Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater

James Benning, Stemple Pass, 2012

James Benning, 13 Lakes, 2004

James Benning, Small Roads, 2011

Director Gabe Klinger at the Music Box Theatre

Director Gabe Klinger accepting the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, 2013

DOUBLE PLAY:  JAMES BENNING AND RICHARD LINKLATER          B             
aka:  Cinéma, de Notre Temps:  James Benning and Richard Linklater

USA  France  Portugal  (70 mi)  2013  d:  Gabe Klinger       Official site

Winner of the Golden Lion Classici Award as Best Documentary at Venice, while the director is a young friend to many here in the Chicago area, as Klinger has been part of the local cinema scene since he was seen at age 16 handing out homemade pamphlets he printed up about The Puppetmaster (Xi meng ren sheng) (1993) at a Film Center retrospective on the works of Hou Hsiao-hsien.  Endearing himself to many, he was like the little brother that many of us never had, eager and completely immersed in watching cinema at an early age, where watching Bergman at 12 was a horrifying experience, yet he survived with his wits intact and an open optimism about the future.  With a Brazilian-American cultural heritage and a history of international travel, coming to America at age 5, moving to Europe and spending his early teenage years in Barcelona, Spain where he saw his first Bresson retrospective at the age of 15 before moving back to the States, he brings a distinct European sensibility to the idea that art critics should support the work of artists, becoming parallel voices of the creative process, where the dual tracks are likely to only further expand potential audiences, such as making inlays into different generational age groups.  By 19, he was a programmer at Block Cinema (Block Cinema: Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art ...), where he programmed, among other things, a Georges Méliès series, a newly restruck 35 mm print of Nicholas Ray’s JOHNNY GUITAR (1954), Orson Welles’ CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1965), Roberto Rossellini rarities, and the first Chicago screening of Jia Zhang-ke’s PLATFORM (2000).  Perhaps more significantly, no one had ever screened Godard’s four-hour plus multi-part video series HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA (1998) in an American public screening before, where Klinger called Godard’s sister who had an existing copy in New York to obtain permission for a weekend screening.  He subsequently became a college cinema studies professor and a programmer for Rotterdam, Sydney, and the Chicago Underground Film festivals, while also presenting material for the Museum of Modern Art.  Eventually programming and writing about film became complementary tasks, becoming a film critic for various publications such as Senses of Cinema, Cinema Scope, BFI Sight and Sound, and Mubi Notebook before co-editing a book on filmmaker Joe Dante, Joe Dante - Columbia University Press.  Of interest, Klinger sent in his choices of the ten greatest films in the 2012 BFI Sight & Sound poll, Gabe Klinger | BFI.

Dennis Lim from The New York Times, August 20, 2010, Film - Miguel Gomes and Others Mix Drama and Reality ...

Jean-Luc Godard once observed that every fictional film is a documentary of its actors. Jacques Rivette finessed the aphorism, proposing that every film is a documentary of its own making, not only a record for posterity of the people in it but also a window into the culture that produced it. In a very literal sense, all films have documentary aspects: once the camera is turned on, whatever is captured, no matter how staged, contains a trace of reality, an element of chance. The inverse is true as well: no documentary, whatever its claims to objective reportage, is ever devoid of manipulation, since a controlling hand is evident in even the most routine matters of camera placement and shot selection.

While these are truisms, obvious enough to anyone who has given these issues more than passing consideration, they have long been easy to forget in a film culture that conditions us to think of fiction and documentary as distinct forms. One of the most striking developments in recent world cinema is the emergence of films that resist precisely those categories, that could be said to blur or thwart or simply ignore the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, staking out instead a productive liminal zone in between.

Klinger’s film was originally inspired by the Cinéma, de Notre Temps series, a collection of documentaries, each devoted to specific filmmakers that began airing on French television in 1964 under the guidance of André S. Labarthe, who is one of the producers of the film.  It was only with his blessing that this film could be made, where according to Klinger, “As a reference for films about filmmakers, you can’t get any better than that series.  So if you’re making a film about filmmaking, wouldn’t you want to be a part of that legacy?”  The genesis of this film began back in 1985 when Richard Linklater, prior to releasing his first feature, formed The Austin Film Society, a film club that screened arthouse and experimental films to an enthusiastic community of like-minded cinephiles, where their first invited guest happened to be experimental filmmaker James Benning, a Midwestern artist that moved to New York in 1980, who with the aid of grants released over a dozen short films, two documentaries, and a half dozen early features by that time, including the highly regarded avant-garde film 11 X 14 (1977), an experimental mosaic of single-shot sequences.  In the late 80’s Benning moved to California where he’s been teaching film/video at the California Institute of the Arts ever since, while continuing to make contemporary, non-narrative cinema that may confound easy categorization.  Suffice it to say, Benning met Linklater at the time and the two developed a personal relationship over the years, while Linklater has gone on to carve out his own reputation as one of the finest independent filmmakers working today.  Two artists seemingly on separate wavelengths, Klinger decides to recreate that initial experience by inviting Benning back to Linklater’s ranch in Bastrop, Texas where he could film them just being themselves.  Combining conversations and archival material, the film has a natural, easy-going fluidity about it where their philosophical explanations mix with clips from their films that offer a parallel expression of their respective artistic visions.  Bookended by Benning’s arrival and departure, the centerpiece of the film is a long, protracted WAKING LIFE (2001) style conversation between the two artists regarding the nature of cinema, what ultimately inspires them, and how these views might change over time. 

While there is nothing radical or new in this cinematic approach, which balances a reality that we see in the present with an alternate reality that exists in the selected clips from their films, Klinger never does a side-by-side comparison of their films or evaluates their unique differences, but simply allows them to speak for themselves, assuming the artists and their work are far more interesting than any reflective commentary by a budding filmmaker who obviously admires them both.  Shot over 4 or 5 days, one common theme is both are trying to control their environment, where Linklater is more connected to the age-old Hollywood style of filmmaking and has obviously produced more crowd-pleasing comedies by using assistants, a film crew, blocking off streets when he shoots, as he goes through a process of following a pre-scripted structure that is eventually edited into his final cut, while Benning has developed a more self-sufficient style by working alone, shooting and developing his film simultaneously, where he’s more concerned about weather patterns, constantly revisiting locations until he understands them well enough that he feels comfortable to begin shooting, where the only actual cost is the price of a sandwich that he brings along for each shoot.  Both filmmakers make films about the somewhat quasi standard and experimental use of time, but certainly one of the phenomenas of the film is the revelatory nature of the clips from Benning’s films, where he’s become something of a landscape artist uniquely expert at capturing a particular moment in time that often changes before our eyes, expressed in the stillness of a single shot, where he chooses to live a rather hermit-like lifestyle, with his Walden cabin sitting on one end of the woods bookended by an exact replica of a Ted Kaczynski cabin built into his isolated wooded retreat.  Both artists are college baseball players-turned-filmmakers, athletes that went to college on sports scholarships that went on to become filmmakers, something of an American phenomena.  According to Benning, “Once I discovered baseball that’s all I did.  I think I’m old enough now to recognize that this obsession with baseball just turned into an obsession with art.  I see my life as very continuous now when I look back at it.” 

Of significant interest is Linklater’s discussion about Boyhood (2014) as he was still shooting the film, where Klinger is invited behind the scenes into the editing room, as some of the edits between age differences had yet to be finalized, where in the beginning of the decade-long project, Linklater still thought of himself as a young kid, but once he saw the aging of the young kids onscreen, including his own daughter (who asked to be killed off as her teenage interest waned), it was a reminder of how much he himself had aged, completely altering his perspective.  Similarly, Klinger edited his own film, where once he realized what he had after the shooting was complete, he began reconfiguring in his mind what to do with it.  “There’s this one lunch scene where they’re just sitting down at Rick’s ranch in Bastrop.  We had two cameras on them and [the conversation] went on for about an hour and ten minutes.  It was completely absorbing and engaging and I remember at a certain point thinking, wow, this one shot could be my entire movie,” closing with a baseball sequence of them playing catch, throwing the ball back and forth, a metaphor for the exchange of ideas.  Klinger has known Benning for about ten years, walking up to him after one of his screenings and introducing himself, claiming the way he speaks about his films adds so much to the experience.  Meeting Linklater for the first time, his response to this first-time filmmaker was offering a wry comment, “I could see you’re a serious film guy.”  Always a hard corps cinema buff, the unbridled enthusiasm of Linklater actually defers to the wisdom of his elder statesman in Benning, where there are five decades of films from these two guys.  Always keeping a respectful distance, Klinger uses the fly-on-the-wall technique, “If you don’t have the purity in formal terms, then you try to achieve the purity in terms of structure and the ideas that you’re trying to convey in the film.  And so it was really important for me to be honest about our experience shooting and at the same time in the representation of the ideas that they were trying to express.”  Klinger indicates the film is driven in large part by Benning’s belief that Linklater had yet to make his defining work, insisting “I don’t think Rick has made his masterpiece yet.  I think he still has his masterpiece inside of him and I want to challenge him to make that masterpiece.”  That masterpiece could very well be Boyhood (my own pick for best film of the year), where the director also submitted his own observations about Linklater’s film in a Cinema Scope article, What is Boyhood? by Gabe Klinger.

Some of the quotes from this review were taken from an hour-long online radio interview in New York between Gabe Klinger and Peter Labuza on October 10, 2014 that can be heard here:  The Cinephiliacs: Episode #44 - Gabe Klinger (The Bowery).   

42

42                    B-                   

USA  (128 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Brian Helgeland

He (Jackie Robinson) knew that the future of blacks in baseball depended on it. The pressure was enormous, overwhelming, and unbearable at times. I don't know how he held up. I know I never could have.  —Duke Snider, Dodger teammate in the Hall of Fame

The Jackie Robinson story is a film black director Spike Lee has been wanting to make literally for decades, but never received funding for the project, so it will likely never get made.  Instead the film gets the exaggerated Hollywood treatment, finally getting onboard with a young, white filmmaker writing and directing the story, a maker of three fairly ordinary action thrillers to his credit, including two Health Ledger ventures, A KNIGHT’S TALE (2001) and THE ORDER (2003), and nothing since, telling the story in the most narrow view possible, anointing Robinson to the sainted hero status, making him all too flawlessly perfect and larger than life, where if you listen to Harrison Ford’s Branch Rickey tell it, with Robinson following in the footsteps of Jesus and turning the other cheek, this historical event unfolds like a Biblical crusade.  Focusing on only three years, 1945 – 47, Robinson is seen making the transition as the only black player on otherwise all-white minor league teams to becoming the first black player in major league baseball, starting the season with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, making an impact hitting .297 and winning Rookie of the Year honors while leading his team to a pennant.  End of film. 

Of interest to viewers, though left out of the film, the Dodgers didn’t win the World Series until 1955, the worst year of Robinson’s career as his skills had diminished considerably at age 37, playing one more year before being diagnosed with diabetes and retiring from baseball, where the Dodgers left Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles before the 1958 season.  Perhaps the biggest disgrace is Robinson’s inability to obtain employment with the Dodger organization after his career, where they were too busy redefining themselves in the leisurely image of Southern California.  Even after being elected into Baseball’s Hall of Fame, Robinson reached out with a letter to Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, attempting to bridge the supposed communication gap, but nobody anywhere in baseball, including General Manager Branch Rickey (who was in Pittsburgh at the time), offered him a job, despite the mythical hero status that the game of baseball supposedly pays him today, making an exception for Robinson alone when they retired his number 42 from baseball on the 60th anniversary of his major league debut, celebrating the first Jackie Robinson day on April 15, 2007, twenty-five years after he died.  What this film doesn’t tell is the untold story of how much of a tortuous psychological beating Robinson endured and how it effected him for the rest of his life, literally killing him prematurely at the age of 53.   

Chadwick Boseman, the actor playing Robinson, is a Chicago playwright whose play Deep Azure was performed by the Congo Square Theatre Company in Chicago and was nominated for a 2006 Joseph Jefferson Award for Best New Work, while he also has an extensive television acting career.  While the film balances his baseball playing days with his steamy romance with his wife, Nicole Behaire from Shame (2011), it is also divided in half, where the first half documents his progression through the minor leagues and the second half shows his first year in the big leagues.  What’s clear early on, however, is the equally heroic depiction of Dodger General Manager Branch Rickey by Harrison Ford, giving it the aw shucks treatment, where his vision-defining nobility make him a co-equal star in the film.  Needless to say, Boseman and Ford are both excellent, Boseman in exuding that electrifying joy and affection for playing the game, and Ford for having the moral mettle to see through and stand up to all the racial guff leveled at his player, basically running interference for him, offering alternative black housing in an era of “white only,” or pep talks from time to time, resuscitating his dwindling spirits.  Ford plays him like a country preacher, as if he’s been to all the rural revival meetings and can quote scripture with ease, where his cause is driven as if by divine understanding, making it all the more evident that the white writer/director cannot imagine how it must have felt being slurred and scorned as relentlessly as Robinson was.

While Rickey maintained a deep Christian faith, he was first and foremost a baseball man who wanted to win and saw that Robinson’s talent added value to the team on the field and at the gate, bringing in additional black customers, where he saw a future for blacks in baseball.  Anyone who saw players in the Negro Leagues at the time would have come to the same conclusion, as so many were major league quality players, but Rickey was able to get them at bargain basement prices.  Other forces were in play to integrate the game of baseball, including a long drawn out crusade led by the leading black newspapers at the time, The Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and Baltimore Afro-American who were also interested in integrating other American industries after the war, including the military, but Robinson was America's first taste of affirmative action, as he was a qualified black applicant denied the opportunity to advance in his chosen profession by an institutionally racist industry.  Later on at Pittsburgh, Rickey signed a contract with Roberto Clemente, the first Latino in baseball in 1955.  In this film, Rickey is Robinson’s closest confidante, the one who accurately predicted the death threats and racial hatred that Robinson would be forced to endure, while also foreseeing how easily Robinson could jeopardize the chances of other blacks coming after him if he ever responded to the taunts, as he would be blamed as the instigator, as was the racial superiority custom of the times. 

The film fails to mention Robinson’s tryout (closed to the public, consisting of only management personnel) along with two other black players with the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park in 1945, an event prompted by the persistence of several black journalists, which was mostly a humiliating travesty designed to placate baseball traditionalists, where the players were subjected to endless racial epithets and Robinson left the tryout angry and disappointed.  It wasn’t until 14-years later that the Red Sox were the last major league team to eventually integrate in the summer of 1959.  Also left out is the largely triumphant 1946 Triple A minor league season with the Montreal Royals, where in contrast to America, Canada embraced Robinson and two other black pitchers on the team, winning over the initial racial resistance of his southern Mississippi manager Clay Hopper on day one with his spectacular play in the field and by hitting .349 and stealing 40 bases in 124 games, laying the groundwork for 2 subsequent major league baseball franchises in Canada.  Like the jingoistic sentiment expressed in the Academy Award winning Argo (2012), both Hollywood films leave out significant Canadian influence.  Also inexplicably, the film leaves out other blacks that followed on the heels of Robinson in that same year, like Larry Doby playing for the Cleveland Indians just two months afterwards, both ending up in the Hall of Fame, or pitcher Dan Bankhead, baseball's first black pitcher, and the first black player to hit a home run in his first major league at bat, who happened to be Robinson's roommate with the Dodgers in 1947, as they were the first blacks to play in a World Series, eventually losing in 7 games to the New York Yankees. 

Born into a family of sharecroppers, Robinson starred in 4 white-dominated sports in college at UCLA, baseball, basketball, football, and track, where he was the nation’s college Long Jump champion.  His older brother Mack won a silver medal at the 1936 Olympics in the 200 meter dash, only 0.4 seconds behind Jesse Owens.  Robinson was actually pursuing a football career as a running back until Pearl Harbor intervened.  So while there are gaping holes in the film, it is well acted and inspirational, providing important perspective about the historical relevance of Robinson's life and accomplishments.  But the threadbare script just doesn’t do Robinson justice, especially in establishing his legacy as a groundbreaker, as the American public grew to appreciate the unbridled enthusiasm that he brought to the game, where kids growing up on the 50’s and 60’s learned to appreciate racial diversity not through landmark legislative or Supreme Court decisions, but through everyday exposure to so many black and Latin baseball players who became not only their favorites, but among the greatest players of all time, like Roberto Clemente, Rod Carew, Juan Marichal, Frank Robinson, Bob Gibson, Willie Mays, or Hank Aaron.  Robinson’s stature transcends sports, as he almost single handedly dispelled the notion of black inferiority, where his Hall of Fame career subsequently spoke for itself, becoming a role model for courage and grace, both on the field and off as he opened doors, calling into question the senseless injustice of a segregated white and black America, becoming a good will ambassador for integration and equality, an advocate for Civil Rights, where his life serves as a personal and professional inspiration, posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.  He’s a man that helped blacks believe that things they could not imagine were now possible, where Robinson took the hateful insults, racial slurs, death threats and abuse and made it just a little bit easier for the next person of color to become the “first” or second in their school or workplace.