HRW Festival Review: Strange Culture

All next week, I'll be bringing you reviews from the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, going on in Manhattan from June 14 to the 28th. One of the first films I've seen is Strange Culture, a weird and unique documentary from Lynn Hershman-Leeson that tells the story of Steve Kurtz, a professor at the University of Buffalo whose life was turned upside one morning in 2004 when he awoke to find his wife Hope lying dead of a heart attack in bed beside him. The police and medical responders who came to the scene were more than a little alarmed to find that Kurtz's home was a sort of armamentarium of biochemical and DNA-extraction equipment, specimens of things as exotic as E. coli and other stuff you wouldn't expect to find in the home of an art professor. Before Kurtz could convince the authorities that he was involved in a unique art movement known as Bio-art, that exhibits real equipment for presentations on topics ranging from terrorism to genetically modified food, his entire block was being sealed off and invaded by men in hazmat suits.

There's a fictional thread to Strange Culture, in which Kurtz and his wife are played by Thomas Jay Ryan (Henry Fool) and Tilda Swinton, but to say that the wall between drama and documentary is broken would be an understatement. As much as we see them acting, we see the actors speaking as themselves about Kurtz's situation. Sometimes we even see the real Kurtz commenting on their performances, as the movie is going on. We're told that the main reason for a fictional component is that Kurtz, who is embroiled in the legal system to this day because of his ordeal, is constrained from talking about certain topics on camera. The feds were never able to make any terrorism-related charge stick to Kurtz, since he's not a terrorist, but they were able to catch him on mail fraud since he and a colleague at another university allegedly broke some laws by mailing biochemical samples back and forth without following proper notification procedures. Kurtz and the colleague are currently awaiting trial sometime in 2007 on those charges.

Kurtz is an entertaining oddball, and tries to regale the viewer with tales of the FBI's overreach in trying to prosecute him on something ... anything. He talks about the period after the initial incident, when he would be approached on the street by people who were transparently undercover law enforcement, trying to sell him street drugs or trying to chat him up about how they'd like to kill the President and wouldn't he too? The film explores how Kurtz's case became something of a cause celebre for the liberal left, and how that may have only exacerbated his difficulties -- the more media light that was thrown onto the case, the more pressure the FBI came under to indict Kurtz on some kind of charge to justify their costly investigation of him. For his part, Kurtz is indignant over his treatment and especially the way his wife's body was handled after his initial detention. Hope's body was apparently taken away from the scene and put through multiple examinations and autopsies to determine if she was the victim of some kind of foul play.

Because of its busy structure and short length -- 70 something minutes -- the film doesn't really delve into a serious examination of Kurtz's art. We certainly hear from him about it, and from other sympathetic figures, but there's not really much of an opportunity to hear from established art critics who can speak to the merit of his art exhibits, some of which are perhaps better classified as participatory theater. Kurtz would hire actors or other artists to dress up like scientists or military personnel and they would go through the motions on stage of actually tinkering around with genetically modified food, hazardous chemicals or in some cases, bioweapons. Members of the audience would be invited to come up and tour the 'facilities' or ask questions as the work was going on, all in the interest of increasing awareness about whatever the issue was. As you can probably guess, some of these exhibits didn't cast a friendly eye on government activities, which Kurtz believes is a primary reason why the government won't let go of him now that he's in their grip.

Ultimately, the loosey-goosey structure of Strange Culture detracts from the seriousness of the subject matter. The splicing of half-formed re-enactments with documentary footage, coupled with Kurtz choosing to appear on camera often in a talkative, jovial mood, leaves the viewer with the impression that what's happening is not really a big deal, when in fact it certainly is. Serious issues of government overreach and the ability of artists to push the boundaries of what's legally allowable are at stake in Kurtz's case. As he himself points out at one point in the film, he's being put on trial for mail and wire fraud even though a) no party is claiming to be defrauded, and b) similar short-cuts were taken during major undertakings like the Human Genome Project, but no one chose to notice because that's just how things are done. Whether Kurtz's treatment is politically motivated is up to the viewer to decide, but after watching the film, any sensible person must conclude that whatever else he may be, this balding hippie eccentric is not a terrorist.