At 7:30PM tonight, 2/25, Only the Young (T/F 2012) returns to Ragtag nearly a year after its first screening at True/False. Fresh off an appearance at the Independent Spirit Awards, where the film was nominated for the Truer Than Fiction award, co-director Jason Tippet will be on hand to answer questions. To buy advance tickets, visit ragtagfilm.com.
When Only the Young introduces us to best friends Kevin and Garrison, they’re breaking into an abandoned house and transforming it into a hangout for skateboarders. “Children are the gods of this city,” Garrison says. “Who’s gonna stop us?” Kevin asks. The friends shrug off legalities, and so does the film. Their hometown of Santa Clarita, California appears to be littered with abandoned property, a product of the recession, which figures prominently as subtext in this delightfully un-didactic film.
The initial premise recalls Jonathan Kaplan’s coming-of-age classic Over the Edge—another film about kids creating a sanctuary in a California boomburb. But Minor Threat t-shirts aside, Kevin and Garrison are far too sweet to raise any sort of hell. They spend a lot of time with their Christian youth group, and if they harbor any ill feelings toward their parents and teachers, we wouldn’t know: filmmakers Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims present a world mostly devoid of authority figures.
Over the course of Only the Young, we also meet Skye, Garrison’s on-and-off love interest who is equally wholesome and twice as wise. At the outset, Skye’s father is in prison and her mother is out of the picture. Instead, she lives with her grandparents, who are about to lose their home. Skye spouts witticisms throughout the film and comes off as remarkably mature and perceptive.
Only the Young could coast on its subjects’ ineffable charm, but the reason this film will go down as one of the most exciting documentary debuts of the past decade is the ingenuity displayed by Tippet and Mims behind the camera and in the editing room.
Although the narrative is almost entirely relayed in interviews, it is easy to mistake Only the Young for pure observational storytelling. In part, that confusion can be attributed to the film’s refined visual aesthetic: each frame is carefully composed (not a handheld shot in sight), and the filmmakers employ the gorgeous, ruinous landscape in meaningful ways. But it’s just as much a testament to Tippet and Mims’ interview technique.
Although we’re never quite sure what that technique is—this film isn’t interested in revealing its process—it seems to involve setting up a shot, directing an open-ended question (which we never hear) at two subjects and then letting their answers develop into a natural conversation. Consequently, the film’s narrative unfolds not through a cycle of questions and answers, but as a series of intimate exchanges. At times it’s as if we’re watching these hyper-articulate teenagers perform in a carefully scripted play, or, as film critic Eric Hynes wrote in The New York Times, “a live-action ‘Peanuts’ cartoon.”
Although Tippet and Mims’ filmmaking derives its spellbinding power from the act of watching subjects lost in conversation, it also yields fascinating results when self-consciousness creeps into the frame. Early in the film, Garrison expresses worry when he notices Kevin cutting himself. Embarrassed, Kevin looks at Skye—out of frame—and says, “This is more awkward than after I kissed you.” When Skye tells him she’s upset that he revealed that on camera, Kevin quickly apologizes. “No, you’re not,” responds Skype, “You did that on purpose.” The camera has instigated a rift that lasts for days.
Tippet and Mims streamline all this compelling footage into a brisk pop narrative that never feels rushed or talky. Over the course of 72 minutes, we watch relationships form, crumble, and reform. We watch subjects deal with economic woes and family crises. And yet, despite all these misfortunes, and despite the dilapidated environment in which the film is set, a sense of freedom and joy pervades Only the Young.
In addition to all the wisecracks made by its three stars, the film is full of glorious shots of Kevin and Garrison catching air, set not to the angst-ridden punk bands whose patches they wear on their jackets but to exuberant soul tunes.
Only the Young’s photography also highlights the fascinating juxtaposition that defines Santa Clarita: all its abandoned houses and mini golf courses rest on breathtaking pretty hills lit by an endless supply of sunshine (the film is almost entirely set in the daytime).
The life force of Only the Young is optimism, whether it’s Kevin and Garrison turning this crumbling landscape into their playground or Skye deflecting home troubles with a wry sense of humor. Tippet and Mims’ distinct, assured debut serves as a testament to both the act of turning lemons into lemonade and simply keeping your shit together.
-Chris Boeckmann
Posted February 25, 2013
All Rock Bridge, Hickman or Douglass High School Students will be able to see Crash Reel for free this Friday, March 1st at The Missouri Theater!
In 2009, Kevin Pearce was arguably the best snowboarder in the world, winning competition after competition, making lots of money and, with a core group of fellow riders (dubbed the FRENDS crew), preparing for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Park City, Utah. Then he crashed. Director Lucy Walker brings a story that transitions smoothly from breathless aerials to emotion-fueled familial conflict, telling the story of Kevin and his family with grace and compassion. What starts as a high-adrenaline sports story grows increasingly deeper and more resonant, an inspiring tale of friendship, recovery and brotherly love.
If you want to attend, here’s the info:
1. By this Monday, 2/25: Students who want free bus transportation to/from their homes need to give their names + pick up address to their school’s main office. Students who use the bus must also submit permission slips by Wednesday to their school office. (Permission slips were sent out via CPS’s Michelle Baumstark to parents and schools.)
2. By this Wednesday, 2/27: Students who want to attend the event (regardless of transportation), need to pick up tickets by the end of the school day from their school’s main office. (We will pick up unused tickets and permission slips on Wednesday).
3. Friday, 3/1: Crash Reel plays The Missouri Theater (203 S. Ninth Street, downtown Columbia).
11:45am Doors open • 12pm Music by Yes Ma’am • 12:30 – 2:40pm film + Q&A
For more info about Crash Reel check out the film’s official website.
Please contact True/False Film Fest’s Education Coordinator Polina Malikin at education@truefalse.org if you have any questions.
Posted February 23, 2013
The Sixth Annual Purple Cow Lip-Synching Competition—a fundraiser for the True Life Fund— will take place Wednesday, February 13, at Hickman High School (1104 N. Providence Rd., Columbia, MO 65203) from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Students will compete against teachers in an evening of unforgettable performances. In the rich and varied history of the Purple Cow competition at Hickman, teacher groups have won three times and student groups have won twice. Who will prosper this year?
The nitty-gritty:
- Admission to the competition is $5.
- Doors open at 6 p.m. and the event takes place in the Hickman auditorium.
- Profits go to the True Life Fund recipients, Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC) and the Milton Margai School for the Blind in Sierra Leone, organizations affiliated with this year’s True Life film, Sebastian Junger’s Which Way is the Front Line From Here? The Life & Time of Tim Hetherington.
Posted February 12, 2013
We are excited to announce the first edition of Neither/Nor, a new annual collaboration with our other half, Ragtag Cinema. This series celebrates the art of film scholarship, while offering a historical overview of “chimeras”—films straddling the line between fiction and non-fiction. Every year a film critic will select and present four films.
In the inaugural Neither/Nor, film critic Eric Hynes takes a look at New York City chimeras from the late 1960s. Eric is a widely respected freelance writer whose work has appeared frequently in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, and Slate.com. Other outlets include Cinema Scope, Film Comment, SundanceNOW and The New York Times. He is a staff writer at Reverse Shot, where he’s also the host and co-producer of the Reverse Shot Talkies video series.
For each Neither/Nor selection, Eric has written an essay and interviewed a filmmaker. These essays and interviews will be appear in a monograph available at the Ragtag box office. The first two screenings in this year’s series will take place at 6pm on February 26 and 27 at Ragtag Cinema, while the second two will be part of True/False 2013. Neither/Nor is underwritten by the National Endowment for the Arts.
We’ll let Eric take it from here and introduce this year’s series and its films.
Chimeras have existed since the advent of film, a form that has always simultaneously offered to record and represent, to capture and simulate life. But as filmmaker Jim McBride says, “Something was in the air” in the mid-to-late 1960s, particularly in New York City, where the likes of McBride, William Greaves, D.A. Pennebaker, as well as transients Peter Whitehead and Jean-Luc Godard, were making gloriously uncategorizable works of cinematic art. It was a moment when everything and everyone seemed to be riding, or even embracing, the edge of things, when films and politics and morality suddenly seemed undefined, up for grabs, subject to reinvention. With the Civil Rights era giving way to Black Power, Kennedy idealism ceding to Johnson’s military morass, Beat Dadaism transforming into hippie agitation, and mod Godard morphing into Mao Godard, it was as if utopia and dystopia were both within reach—if not one and the same.
For these four filmmakers, as well as other fellow travelers in New York and beyond, it was a moment when politics, formal curiosity, and the sudden mobility of both the camera and sound recording invited an approach to cinema in which every shot, every gesture, every decision seemed less a statement than a question. Reality and fiction were constantly being blurred—for serious and for play, and ever sincerely. The four films in this series were all recorded during 1967-1968 in New York City, and all are both invaluable time capsules of that moment and impossible to box or bottle up. There are resonances and ricochets between these four films—having all drunk from the same wild New York well, with its fly-on-the-wall documentarians and Warholian flair, its Actor’s Studio interiority and Living Theater political absurdity, there would have to be. Viewed together they represent less of a cinematic leap forward than a scattershot concentric expansion into the beyond—beyond genre, beyond the limits of film itself.
Filmed over the summer of 1967, David Holzman’s Diary marked the advent of cinema verité by slavishly albeit fictionally aping it, while 16 months later the vanguards of that movement subtly aped themselves in 1 P.M.; in between, The Fall would both deconstruct and co-opt the movement’s objective approach, while Symbiopsychotaxiplasm cajoled its flies on the wall to swarm to the center of the room. Method actor Rip Torn bustles through 1 P.M. (as he would several chimeric films of the era), dadaist destructivists make mischief in The Fall, a salty nude model steals the show in Holzman’s, and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm closes the circle with a former Method man making an entire film crew into an extension of his own directorial performance. News and politics of the day buzz between background and foreground of all four films, from Vietnam and the Newark riots to ubiquitous activist Tom Hayden. And in the most startling overlap, an elevator rise up a half-formed skyscraper in The Fall is almost exactly matched in 1 P.M.; while the former metaphorically implies a toppling in its very title, the latter ends with a literal, time-lapse dismantling of a city tower.
Rising and falling, accumulating and dispersing, evoking and projecting, destroying and creating, these are films whose true common thread instability. And it’s instability that makes them, still, vital. Their very form—their deliberate unwieldiness—makes them perennially modern. Strictly speaking, they’re neither documentary nor drama, scripted nor spontaneous, true nor false. They’re neither/nor, and therefore pretty much anything they want to be.
Neither/Nor 2013 Selections:
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (dir. William Greaves, 1968, 75 min.)
February 26, 6pm, Ragtag Cinema
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is the cinematic equivalent of a ship listing, steadily and helplessly, over a waterfall. In the summer of 1968, venerated veteran filmmaker William Greaves set out to shoot an independent film in Central Park. The project entailed three different cameras recording three tiers of action: one filming a fictional scene in which multiple sets of actors would perform the same dialogue about a squabbling married couple; another capturing the making of that scene, triangulating the actors and their assigned camera; and a final camera widened out to the whole community of machines, actors, crewmembers and bystanders. Both in terms of the camera set ups and the rotation of performers, it’s clear from the start that process was of more importance than product. What’s not immediately but soon becomes clear is that the process was just as fucked as the product. Yet as cinematic train-wreckers go, it’s not that Greaves is hell-bent on torturing anyone, it’s more that he conducts himself with such benign ineptitude that everyone begrudgingly goes along with the inanity—for a while. It’s only when the crew starts asking questions, and steals away to record a secret bull session in which they question the wisdom of everything they’ve been asked to do, that they entertain the possibility—like prisoners realizing they’ve been caught in a maze—that Bill Greaves has been neither benign nor inept. And that’s when the film transforms from a curious shambles to the closest a meta-textual making-of whatsit gets to a thrill ride.
1P.M. (D.A. Pennebaker, Jean-Luc Godard and Richard Leacock, 1972, 90 min.)
February 27, 6pm, Ragtag Cinema
It was like a Sixties-era cineaste supergroup. And like all such assemblage, it was destined to dissemble, to be a dream team deferred, to elicit a mess of metaphors pitting sums vs. parts. Over here you had the inexhaustible trailblazers of Direct Cinema, the most celebrated and pejoratively pegged flies on the wall, Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker. Over there you had the notorious JLG, Jean-Luc Godard, the international arthouse superstar turned ardent political provocateur. Throw in method acting madman Rip Torn, rock n’ drug culture messengers the Jefferson Airplane, cult heroic polemicists Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, national leader for Students for a Democratic Society Tom Hayden, and black nationalist poet LeRoi Jones (the soon-to-be Amiri Baraka), and you pretty much had boho 60s rabblerousing incarnate. The story is that it didn’t really come together. The story is of bafflements, bruised egos, and abandonment—a film left unfinished, and participants free to foster their legends elsewhere. Yet that story is ultimately irrelevant to the cinematic record, to what you can actually see with your eyes. Everything in 1 P.M. is shot with the same busy curiosity, simultaneously offering an astonishingly rich record of its time and place, and, by dint of the filmmakers’ many fabrications, offering an auto-critique of cinema verité itself.
The Fall (Peter Whitehead, 1969, 110 min.)
Thursday, February 28, 5pm, Little Ragtag
The Fall is a bow shot and parting shot for Peter Whitehead, a 30 year-old British filmmaker who dropped the mic and scarcely returned to the stage after all was edited and done, literally wandering the desert to teach falconry in Saudi Arabia the decades that followed. This would be tragic if the film didn’t entail a career’s worth of ideas and developments deployed at once. In town for the 1967 New York Film Festival, Whitehead was cajoled into training his lens on Gotham, the de facto capital of a civilization he found both kinetically alluring and politically deplorable. From that autumn through May of 1968, he would shoot a daunting spectrum of activity: a pro military rally in Washington Square Park, an anti-war march on D.C., art openings, art happenings, poetry readings, football games, dance parties, photo shoots, Newark in smoldering ruins, and the tide-turning sit-ins at Columbia University. An essay, a dialectical exercise, a visual and sonic experimentation, a documentary, a stunt, a record, a statement, an idea, a harangue, a grenade, an opus, The Fall presses hard against its time and place until it pulses outward to the past and future, then back in on itself, as exhausting as it is exhaustive, as totalizing as it is total.
David Holzman’s Diary (Jim McBride, 1967, 74 min.)
Friday, March 1, 7:30pm Little Ragtag + Saturday, March 2, 8pm Big Ragtag
With director Jim McBride!
David Holzman’s Diary comes on as a first person, documentary-style, chronological diary of David, a young man recently unemployed and potentially going off to war. David rambles for the camera about his ambitions and ideas, shoots his home and surroundings, and generally tries to give a wholistic sense of his life. The footage is so raw that it seems to be edited in camera, with David visibly switching the machine on and off, and including interstitial sequences of placement, light flares, and distorted sound. Yet it’s all a fiction. Released in 1967, director Jim McBride’s movie anticipates (and pre-satirizes) the next half-century of first-person cinema—of video cam monologues, of YouTube exhibitionism, of faux confessionals, of media’s psychic irresolution. McBride’s film is a fiction, but his script anticipated the dialogue of our contemporary lives. Do film and other media bring us closer to, or farther from, ourselves? Are we ever alone? Are we ever in control of the devices we’re meant to control? Are reflections of self ever anything but fictions? Are fictions ever anything but reflections of self? David Holzman’s Diary captures a moment when modern man was able to see better than he ever had before, yet his sense of self only got murkier.
-Eric Hynes
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