DAY TWO: ART MADE; ART MAKING

By Joyce Marcel



Sorry, I was zonked when I wrote yesterday, so I forgot to explain that when Sister Jane, in "The Sermons of Sister Jane," was talking about sex as being a God-given, life-affirming gift, she was explaining why she didn't believe in the Virgin birth. After all, I think she said, why would God deny this precious gift - sexual intimacy - to the mother of His son?
That said, let's move on.
Yesterday, I also said that one of the problems with things like women's film festivals is that the emphasis is usually on the women and not on the films - or at least the film as art. "Enemies of Happiness," the Afghanistan film, is a good example. Great idea, great person at the center of the story, great relevance - but terrible film making.
So I was delighted - no, enchanted - to encounter the exquisite "Time to Die," written and directed by Dorota Kedriezawska of Poland in black-and-white.
This is a work of fiction, made in 2007, which tells the story of a 92-year-old old woman, Aniela, played by the actress Danuta Szaflarska, who is living in a large and stately old house which, thanks to the end of the Communist regime, she now occupies alone.
The film tells how Aniela, caught by scheming neighbors and her ungrateful son, at first decides to die, and then comes up with a scheme of her own.
The pacing of film is slow, ever so slow. Smoke rises in the air, candles burn, and the camera focuses deeply on Szaflarska's beautiful, aged, lined face and age-spotted, graceful hands. Every frame is lush with detail - a million leaves on the trees, a million wrinkles on her face - until you are absolutely drunk with the generosity all this ravishing beauty and the painterly light that illuminates it.
The most original concept: half of the time, you are identifying not with Aniela, but instead experiencing her through the expressive face of her dog, Philadelphia. According to IMDb, "the dog was so popular to the first audiences, that they demanded (and got) a special "Canine Award" at the 32nd Polish Film Awards (where actress Danuta Szaflarska had also won Best Actress)."
There were only 20 or so people in the Latchis's downstairs theater when I saw the film, but it's being replayed today at 4 p.m.
This is a stunning, moving film that affects you the way a great piece of music does. Absolutely the best fictional film I've seen so far at the festival. (Actually, it's the only fictional film I've seen so far.)
I think I'm going to say, "Best film in festival" more than once.

The next film I saw was a polemic called "The Motherhood Manifesto," which has at its aim public policy changes to allow more family leave time and to, eventually, bring about universal health care. We're a country that touts its "family values," says the film, but we screw the family at every turn.
Yes.
The film is by Laura Pacheco and narrated by Mary Steenburgen.
Since every other developed country on our planet (and many countries less developed) (actually, most countries) has universal health care, or single-payer national health insurance, or some other kind of national health insurance, it's hard to understand why our country doesn't. (Except that insurance is about 16 percent, I believe, of the nation's economy - an economy that isn't doing too well right now, as you may have heard. And so we may not want to screw with it any more than we have to.)
In any case, we need a national health care system, so I have no problem with that part of the film.
Mothers need time to bond with their babies. Yes. Everybody is working too many hours and children are shortchanged. Yes. Poorer people, especially single mothers, are the hardest hit. Yes. Children spend multiple hours a day connected to electronic equipment (text messaging, television, Internet, everything) and may be losing sight of real life. Yes. Kids see 1,000 murders a year on TV. Wow.
It's hard to argue with all that.
To me, the film appears to be part of a larger movement to either create "mothers" (or parents) as a protected class, or to carve out for them a larger slice of a rapidly diminishing economic pie.
The Web site Momrising.org spells it out: The goal is to bring about "family friendly social and workplace policies."
In the panel discussion afterward, a British woman asked why Americans were so afraid of speaking up for their rights in family matters. She mentioned that in England, with socialized medicine, you can leave your job and still be covered. Here, we stick in jobs we hate just for the medical insurance.
And so it comes full circle.
Frankly, most of us are lucky if we even have jobs (see economy, above). In an uber-capitalist society run by fat-cat billionaires for the exclusive benefit of fat-cat billionaires, workers have no rights at all.
Why don't working people vote their pocketbooks? Why don't they unionize, for example?
Well, as long as Republicans can scare people with tales of "the homosexual agenda" or with immigrants as demons who are coming to take their jobs, their homes and rape their children, people can be
duped into voting against their economic interests. Fools and damned fools. As H. L. Mencken once said, ""No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
And if that fails, give them Britney Spears.


"Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women" by Rachel Talbot, is a great film with a misleading name.
It's the story of six female Jewish American comedians - how's that for a specialized identity? - Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner and playwright Wendy Wasserstein. It's hosted by successful comics Judy Gold, Jackie Hoffman, Cory Kahaney, and Jessica Kirson, who sit around a table in Katz's Delicatessen ("Send a salami to your boy in the army") and talk about these women's careers and being female, Jewish and funny all at the same time.
But why "Making Trouble?" There have always been female Jewish (Jewish female? Which modifier comes first?) comics - in vaudeville, in radio, on the stage, in television and in film. In fact, there have always been funny Jewish women.
(Also funny women in every culture and country, but that's not the issue here.)
Does the title imply that if a woman is funny, she's a troublemaker? That's just silly.
I took a copy of this film down to Florida and watched it with my 90-year-old mother. We were both enchanted - after all, it's our heritage, too. But when I saw it again in the packed Hooker-Dunham theater, which rang with laughter, it was doubly wonderful.
Watch this film and be entertained. The energy and talent of Molly Picon - actress, musician, comic, acrobat, what can't she do? And she did it for something like seven decades! I remember watching her on television in the Fifties. The sly wisdom and clowning of elegant Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice, whose Jewish accent was put on for the stage. The sexy Red Hot Mama Sophie Tucker, who was a hooker before she was a star. Then the more modern women, like the great Joan Rivers, who would kill another comic for a turn on stage (she claims that younger comics like Sarah Silverman are taking food from her mouth). Ot innocent, devilishly wicked and adorable Gilda Radner. And the wonderful and funny playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who died much too young.
I found this on the Web site of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and it says it better than I can: "These are women whose comedy defied cultural expectations and changed the rules. Get ready to duck when the zingers fly and guffaw at this hilarious, insightful documentary--an exhilarating mix of contemporary performance, interviews and rare archival footage. What is it that makes funny Jewish women so funny...and so Jewish? Is it a nose wrinkled just so, accompanied by a devilishly sexy grin or a jolting and sarcastic punch line? Is it the acerbic humor of generations of immigrant and first-generation women who fought for a place in America with their brains and their wit, and at the same time needed to make a living? Making Trouble celebrates three generations who, for all of the reasons above, successfully went from vaudeville and the Yiddish theater to Broadway, from Ziegfeld's Follies to Saturday Night Live."
Lauren Antler, one of the producers of the film, talked with the audience afterward. In answer to a comment by Ann Stokes, who said that she wanted more footage of the women, and that she was particularly disturbed by all the men talking in the early scenes, Antler said that archival footage is very expensive. I thought that was interesting. I'd like to see a lot more footage of all these funny women, too.
It's playing again next Sunday at 8:30 p.m.

"What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann," by Steven Cantor, is about making art. It's so much about making art that Cantor gets lost and the movie, as well as the world inside it, is dominated by Mann, the photographer who became famous for her 1992 nude pictures of her children.
"It never occurred to me to leave home to make art," she says.
Luminously lovely herself, with wide blue eyes that seem to go on to the horizon, and totally self-obsessed and obsessed by images, Mann shoots her children, her husband, her dogs, her chickens, her horses, her trees and - hold on - decomposing bodies at a forensic sight. The bodies and some other photographs, including bones from the body of one of her pet greyhounds, which she dug up after it had partly decomposed, were part of an exhibit recently at the Corcoran Museum in D.C.
"I love mummified skin," she says. "It's so beautiful. It looks like fabric."
The photographs are beautiful, truly. As beautiful as they are weird. "There might be some people upset by these pictures," she says. And later, "But it reminds us to embrace life."