Hollywood Boulevard is the Film Capital This Week with AFI Fest and Cinematheque

GELFAND’S WORLD-Los Angeles likes to bill itself as the creative capital of the world. For the next few days, we can also make an argument that we are the film presentation capital of the world, thanks to the AFI Fest and the always fascinating American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater. 

For part of this week, the Egyptian is itself a part of the AFI Fest, including a free discussion and partial screening of a film about the turmoil in Selma, Alabama hosted by Oprah Winfrey. The Egyptian will continue with its own presentations later in the week, including Armenian films in the Arpa festival and the week after, the film Cake, with a personal appearance by Jennifer Aniston. 

There is plenty yet to come at the AFI Fest, but I'm going to concentrate my remarks on the recent film The Salt of the Earth, coming to us after its triumph at Cannes, as described by Karin Luisa. It's one example of what a film festival can do at the optimum. 

Nominally, The Salt of the Earth falls under that dreaded term 'documentary,' as it is, technically speaking, a film about a real person, his work, and how he has personally evolved through that work. But this film is so much more. Through the horrifying historical importance of much of the work, it transcends the usual scope of the documentary form. 

The film is centered on the life and work of the photographer Sebastiao Salgado. As described in the film and summarized in the Luisa article linked above, Salgado began as a Brazilian economist transplanted with his young wife to Paris and then to London. He had a promising career with the World Bank until he found his true passion, after he borrowed his wife's camera to take on one of his bank trips. 

Salgado and his wife Lelia then made the decision to go into photography as a passion and a life's work, him behind the camera, and Lelia as a combination editor, mastermind, and homemaker. Along the way they had two sons. He spent long periods away from his family on long treks in the hinterlands of several continents. 

Salgado's  early exploration brought numerous books about the variety of human life, including hill people in Papua, New Guinea, South American mountain dwellers, and various peoples of Africa. 

The early explorations of Africa eventually led to some of the most horrific images recorded in modern history, including the personal suffering induced by civil war in Rwanda. But the worst episodes, it would seem, were in the Ethiopian famine. Salgado relates to us, the audience, directly, that the famine was created by the government withholding food from its own people. 

The film, through careful editing, leads up to that moment by showing us what starvation does to people. Salgado and the documentary itself explain how famine induces disease, and shows photographs of fathers preparing their children and their wives for burial. The world was aware of the political backdrop behind the Ethiopian famine, but this film makes clear how distant political decisions have an effect at the personal level. 

You can sometimes tell how well a film is getting through to the audience by whether it suppresses the crackling of candy wrappers and whispered chatter. The Chinese Theater Screen 1, full to the top with viewers, was dead silent. 

There is a lot more in The Salt of the Earth, including a long seemingly parenthetical story about Salgado's return to his father's ranch in Brazil. That visit, it turns out, becomes the second part of this movie. Lelia suggests that the drought impoverished land be recreated as the once verdant tropical forest it had been. The film goes through a multiyear history of the replanting of the forest on the bare hillsides. leading to the growth of a million or more trees and ultimately, the conversion of the family spread into a national park along with the creation of a foundation aimed at natural ecosystem recovery. 

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Along the way, the filmmakers take us on a photographic expedition to the far north, where we make close contact with a polar bear and a herd of walruses in the wild. It seems that Salgado has found some solace in the natural world, and seems to be concentrating on nature photography in this era of his long career. 

I've left out the discussion of economics and the effect on working people, another famous volume in Salgado's career, but it's all documented in what is more than a documentary and yet something surpassing the merely fictional. 

All in all, a powerful portrayal of humanity through the eyes of one family and a documentary crew.

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The competition for the AFI Fest this week, at least in terms of newspaper discussion, was the noire film series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). LACMA publicized last Friday's presentations as "After Expressionism, the versatile Edgar G. Ulmer." The two films together came to a total of 170 minutes, hardly much longer than some recent films by themselves. Detour is kind of a cartoon shot with real actors, a mere 69 minutes in length, in which a hard luck guy gets himself involved with two con artists, one male and the other female. Both of the con artists end up dead, and our protagonist will end up taking the legal fall for what he didn't actually do, or at least didn't intend to do. 

It's hard to visit LACMA without wondering whether the film program itself, once so terrific, is doomed. It's not been much of a secret that the current administration is most intent on a building program. The plan involves dusting off last decade's failed plan to tear the current buildings down to the foundation and do a whole new structure on what is left. What's not clear is whether the current ruling group is equally wedded to maintaining Lacma's once preeminent position as the center of historical film presentations. 

In spite of the fact that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is just now about to receive two new members (out of a total of five), the Supervisors have just recently supported, at least in words, paying out $125 million of your money to LACMA as part of a half-billion dollar architectural redo. 

In taking this position, the Supervisors don't seem to have worried too much about popular opinion, or the effects on the local community, or the views of its designated neighborhood councils or civic associations.

 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])  

-cw