Reviews

"This is a film about a full life, and art is part of it. It is not a film about art and life as part of it." Director Katharina Otto-Berstein emphasizes this distinction when talking about her new documentary film, "Absolute Wilson." As a portrait of the American legendary theater artist Robert Wilson, the film cannot help but focus on his art. The point is that art is his life.

Berstein traces Wilson's life, beginning with his childhood, through the development of his artistic sensibilities against a backdrop of family, personal struggles, and social forces. Throughout the film, the juxtaposition of visual images from Wilson's life with scenes from his theatrical productions suggests that the artist drew much of his inspiration from his experiences with the world around him. While this method is not unusual, Wilson's approach to creating art is.

His productions—including such works as The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, Death and Destruction in Detroit and Einstein on the Beach—are visual tour de forces. Wilson emphasizes movement and light in favor of language. He communicates in symbols and gestures rather than traditional narrative form.

Berstein's film eloquently links Wilson's theatrical style to his personal relationship with language. Wilson stuttered as a child, a disability that exacerbated his status as a social outsider. In the film, he explains how he overcame this speech impediment with the help of a dancer, Byrd Hoffman, who taught him to slow down his thoughts and his movements when trying to speak. This moment, he claims, changed his entire perception of the world—and his work reflects this shift. Slow, deliberate movements take the place of realistic motion; speech occurs infrequently, often in abstraction.

The art of choreography enabled Wilson to deal with his own disability; since then, he has utilized this potential of art to help many disabled children. During a brief stint at architectural school, Wilson took a part-time job doing movement therapy with brain damaged children. He encourages expression through non-linguistic forms, and uses his theatrical work to illustrate the atypical thought processes of mentally and physically disabled individuals. Most famously, he adopted the deaf-mute child Raymond Andrews, with whom he collaborated to create the "silent opera" Deafman Glance. Similarly, he incorporated the texts of the autistic Christopher Knowles into the highly successful deconstructionist production A Letter to Queen Victoria.

In following with Wilson's preference for the visual over the linguistic, Berstein's film does its best to show us the correlations between the artist's personality and philosophy, his philosophy and his work (both theatrical and social). An impressive amount of stock footage constitutes much of the film, from still photos to archival videos. Berstein's manipulation of these images often resembles a kind of collage, a form of communication that seems well-suited to Wilson's own artistic style.

As a documentary, however, "Absolute Wilson" requires the use of interviews to fully tell its story. Along with Wilson himself, Berstein builds her portrait of the artist from the input of a wide variety of people—family members, actors, critics and friends. While the multi-faceted perspective this approach creates proves intriguing, the effect sometimes seems more superficial than revealing. Nonetheless, several of the interviews become quite compelling, particularly the one with Wilson's sister.

Overall, Bernstein's film is remarkable in its portrayal of art as a lifestyle. Issues of father-son relations and social ostracization underlie the story of Robert Wilson's life, but Bernstein reveals how Wilson's art provided an outlet for coming to terms with the difficulties of life as well as a means to improve it. As one commenter states, almost more than any other artist, Wilson has succeeded in creating his own world through his art. Indeed, "Absolute Wilson" ultimately proves that, for Wilson, art is absolute.

This review was first posted on www.cinemattraction.com.

In subject and in style, "Jesus Camp" is nothing short of provocative.

Through a close examination of the lives of several children immersed in one of America's most prominent sub-cultures, Christian evangelicalism, directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady offer up a filmic meditation on this unique brand of faith and the discussion surrounding it.

Levi, Rachel, and Tory are three pre-teens from Missouri who have grown up in the tradition of evangelicalism. Like many evangelical children, all three are home-schooled by their parents and all three participate regularly in organized Christian activities, including a yearly pilgrimage to Becky Fischer's "Kids on Fire" summer camp. Fischer, a dedicated children's minister, has boldly declared that her life's mission is to create an "army of God" among the nation's youth. Along with the other children at the camp, Levi, Rachel, and Tory commit themselves wholeheartedly to Fischer's cause. As members of this "army," they pledge to spread the word of Jesus Christ among the population of un-saved Americans, to refrain from participation in a multitude of sinful activities, to revere our Republican president, and to join the fight against abortion, among other things.

While the devotion of these children to their faith is quite a compelling story in itself, Ewing and Grady complicate the subject of their film by interspersing segments of commentary by Christian radio host Mike Pompantonio, who criticizes the evangelical movement as a threat to American democracy. Horrified by the attempts of Fischer and others to secure the dedication of children to their cause, Pampantonio condemns their efforts as a form of tyrannical indoctrination.

Unlike many contemporary documentaries that engage polemically with questions of social morality and political opinion, "Jesus Camp" contains no directorial attempt to pass judgment on the debate at the film's core. Rather, Ewing and Grady seem more interested in the juxtaposition of competing ideas, leaving the viewer free to make his or her own choices about the issues presented on screen.

Indeed, what makes "Jesus Camp" fascinating as a documentary film is this very even-handed presentation of a contentious subject. Supporters of the evangelical movement could easily recognize plenty of evidence in this film to support their cause, as could those who contest evangelicalism. Enmeshed in the comparatively-organized structure of the film, for example, the very same incident often concurrently upholds and decries the same idea.

At times, perhaps due to the potential for the same image to contain diametrically-opposed meanings, traces of light irony become apparent in the film. Cutaways sometimes seem mismatched to voice-overs, the presence of landscape shots is puzzling at first, and the pace of some of the transitions between images can be startling, but, taken together, these peculiar elements ultimately serve to illustrate and/or create points of humor within the content. While the narrative structure propels the sort of alternating analysis that characterizes the overt storyline, the visual construction of the story implicitly establishes a tone of wry observation, which constitutes the only kind of commentary Ewing and Grady seem to offer.

"Jesus Camp" is not without flaw—one concern in particular centers on several unlikely coincidences that lead to questions of the film's integrity—but the product of this collaborative endeavor is without a doubt one of the strongest examples of documentary film to emerge in recent years. With this film, Ewing and Grady exploit the highest potential of the form; "Jesus Camp" is sure to enlighten and stimulate all who partake.

This review was first posted on www.cinemattraction.com.