FILM EVENT: PROGIE AWARDS 2014

The Trumbo (Best Picture): Fruitvale Station.

 

And now for something different

By John Esther

Over the weekend, while the voters behind the Spirit Awards and Oscars were awarding relatively, and quite similarly, politically safe films reinforcing the status quo, the James Agee Cinema Circle – which the four current writers of this publication are members – announced their Progie Awards.

Congratulations to the filmmakers below and thank you very much. You were a welcoming breath of fresh air amongst the intellectual, political repression largely found in the driving forces of current cinema.

THE TRUMBO: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE PICTURE is named after Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten, who was imprisoned for his beliefs and refusing to inform. Trumbo helped break the blacklist when he received screen credit for Spartacus and Exodus in 1960.

Winner: Fruitvale Station. Written-directed by Ryan Coogler.

THE GARFIELD: The Progie Award for BEST ACTOR in a progressive picture is named after John Garfield, who rose from the proletarian theatre to star in progressive pictures such as Gentleman's Agreement and Force of Evil, only to run afoul of the Hollywood Blacklist.

Winner: Chiwetel Ejiofor for 12 Years a Slave.

KAREN MORLEY AWARD: The Progie Award for BEST ACTRESS in a film portraying women in a progressive picture is named for Karen Morley, co-star of 1932’s Scarface and 1934’s Our Daily Bread. Morley was driven out of Hollywood in the 1930s for her leftist views, but maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for New York’s Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954.

Winner: Barbara Sukowa for Hannah Arendt.




Recipient of The Renoir and the Dziga Awards: The Act of Killing.

THE RENOIR: The Progie Award for BEST ANTI-WAR FILM is named after the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, who directed the 1937 anti-militarism masterpiece, Grand Illusion.

Winner: The Act of Killing. Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, Anonymous, and Christine Cynn.

THE GILLO: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE FOREIGN FILM is named after the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, who lensed the 1960s classics, The Battle of Algiers and Burn!

Winners (three-way tie):  China’s A Touch of Sin; Italy’s The Great Beauty; and Slovenia’s Class Enemy (my pick).

THE DZIGA: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE DOCUMENTARY is named after the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who directed 1920s nonfiction films such as the Kino Pravda series and The Man With the Movie Camera.

Winner: The Act of Killing. Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, Anonymous, and Christine Cynn.

OUR DAILY BREAD AWARD: The Progie Award for the MOST POSITIVE AND INSPIRING WORKING CLASS SCREEN IMAGE.

Winner: The Angels’ Share. Directed by Ken Loach.

THE ROBESON: The Progie Award for the BEST PORTRAYAL OF PEOPLE OF COLOR that shatters cinema stereotypes, in light of their historically demeaning depictions onscreen. It is named after courageous performing legend, Paul Robeson, who starred in 1936’s Song of Freedom and 1940’s The Proud Valley, and narrated 1942’s Native Land.

Winner: 12 Years a Slave. Directed by Steve McQueen.

The Bunuel: The Wolf on Wall Street.

THE BUNUEL: The Progie Award for the MOST SLYLY SUBVERSIVE SATIRICAL CINEMATIC FILM in terms of form, style and content is named after Luis Bunuel, the Spanish surrealist who directed 1929’s The Andalusian Dog, 1967’s Belle de Jour and 1972’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Winner: The Wolf of Wall Street. Directed by Martin Scorsese.

THE LAWSON: The Progie Award for BEST ANTI-FASCIST FILM is named after John Howard Lawson, screenwriter of 1938’s anti-Franco Blockade and the 1940s anti-Nazi films Four Sons, Action in the North Atlantic, Sahara and Counter-Attack, and one of the Hollywood Ten.

Winner: Hannah Arendt. Directed by Margarethe von Trotta.

THE SERGEI: The Progie Award for LIFETIME PROGRESSIVE ACHIEVEMENT ON- OR OFFSCREEN is named after Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet director of masterpieces such as Potemkin and 10 Days That Shook the World.

Winners: Robert Redford and John Sayles.

 

FILM REVIEW: HANNAH ARENDT

Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) in Hannah Arendt.

Paying for the privilege of owning herself

By Don Simpson

Hannah Arendt begins as Adolf Eichmann is captured during a covert action by the Israeli police. Eichmann is whisked away to Jerusalem to be tried and punished for the war crimes committed against Jewish people by the Nazi government during World War II. Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) immediately submits a pitch to the New Yorker to travel to Israel to cover the trial. The New Yorker editor William Shawn (Nicolas Woodeson) jumps at the opportunity to have the highly regarded New School political theory professor -- and author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958) -- covering such a landmark story for them.

A German Jew, Arendt was interned during WWII in a concentration camp in France but escaped, eventually emigrating to the United States with her husband, Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg). Despite her firsthand experience with the Nazis, Arendt's approach to the Eichmann trial is nothing short of humanist. Arendt sees Eichmann as a government employee who took an oath in which he promised to blindly abide by the Nazi agenda. Even as a high-ranking SS officer, Eichmann merely played a small-yet-integral part of a much larger bureaucratic machine. Eichmann coordinated the transportation of Jews during WWII to various concentration camps, but it could not be proven that he ever participated firsthand in the gruesome mass murders. He was just a paper-pusher, rendered unable to think for himself by the Nazi system. Eichmann's thoughtlessness is precisely what attracted Arendt to his case.

Witnessing Eichmann's trial led Arendt to conclude that evil grew from the thoughtlessness of ordinary people who obeyed orders without consideration of the consequences of their actions. The problem was that a hyper-intellectualized lecture about "the banality of evil" was not exactly the type of coverage of Eichmann's trial that people -- especially Jews -- wanted to read in the New Yorker. They wanted journalistic reporting on the trial, not a philosophy lesson on the nature of evil. Arendt was also quite critical of the actions of some Jewish leaders during the Holocaust, thus igniting tremendous controversy and animosity toward her. Arendt was considered to be snobbish, cold and unsympathetic towards Jews. But, in her own defense, Arendt explained that anyone who writes about the Nazis and the Holocaust should attempt to understand what turns seemingly ordinary people such as Eichmann into tools of totalitarianism.

Writer-director Margarethe von Trotta's approach to Arendt is as calculated and pragmatic as the philosophies of the subject it so minutely contemplates. Rather than functioning as a frothy bio-pic, Hannah Arendt focuses on the shaping of Arendt's concept of the "the banality of evil." Practically every line of dialogue serves as a building block for Arendt's ideologies and philosophies. By way of the fiery debates that Arendt enjoys with her colleagues and friends, we witness as Arendt forms her hypotheses; and as we observe Arendt slowly digesting the transcripts from Eichmann's trial, we practically see the proverbial wheels turning inside her brain.