises a finger. He snatches an archaic-looking remote from the arm of his recliner and pushes its single red button. A panel slides up into the wall, and a knee-high chrome robot emerges holding a single Bloody Mary on a tray.]
BB: That’s how.
[Less than halfway to us, the robot’s wheels catch and it topples over. Bobby watches the tomato juice soaking into the rug, his eyes suddenly heavy.]
BB: I’m coming off like an asshole, aren’t I?
Q: What? No, I think—
BB: Shame.
* You can buy the illustrated novel, Saguaro: The Life and Adventures of Bobby Allen Bird at carsonmell.com
FILMMAKER BIOS
Khadija Al-Salami
Khadija Al-Salami, Yemen’s first female filmmaker, has made some twenty documentaries for various TV stations in France and Yemen. With her husband, she has written a book, The Tears of Sheba, about her experiences growing up in Yemen. Currently, she occupies the posts of Press Counselor and Director of the Communication Center at the Embassy of Yemen in Paris.
Arnoldo Garcia is a Senior Program Associate at the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, based in Oakland, California. Founded in 1986, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) works to promote just immigration and refugee policies in the United States. Arnoldo is the editor of Network News, NNIRR’s newsmagazine, and heads up NNIRR’s Justice, Equality & Human Rights Program, which monitors and documents immigration-law-enforcement abuses and human-rights violations. For additional information about the National Network for Immigration and Refugee Rights, please visit www.nnirr.org.
Dennis Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas in 1936. He has been in over 140 television shows and has starred in over 150 films, including Rebel Without A Cause, Giant, Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, and Speed. The classic Easy Rider won him “Best New Director” at the Cannes Film Festival and he received the prestigious CIDALC award at the Venice Film Festival for The Last Movie (1971). In June of 2004, he became Chair of the CineVegas Film Festival. In addition to acting and directing, Hopper is a noted photographer and painter. He began painting on his family farm in Kansas, but it wasn’t until 1961, when his first wife gave him the “life-changing” gift of a Nikon camera, that his talent for photography began to emerge. Today, Hopper’s art has been exhibited internationally in Italy, France, Japan, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, and Spain, as well as in major cities across the U.S. Hopper is a father of four.
Arizona native Carson Mell lives in Hollywood, California without a wife or an animal. He is currently developing his illustrated novel, “Saguaro,” into a feature film and working on a variety of short film projects. You can see more of his work and purchase a copy of the book at www.carsonmell.com.
Aniki is the most well-known commercial director in Japan; his honors include the ACC Asia Pacific Advertising Award. His feature-film directorial debut, Custom Made 10.30, was releases in Japan in October 2005. He is also a vinyl-record collector, and was the music supervisor in Katsuhito Ishii’s Taste of Tea.
Katsuhito Ishii began directing television commercials in 1992, for which he won several prestigious awards. This film Taste of Tea (2004) was the opening night film for Cannes Director’s Fortnight at the 2004 Entrevues Film Festival in France. Ishii also contributed to the animated sequence in Kill Bill: Volume One.
Shunichiro Miki is known for his out-of this-world commercials and music videos; his series of Fanta soda ads is the most renowned. He has won various awards for his innovative commercial campaigns for Cannes, Clio, and IBA. Miki has also acted in Katsuhito Ishii’s Taste of Tea, and plays the taller of the mole brother in Funky Forest The First Contact.
Jonas Odell is one of the founders of Filmtecknarna. He specializes in making films by mixing live action and various mixed media animation techniques. He has also scripted, co-scripted and written music to a number of the studio’s productions. Jonas has directed music videos for Erasure, Goldfrapp, Audiobullys, and Franz Ferdinand; for the Franz Ferdinand video, he received a breakthrough video of the year award at the 2004 MTV Music Awards, as well as a Grammy nomination. His films include the short films Revolver (1993) and Otto (1997) and his latest piece, Family & Friends.
Bob Odenkirk did Mr. Show, and now he’s directing films and trying like hell to do good work. Pathetic. www.bobanddavid.com
Alexander Payne was born in Rome, the son of a sculptor father and professor mother, and was raised largely in Scotland and Benin. He left Harvard after two years to work as a longshoreman, a bus driver, a pool man and a translator. A lifelong asthmatic, he moved to Nebraska for the air but found himself so fascinated by rituals and customs on the plains that he picked up a movie camera as a way of documenting them before they vanished forever. After four feature films, he is currently at work on his second volume of poetry. His first, Shadings and Shadowings, was published in 1991.
Daren Rabinovitch is an artist living in San Francisco. Tactical Advantage is his first film.
Joe Baio received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley, and currently works in the Patek lab as a research assistant and laboratory manager.
Brian L. Fisher has published research on ants since 1986; his specialty within entomology is the diversity and evolution of ants. His current research centers on Madagascar, where he initiated the Biodiversity Center Project in collaboration with Park Tsimbazaza in 1999. For the last sic years, he has been the lead scientist on the National Science Foundation-funded arthropod inventory of Madagascar project. He has published over fifty pee-reviewed articles in scholarly journals and books, and he is currently Associate Curator and Chairman of Entomology at the California Academy of Sciences and adjunct research professor of biology at both the University of California at Berkeley and at San Francisco State University.
Sheila Patek attended Harvard University for her undergraduate work, continued to Duke University for her PhD and completed her training with a Miller postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley. In 2004, she joined the Integrative Biology department at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor. Her lab currently focuses on the interface between physics, behavior, and evolution to understand the fascinating diversity of fast animal movements and animal communication systems.
Andrew V. Suarez grew up near Chicago, and got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He then moved to California for ten years where he completed a PhD at the University of California, San Diego, followed by a few years of research at the University of Illinois in 2003, as faculty. While Andy is generally interested in many aspects of ecology, evolution and animal behavior, he is passionate about the study of ants.
Alice Winocour graduated from La Femis French national film school (screenplay department). She won the Junior Trophy in 2004 for the best Sopadin screenplay with Augustine. The same year, she wrote and directed Kitchen, her first short film, which played at Cannes.
David and Nathan Zellner are filmmaking siblings based out of Austin, TX. They’ve been enraptured with cinema since a young age, when a chance encounter abroad led to being cast as Featured Extras in Pasolini’s coming of age drama, Salo. During the 1980′s they served as personal videographers for music legend Chuck Berry, further solidifying their career path of choice.
Along with an assortment of short films and music videos they’ve made two features, Plastic Utopia (1998) and Frontier (2002), which are available on DVD. Their work has screened at festivals internationally, though there’s still quite a bit of ground to cover. www.FortHQ.com