{"id":29164,"date":"2023-10-18T12:59:32","date_gmt":"2023-10-18T19:59:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=29164"},"modified":"2023-10-18T12:59:33","modified_gmt":"2023-10-18T19:59:33","slug":"reviews-from-mill-valley-green-film-festival-of-san-francisco-and-third-i-film-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/10\/18\/reviews-from-mill-valley-green-film-festival-of-san-francisco-and-third-i-film-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"REVIEWS FROM MILL VALLEY, GREEN FILM FESTIVAL OF SAN FRANCISCO, AND THIRD I FILM FESTIVAL"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by\u00a0Peter Wong<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0October 16, 2023 (BeyondChron.org)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Why did gifted Brazilian piano player Francisco Tenorio Jr. mysteriously  disappear in 1976?  Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal\u2019s heartfelt and entertaining animated docufiction \u201cThey Shot The Piano Player\u201d answers this question.  Fictional music journalist Jeff\u2019s (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.\u2019s own incredible keyboard work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along with screening Trueba & Mariscal\u2019s 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\u2019s Mind The Gap Award and screening Leeson\u2019s four short film cycle \u201cCyborgian Rhapsody.\u201d  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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The earliest of the films, \u201cSeduction Of A Cyborg,\u201d doesn\u2019t involve physical sex or flirtation.  A woman who\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The featured technology and video visual effects seen here may seem primitive compared to what\u2019s 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\u2019s far too easy to mentally drown in the flood of new worlds opened by this technology and now introduced into the user\u2019s consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShadow Stalker,\u201d 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\u2019s high crime areas to create a series of 500\u2019 x 500\u2019 red squares on city maps which police could patrol to supposedly stop crime before it happened.  Of course, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more philosophical section of Leeson\u2019s 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\u2019s a Bill of Rights for the digital age, one of the Amendments needs to be the right to own one\u2019s digital identity and personal privacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The award-winning \u201cLogic Paralyzes The Heart\u201d 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 \u201cShadow Stalker,\u201d 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\u2019s being used now, who exactly is the enemy?  It seems the answer is the most socially vulnerable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From there, the short touches on such subjects as the commodification of people\u2019s 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\u2019 privacy as the basis for their code.  The film\u2019s odd title refers to the consequences of an existence where decisions are based solely on logic.  Chen\u2019s cyborg winds up being a philosophical creature as it realizes the questions it asks contain the seeds of their answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final and most recent short \u201cCyborgian Rhapsody \u2013 Immortality\u201d happens to be the most meta of the cycle\u2019s shorts.  \u201cSarah,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real Leeson\u2019s appearances (both present day and from 1978) winds up being a reality check on Sarah\u2019s desires.  The line about Sarah\u2019s having access to tons of information yet possessing the memory of a goldfish feels brutal.  But what truly twists the knife in Sarah\u2019s desires is Leeson explaining why immortality is something the Chatbot can never achieve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pedants may dismiss Leeson\u2019s shorts based on her misunderstanding of what the term cyborg means.  But they can\u2019t dismiss either the big questions the filmmaker raises or her handling of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likely to polarize some viewers and unlock the mental dungeons of others describes the effects of watching the Closing Night Film for this year\u2019s Green Film Festival of San Francisco.  Maren Poitras\u2019 timely must-see documentary \u201cFinding The Money\u201d can be called the economists\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is the previous sentence hyperbole? Not really.  Hyperbole would be labeling Poitras\u2019 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The economic theory discussed in \u201cFinding The Money\u201d is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).  While ridiculed and currently derided by Serious People in Economics, Poitras\u2019 film informatively and educationally walks the viewer through the theory\u2019s central ideas and also exposes the Serious Economics Peoples\u2019 lies and misunderstandings regarding MMT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two commonsensical questions provide a good starting point in the film for discussing MMT.  One is \u201cIf the United States government can print its own money whenever it wants, why does it need to borrow money?\u201d  The other is \u201cWhat is money?\u201d  (Interestingly, \u201crespectable\u201d economics people\u2019s responses to these questions tend to be \u201cI never thought about it\u201d and \u201cthat\u2019s the third rail of economics study.\u201d)  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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answers to these questions (\u201cit\u2019s not \u2018borrowing\u2019 money\u201d and \u201ca government IOU\u201d) 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\u2019s understanding of which phenomena actually enrich society and which will actually hurt it.  As a result of that mental flipping, the film\u2019s subjects show how some of the biggest challenges facing America (and the world) are actually solvable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019 film shows it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFinding The Money\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019t produce crippling inflation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This writer had a couple of questions about MMT which Poitras\u2019 film doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cFinding The Money\u201d is intended as an introduction to MMT basics, perhaps these questions can be answered at another time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the film\u2019s best ironies is learning that MMT\u2019s public spokeswoman wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s validity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poitras\u2019 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 \u201ceverything you know (about economics) is wrong.\u201d  Fortunately, \u201cFinding The Money\u201d never descends into self-satisfied certainty about the paradigm shifting ideas it presents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If someone needs to look for examples of the obnoxiously self-satisfied and certain, Poitras\u2019 film shows that one should look at the people who utter the film\u2019s titular phrase.  The \u201cfinding the money\u201d question is actually a polite way of saying \u201cI do not value the societal importance of your project and it\u2019s more important to make rich people richer.\u201d  Ever notice that government projects which benefit rich recipients never get blocked by \u201cfinding the money\u201d concerns?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t stopped its counting down to the human species\u2019 doom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also timely is the film opening this year\u2019s 3rd i South Asian Film Festival.  Vinay Shukla\u2019s relevant and disturbing documentary \u201cWhile We Watched\u201d is a riveting portrait of the strength of character it takes to speak truth to power in a very hostile journalistic environment.  It\u2019s alternately a stressful, hopeful, despairing, triumphant, and ultimately intense portrait of a modern-day Sisyphus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ravish Kumar, the subject of Shukla\u2019s portrait, would seriously dispute that he\u2019s being eternally punished.  After all, he\u2019s 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\u2019s ZDTV.  The big trouble is, Kumar\u2019s peers are also practicing the same profession\u2026except they\u2019re doing so with fear (of being declared \u201canti-national\u201d and subjected to harassment) or favor (towards powerful BJP politicians publicly lying). The film\u2019s subject has himself been publicly branded as \u201canti-national,\u201d and the viewer gets to see some of the forms of the resulting harassment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t help but despair at the seemingly unstoppable power of the BJP\u2019s fundamentalist fascists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhile We Watched\u201d offers a fly on the wall immersion in Kumar\u2019s world.  The viewer meets Kumar\u2019s 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\u2019s also humbling to those who write to see even Kumar facing the familiar terror of the patiently waiting blank screen.  And there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cnews\u201d broadcasts little better than circuses without the bread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kumar\u2019s 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\u2019s necessary yeoman\u2019s work of leaving their audience a little more informed than before and to give a public voice to the voiceless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s people does not make that newscaster\u2019s viewers better citizens of India. Modi and the BJP\u2019s unfortunate landslide election sweep feels like a reward for the NDTV competitors\u2019 willingness to abandon journalistic integrity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kumar\u2019s melancholy wandering through a darkened disassembled lobby provides a nice visual metaphor for the veteran reporter\u2019s feelings about the state of journalism in his country.  Yet a last act development never feels like an artificially tacked-on happy ending.  It\u2019s 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\u2019s subject might benefit from getting a call-screening system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(\u201cThey Shot The Piano Player\u201d has been picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics.  No release date has been announced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(\u201cFinding The Money\u201d 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 \u2013 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(\u201cWhile We Watched\u201d 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<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Peter Wong\u00a0on\u00a0October 16, 2023 (BeyondChron.org) Why did gifted Brazilian piano player Francisco Tenorio Jr. mysteriously  disappear in 1976?  Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal\u2019s heartfelt and entertaining animated docufiction \u201cThey Shot The Piano Player\u201d answers this question.  Fictional music journalist Jeff\u2019s (Jeff Goldblum) book research will lead him to the Bottle… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1216],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29164"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29164"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29165,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29164\/revisions\/29165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}