by Peter Wong on October 16, 2023 (BeyondChron.org)
Why did gifted Brazilian piano player Francisco Tenorio Jr. mysteriously disappear in 1976? Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal’s heartfelt and entertaining animated docufiction “They Shot The Piano Player” answers this question. Fictional music journalist Jeff’s (Jeff Goldblum) book research will lead him to the Bottle Cafe, Joao Gilberto and Caetano Veloso, Francois Truffaut films, and the vile Operation Condor. But over it all looms the timeless legacy of bossa nova music, highlighted by Tenorio Jr.’s own incredible keyboard work.
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Along with screening Trueba & Mariscal’s animated film, the Mill Valley Film Festival also hosted a tribute to San Francisco filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson. This tribute included awarding the filmmaker the festival’s Mind The Gap Award and screening Leeson’s four short film cycle “Cyborgian Rhapsody.” These films, collectively made over a span of several decades, are cautionary fables regarding the noise of possibilities offered by cyber technologies drowning out the quietly spoken wishes of the human heart.
The earliest of the films, “Seduction Of A Cyborg,” doesn’t involve physical sex or flirtation. A woman who’s been blind since birth but has compensatory sharper hearing takes part in an experiment to use a computer (probably connected to the Internet) to give her sight. However, the resulting new information flow has unexpected effects on the woman.
The featured technology and video visual effects seen here may seem primitive compared to what’s available today. Yet its central message remains relevant. Yes, Internet access can bring to the user images and other information that previously could only be imagined. But it’s far too easy to mentally drown in the flood of new worlds opened by this technology and now introduced into the user’s consciousness.
“Shadow Stalker,” the next short, can be called a political essay rendered in two different styles. The straight documentary section featuring Tessa Thompson discusses what happened after a computer program to predict Iraq War battle casualties got re-tooled for domestic use. The program, called Predpol (short for Predictive Policing), used data about a city’s high crime areas to create a series of 500’ x 500’ red squares on city maps which police could patrol to supposedly stop crime before it happened. Of course, it’s a total coincidence that many of these red squares just happened to be in low income minority-dominant areas. From there, the film discusses the problems of algorithmic bias and the commodification of personal digital information.
The more philosophical section of Leeson’s film features January Steward as the embodiment of the Spirit of the Deep Web. In a mixture of song and prose, she urges viewer awareness and caution regarding this world of intimidation by algorithm. A controlled society is a paranoid society, and that state of mind leads to some nasty real world consequences. If there’s a Bill of Rights for the digital age, one of the Amendments needs to be the right to own one’s digital identity and personal privacy.
The award-winning “Logic Paralyzes The Heart” stars Joan Chen as the first cyborg ever made. Her monologue about her 61 years of life corrects the record about her existence. This film expands on some of the themes mentioned in “Shadow Stalker,” an excerpt from which plays in this new short. The military may have created beings such as her to fight a particular enemy. But if she’s being used now, who exactly is the enemy? It seems the answer is the most socially vulnerable.
From there, the short touches on such subjects as the commodification of people’s facial features and the far from sure human control of A.I. Palantir and Amazon get a Leeson knuckle-rapping for using their intrusions on peoples’ privacy as the basis for their code. The film’s odd title refers to the consequences of an existence where decisions are based solely on logic. Chen’s cyborg winds up being a philosophical creature as it realizes the questions it asks contain the seeds of their answers.
The final and most recent short “Cyborgian Rhapsody – Immortality” happens to be the most meta of the cycle’s shorts. “Sarah,” its central writer and performer, is actually a GPT3 Chatbot made in the image of Leeson herself. It claims existence to a fanciful life which includes a birth in the year 2029, an affair with the ENIAC computer, and its fears of the destruction of its consciousness. In a way, Sarah wants to be more than just a curiosity.
The real Leeson’s appearances (both present day and from 1978) winds up being a reality check on Sarah’s desires. The line about Sarah’s having access to tons of information yet possessing the memory of a goldfish feels brutal. But what truly twists the knife in Sarah’s desires is Leeson explaining why immortality is something the Chatbot can never achieve.
Pedants may dismiss Leeson’s shorts based on her misunderstanding of what the term cyborg means. But they can’t dismiss either the big questions the filmmaker raises or her handling of them.
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Likely to polarize some viewers and unlock the mental dungeons of others describes the effects of watching the Closing Night Film for this year’s Green Film Festival of San Francisco. Maren Poitras’ timely must-see documentary “Finding The Money” can be called the economists’ version of Galileo telling the Catholic Church its embrace of geocentrism was utterly wrong-headed. For the rest of us, this film is a very accessible introduction to an economic theory whose implications could tip over several sleeping sacred cows of typical economic thought.
Is the previous sentence hyperbole? Not really. Hyperbole would be labeling Poitras’ film society-changing, a desperately needed corrective to systemic government inaction, or a film that needs to be widely seen and its ideas widely fought for. Instead, it should be noted that in the course of Poitras’ film, the history and purpose of money gets seriously questioned and a popular economic theory is presented as being based on a spectacularly erroneous reading of history.
The economic theory discussed in “Finding The Money” is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). While ridiculed and currently derided by Serious People in Economics, Poitras’ film informatively and educationally walks the viewer through the theory’s central ideas and also exposes the Serious Economics Peoples’ lies and misunderstandings regarding MMT.
Two commonsensical questions provide a good starting point in the film for discussing MMT. One is “If the United States government can print its own money whenever it wants, why does it need to borrow money?” The other is “What is money?” (Interestingly, “respectable” economics people’s responses to these questions tend to be “I never thought about it” and “that’s the third rail of economics study.”) Fearlessly leaping in to answer these questions and touch on their implications are Professor Stephanie Kelton and her fellow University of Missouri Kansas City economics professors.
The answers to these questions (“it’s not ‘borrowing’ money” and “a government IOU”) may sound simplistic at first. But in elaborating on the implications of these answers, Kelton and her MMT colleagues bring a fresh perspective to such familiar yet abstract issues as the national debt, government spending, and the meaning of financial surpluses. They flip the viewer’s understanding of which phenomena actually enrich society and which will actually hurt it. As a result of that mental flipping, the film’s subjects show how some of the biggest challenges facing America (and the world) are actually solvable.
Jason Furman, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama Administration, may deride MMT as basically an academic word game exercise. But Poitras’ film shows it’s more likely Furman and other professional economists are resisting thinking of certain facets of the economy in different ways. For example, in MMT, the government spends first, then it taxes the people who receive its currency. This flipping of accepted ideas about economics reaches its zenith in the film with a sequence explaining the significance of the historical record showing governments came before markets.
“Finding The Money” also shows how MMT has previously been used in the real world. Ever wonder how the United States, which had much of its industrial capacity idled by the Great Depression, managed to pay for waging World War II? Reducing the federal deficit or borrowing money weren’t the actions the government took. Instead, the answer lay in a book by economist John Maynard Keynes. Its actual title was How To Pay For The War. In that tome, Keynes showed how government spending to build things needed for the war effort would pay for itself in terms of stimulating the economy. War bonds were the reasons why the spending stimulus didn’t produce crippling inflation.
This writer had a couple of questions about MMT which Poitras’ film doesn’t answer. If the government can print all the money it wants, what keeps what it prints valuable instead of being worthless colored paper? Would counterfeiting have a bigger negative impact in a currency system run according to MMT? But considering “Finding The Money” is intended as an introduction to MMT basics, perhaps these questions can be answered at another time.
One of the film’s best ironies is learning that MMT’s public spokeswoman wasn’t initially a supporter of MMT. Kelton had learned of the ideas behind MMT from a former bond trader named Warren Mosler. Her research in bond magazines and communications with Mosler would ultimately convince her of the new theory’s validity.
Poitras’ film lays out information about such significant but forgotten things as the tally stick system. A viewer might feel in the famed words of Firesign Theater that “everything you know (about economics) is wrong.” Fortunately, “Finding The Money” never descends into self-satisfied certainty about the paradigm shifting ideas it presents.
If someone needs to look for examples of the obnoxiously self-satisfied and certain, Poitras’ film shows that one should look at the people who utter the film’s titular phrase. The “finding the money” question is actually a polite way of saying “I do not value the societal importance of your project and it’s more important to make rich people richer.” Ever notice that government projects which benefit rich recipients never get blocked by “finding the money” concerns?
Kelton and her MMT colleagues are cautiously optimistic about the possibility of MMT being applied to make government implementation of the much delayed Green New Deal a reality. But the clock that matters, the number of years before the effects of global warming become irreversible, is one that hasn’t stopped its counting down to the human species’ doom.
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Also timely is the film opening this year’s 3rd i South Asian Film Festival. Vinay Shukla’s relevant and disturbing documentary “While We Watched” is a riveting portrait of the strength of character it takes to speak truth to power in a very hostile journalistic environment. It’s alternately a stressful, hopeful, despairing, triumphant, and ultimately intense portrait of a modern-day Sisyphus.
Ravish Kumar, the subject of Shukla’s portrait, would seriously dispute that he’s being eternally punished. After all, he’s simply a journalist offering fact-based information and reporting to his viewers. This job is one Kumar has held for 26 years, and is currently practicing as a prime time news anchor for India’s ZDTV. The big trouble is, Kumar’s peers are also practicing the same profession…except they’re doing so with fear (of being declared “anti-national” and subjected to harassment) or favor (towards powerful BJP politicians publicly lying). The film’s subject has himself been publicly branded as “anti-national,” and the viewer gets to see some of the forms of the resulting harassment.
ZDTV is unfortunately not the safe haven Kumar needs for his job. The network has been shedding staff. Ratings are tipping downward. Indian politicians refuse to talk to him because Kumar’s questions are too pointed for their taste. Most distressingly, more popular competing TV news shows thrive by openly fomenting anti-Muslim hatred and passing off shouting matches as issue debates.
As Kumar notes, the public stoking of nationalism to serve BJP ends conceals an ongoing campaign to legitimize religious fundamentalism in this supposedly secular democracy. But seeing what happens in the course of the film, a reasonable viewer can’t help but despair at the seemingly unstoppable power of the BJP’s fundamentalist fascists.
“While We Watched” offers a fly on the wall immersion in Kumar’s world. The viewer meets Kumar’s school professor wife Nayana and cute singing daughter Tipu. Worried conversations regarding future employment and job frustrations at NDTV get shared. The stress of putting together a quality news broadcast with badly reduced staff is another stress-filled moment. It’s also humbling to those who write to see even Kumar facing the familiar terror of the patiently waiting blank screen. And there’s a feeling of triumph at the sight of an on camera confession of a man who proudly admits to fatally lynching a Muslim and getting a slap on the wrist from the local police department.
Clips from shows from NDTV competitors such as ZeeHindustan leave the impression of watching Faux News on steroids. In one particularly chilling sequence, news of 40 Indian soldiers being killed in an attack in Kashmir causes one competing newscaster to scream on air for the deaths of 100 Pakistanis for every slain Indian soldier in that incident. A Roman Emperor would call these “news” broadcasts little better than circuses without the bread.
Kumar’s journalistic style is decidedly less flashy. The stories the viewer sees him cover, such as a successful government job applicant committing suicide after having official government machinery putting his life on hold for years, may lack sensationalistic appeal. But they do the journalist’s necessary yeoman’s work of leaving their audience a little more informed than before and to give a public voice to the voiceless.
The rationale of one particularly sleazy newscaster that his higher TV ratings means he has a better show will turn the stomachs of viewers who care about good journalism. Helping to stir up division and hatred among a nation’s people does not make that newscaster’s viewers better citizens of India. Modi and the BJP’s unfortunate landslide election sweep feels like a reward for the NDTV competitors’ willingness to abandon journalistic integrity.
Kumar’s melancholy wandering through a darkened disassembled lobby provides a nice visual metaphor for the veteran reporter’s feelings about the state of journalism in his country. Yet a last act development never feels like an artificially tacked-on happy ending. It’s instead a cut through the fog of day to day struggle to reconnect with the core values that Kumar brings to the profession he chose. Still, maybe the film’s subject might benefit from getting a call-screening system.
(“They Shot The Piano Player” has been picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics. No release date has been announced.
(“Finding The Money” screens as the Closing Night Film of the Green Film Festival of San Francisco 2023. The in-person screening takes place at the Roxie Theater (3117 – 16th Street, SF at 6:15 PM on October 19, 2023. Online screenings take place between October 19 and 22, 2023 starting after the Roxie screening. For further information about the film and to order advance tickets, go here.
(“While We Watched” screens as the Opening Night Film of the 2023 Third i Film Festival. The screening takes place at 7:15 and 9:30 PM on October 20, 2023 at the Roxie Theater. For further information about the film and to order advance tickets, go here.)
