Thursday, May 9, 2002
11:50pm
One of those mornings: Up all night doing yesterday's weblog so overslept, had to iron something to wear, ran for the bus, ran for the train only to sit at 23rd Street for 10 minutes due to the ever elusive "sick passenger," ran across Franklin Street to the press office for the festival. And now I find that I did not, in fact, snag the ticket I'd requested to the noon luncheon and panel discussion that I was rushing to. Martin Scorsese and food critic Gael Greene talking about food in the movies -- how cool would that have been? I'll never know.
So, with time to kill before my next screening, I head to the hospitality suite for something to eat -- please notice that there was no time for breakfast in the above timeline. Over chow, I meet Eva Saks, a filmmaker whose short "Family Values" is playing at the festival. Sounds immensely clever on her flyer: "Meet Becky and Donna, a nice American lesbian couple with a house in the suburbs, who run a family business cleaning up murder scenes." Best thing: It's a documentary. She's not making this stuff up. I hope to catch its Sunday screening. (Eva's site is at EvaSaksMovies.com.)
After breakfast/lunch, I wander to the Media Lab, mostly to check my email but also because the Media Lab is in the Tribeca Film Center and I'm hoping to, you know, just sort of casually bump into DeNiro, and what better place than his offices?
Apparently there are better places, cuz it doesn't happen.
Still time to kill...
I recall suddenly that not only is Sunday Mother's Day, it's also my brother's birthday. I go in search of a store selling greeting cards, which isn't as easy as it sounds. Until very recently, Tribeca was a kind of wild frontier, with few amenities like supermarkets, pizza places, movie theaters, and other necessities of life. Even now, there's not much around. Except, um, interesting architecture.
This building is a few blocks down Greenwich Street from the Tribeca Film Center. It reminds me uncomfortably of the memorial in Hiroshima, the building that had its skin blown away down to its steel frame, and the city just left it like that as a horrible reminder of what happened. That New York's own Ground Zero is within spitting distance only makes it more squirm-inducing. Do the people who live in those buildings -- for apartments they contain -- look up every day and feel weird?
1:45pm
It's a gray, drizzly, damp, coldish day. That's okay: this is New York in the spring, usually. Nothing like rain-slicked cobblestones for turning an ankle or two.
Think happy! American Express employees and/or volunteers are handing out free bags of popcorn on every other corner along Greenwich Street. All hail AmEx, the founding sponsor of the festival, not only for the freebies but for being good neighbors in Tribeca -- the company was hit hard on September 11, chased out of its offices, but it's moving back in on Monday, May 13, an AmEx bigwig announced to hearty applause during the festival opening ceremony yesterday.
2:15pm
There's a whole track of festival programming related to 9/11, and some of it is screening at a new United Artists multiplex in the new Embassy Suites Hotel on North End Avenue, right on the edge of the World Trade Center site. (The big white tent is a decontamination station that workers on the WTC site use to clean up and not track that toxic dust home with them.)
The theater's screening rooms are up a few floors, and the lobby windows overlook Ground Zero -- it looks like a big construction site now. Notice the yellow taxis on the streets in the foreground -- just a few weeks ago, those streets were still closed to traffic. The small white building on the far side of the site is Century 21, a famous discount department store. I never used to be able to find it, because it was surrounded and hidden by tall buildings. No more. It looks kinda naked and vulnerable now. (The purple lines are the reflections of neon lights in the theater lobby.)
2:37pm
This was a mistake. I should have avoided the 9/11 programming completely. I don't need this. I was starting to feel a little better, starting to have long stretches of days and weeks with no random and unprovoked crying. And this is bringing it all back. But no: It's not like I could have avoided these films. I'm still obsessed by trying to figure it all out, and if thinking about 9/11 still upsets me, then it's because I haven't quite worked through it yet.
First is Laura Plotkin's "21," a 3-minute interview with Niomi, a Brooklyn woman who suffered a terribly physical beating at the hands of bigoted morons in late September, morons who thought she was Middle Eastern and so felt free to do to her what they pleased. The police encouraged her not to pursue the matter. Welcome to John Ashcroft's America. (Laura's site is at www.lolafilms.net.) Now I'm crying and angry.
Next up is "9-11," a 25-minute guerilla documentary by activist filmmakers, of which we inexplicably see only 5 minutes. Here is all the news we didn't see on the news, the things only we New Yorkers knew were happening: the protests and the candlelight vigils and the endless walls of heartbreaking flyers posted by the families and friends of people missing from the WTC, desperate for information about their loved ones. The first time I saw one of these posters, on Thursday, September 13, I burst into tears as I was walking down the street -- this was the most awful and pitiful thing I'd ever seen, little posters taped to phone kiosks and light poles begging for information about a husband or a wife or a child or a friend, like these dead people were lost puppies. Powerful and raw, "9-11" brings me right back to September. I'm not sure I needed to go back, though.
Finally, the feature presentation is Deborah Shaffer's "From the Ashes: 10 Artists." In her introduction before the film, Shaffer talked about her "obsession" with 9/11 and how it became this film, which she created for Austrian television. She talks to 10 artists -- videomakers, musicians, painters, performance artists -- about their lives post-9/11, and the range of responses encompasses everything I've felt, too. One guitar player laments that he can't "hear the music" anymore; a performance artist who calls herself a "fool," in the court jester sense, wonders how she can continue her art; a painter has an even greater focus on her work; a videomaker finds good in the disaster, documenting a 12-year-old Tribeca girl who bakes cookies for rescue workers. All these artists are going through the same crisis of confidence, the same sudden plunge into self-reflection, that I did after 9/11 and still struggle with today. I feel like I've been punched in the chest.
4:30pm
Emotional stress always makes me hungry. I sit outside the theater at a little cafe, enjoying my bagel and tea, and watching the festival people set up for the red-carpet event for Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood later. Former frat boys/current stockbrokers in suits wander by, wondering WTF is going on. [my review]
5:10pm
Back into the multiplex for Chiefs, a documentary by Daniel Junge, making its world premiere at the festival. Ah, the NYC moviegoer: The screening room fills up for this obscure flick about Native American high school basketball players. The film is absolutely wonderful: suspenseful, funny, touching, real. Wyoming Indian High School fields an incredible basketball team, culled from a student body of only 161 -- they double the score of their opponents, from far larger schools, in many, many games -- and the film covers the ups and downs of two championship seasons. The game is as important in the ghetto of the reservation as it is in inner-city ghettoes: a potential ticket out, and a reason for everyone besides the players to be proud. Its characters are unforgettable, especially the conflicted, hilarious party dawg Beaver C'Bearing. From its straightforward depiction of the racism the players face to its poignant exploration of the kids' opposing desires to stay on the "res" -- where there's nothing for them, one mother laments -- and leave it behind, Chiefs is something to cheer.
7:25pm
There's a series of these all over Lower Manhattan. This one seems the most fitting to the festival, considering whose inspiration it was.
8:10pm
Martin Scorsese chose his "Best of New York" films for a track at the festival, and 9 of the 10 are the likes of Naked City and On the Waterfront: hard, gritty flicks that inspired and inform Scorsese's work. The 10th is the one Scorsese admits depicts a New York he'll never be able to put on screen, romantic and intellectual and neurotically sweet: Woody Allen's Manhattan. Oh, what a lovely film, and what a perfect antidote to my memories-of-9/11 day. Allen's 1979 black-and-white valentine to the city, set to Gershwin, shows how far his work has fallen in recent years: the opening montage alone, of the city in every season, set to Allen's attempts at a first chapter of a novel about Manhattan, reflects every reason to love this city and every way to hate it. People who live in book-stuffed apartments and buy the Sunday paper on Saturday night fall in and out of love with the city as their background, infusing their relationships with its own chaos. Simply perfect.
9:47pm
A foggy mist has settled on the city, I see as I leave Pace University, where Manhattan was screened. The buildings and their lights are shrouded and beautiful, made soft and mysterious by the fog. The Brooklyn Bridge, right there as I descend into the subway, looks just like it does in that shot at the end of the film, distant and near and floating over the river. I feel an almost unbearable surge of love for this city.
