strange culture Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I opened my email this morning, and had an update on the Steve Kurtz case that made my entire day. Kurtz, as you may recall, is the subject of the film Strange Culture, which has been on the fest circuit since Sundance 2007. Kurtz and his wife, Hope, had been involved in a group called the Critical Art Ensemble, which had won numerous awards for its bio-art exhibits, and has been commissioned to perform in prestigious cultural institutions around the world.

The nightmare started for Kurtz when Hope, his wife of 27 years, died suddenly of heart failure while they were in the midst of preparing for an exhibit on GMOs in the food supply. As a part of the exhibit preparations, they had some harmless bacteria in petri dishes, microscopes, and other scientific materials (all of which are commonly found in college and even high school labs) in their home.

In the spirit of the season and goodwill and whatnot, I thought I'd forgo griping about the sorry state of things this week and instead send out some love to the downtrodden, the small films of 2007 that were somehow overlooked, underrated or outright ignored in some way. Let's start with the Russian film The Italian, released in January, which caused critics to dredge up the word "Dickensian" for the first time in a while. But for all that it was a surprising, deeply-felt story of an orphan who escapes the orphanage to find his birth-parents.

Kino released the documentary Romantico in January as well, and they're apparently counting it as a 2007 release. I wrote a few weeks back about the documentary format; there's certainly a place for journalism and reporting, but the very best documentaries, the ones that stand the test of time, are the ones that capture the details of life, like Crumb, Hoop Dreams and To Be and to Have. Romantico is one of those. It tells the story of a mariachi illegally based in San Francisco who decides to go back to Mexico to see his family, even though he risks never being able to return (of course, his income in the States is much higher than in Mexico). Romantico will most certainly be overlooked in any discussion of 2007's documentaries, but it's worth seeking out on DVD.

I know people have said this every year since digital video became a viable filmmaking tool, but 2007 really has been a great year for documentaries. Still, it takes more to impress me than a film about the war or the environment, and cute penguins only go so far. Most documentaries behave as if they were newspapers. They're relevant today, but tomorrow they're lining birdcages. Or at least someone is making pretty hanging mobiles out of discarded DVDs. This is not to disparage hot topic films; they serve their purpose. Though Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 failed to prevent G.W. Bush from being re-elected, it sure stirred up some discussion. And it's possible that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth actually helped, in some small way, improve our planet's chances at a bright future. No, I ask a lot of a documentary. I ask it the toughest question of all: do I ever want to see this again?

I ask this because I'm concerned about film as an art form. Even a newspaper story has to be -- or at least should be -- well written. A great story has a hook, a way with language, and an emotional center. It's one thing to report on an amazing story, but it's another thing entirely to ask people to sit through a dull film. I have no patience for objective journalism in documentaries, mainly because there's no such thing. If a film tries to be objective, it's only pretending. I love films in which the maker throws him or herself into the very fabric of the film. What I hate most of all is films that use the same, tired old documentary format: talking heads and photos, and if we're lucky, some video clips. If you're just going to photograph someone sitting in a room and talking, why not write it as a newspaper story?

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.