Movie Review: I am Because We are, and Out of the Ashes
Today I started scanning old creative writing comments so I can have them on the computer. Then I made a shopping list, stopped by Fry’s to get a very long flash drive for my new Library of Congress player, among other things — God, I’m going to like this thing, I will have to give it a review all to itself — the bank, the cobbler’s to fix my broken purse strap, and the bagel shop to eat a cream cheese thing called a boureka. Very good. I also got a response back from History San Jose re: their archives. They finally got their email and computer problems fixed after lightning hit their light tower, and I have a tentative appt for Thursday. Yay! It’s been a couple months.
I watched two movies over the past two days: Out of the Ashes, which I found cheap enough to replace my VHS — and I Am Because We Are.
The first is about Dr. Gisella Perl, a woman I hadn’t heard anything about until I saw the movie a few years ago. It’s about a inmate-doctor at Auschwitz, and i’ve run into a few old hardbacks from after the war that are similar, though I haven’t read them. I rented it from Hollywood Video. It’s a Holocaust movie and has the — well, if you can say so — usual horrers about it — tattooing, life before the war, how that life was changed, adjusting, causal cruelty — you name it, it has it.
What makes the film spooky is not that Gisella Perl was forced to participate as a doctor, against her will, but using her training to better the lifes of those around her — but the use of flashbacks. These flashbacks are short cuts of film or longer versions as Dr. Perl tells her story to New York officials who want to stop her from practicing in the U.S. What makes them spooky is their suddenness, the change from a perfectly normal conversation in the film to a memory of Dr. Mengele, music on the radio, sudden accusations from other inmates in broad daylight, and also, a very distinct palette change.
Scenes in New York in this film are bright and colorful and except for when Dr. Perl is in her house, which has wood paneling, generally not dark. The scenes from Auschwitz are dark, lit only by one or two bulbs, dingy — often oddly green colored from security lights. These scenes are intercut and the results are striking. You know instantly where you are in these flashbacks — standard colors are “modern-day” post-1945 New York, green or drab colors are Auschwitz, and a gold sepia color are flashbacks from when Dr. Perl was a child.
This is a good cable-produced movie, but not one I generally watch at night.
I wanted to like I Am Because We Are, a documentary about AIDS orphans in Africa…but I disagreed with the delivery. The film is narrated by Madonna and within the first few minutes or so I was hooked.
The film draws you in with the opening lines, has excellent snippets of news footage about the area’s history…a large percentage of child-headed households, an orphanage basically run by children who are assigned or at least take care infants (with an 9-year-old carrying a baby); juvenile prisons where children wait to be aged out into adult prisons. for crimes like stealing a radio; the witchcraft form of disease such as alcoholism (and very likely AIDS as well), and mutilations.
So many interesting things. Anthropologically interesting, humanly interesting…excellent, startling photographs, a wonderful though impoverished area to film in, and an intriguing question somewhere in the middle. How can these people, who sing and are so happy, be happy with such poverty and disease, while we in America cannot? It raises the question of the modernized society and whether a modernized society is right under these circumstances. I thought this was a wonderful question.
And yet…
I actively watched for 30 minutes, and fast forwarded every so often thereafter.
The film has the usual talking heads, officials, doctors, etc. which is fine. It explores the stories of a number of adults and children and gives a good overview of the problems in the country…but talking heads do not always make a good documentary.
After 30 minutes or so of the Poverty Hotline soundtrack playing constantly in the background, the talking heads restricted eventually to an almost constant appeal for help in the area, actually saying that we were all people, etc. I wanted it to end.
It felt as though I was watching a station break program. You know, with the starving children that you need to help.
Are they starving? Most likely. Do they need help? Most likely. Is it a shame they’re orphans? Yes, it is.
Do I wish the film had shown me more in-depth stories of the children and their remaining parents?
Certainly.
The film explains how Madonna adopted one of her children there. Now if she felt the need to adopt, she must surely have seen something in the people she liked, or at least been sincerely interesting in helping one of the children. But this film does not convey that. It tries so hard to convince the viewer that these are humans in need of assistance, that ultimately it fails, in my opinion. The tone is wrong.
For example, one child explains that he is only fed once a day and he is seen to be wringing out his spare shirt and hanging it out to dry. He has friends with families and envies them. But that is all it explores. I wanted the camera to follow this child…what does he do for fun? When? Where? Does he get his shirts at the same place as the food?
If there were only 2 adults to be seen at the orphanage, what else did the children do there? Obviously, as in the child-headed households, they had taken on adult responsibilities, but show me that…
This film has great scenery and good overview, but what I have highlighted above is unfortunately what I felt it showed that was different and better than the usual Help-Children station break. The rest, I felt, was standard…filmed well, but standard.
Maybe I only have a different view of documentaries…But then again, I find nothing wrong with historical documentaries, which are almost nothing but talking heads, photographs and reenactments. This leaned too heavily on the side of the talking heads, and spent astonishingly little time interviewing the children involved. The DVD does include additional interviews in the extras, but I didn’t watch those. I wanted the film to show me a human side of the story…what could it tell me that no other film on the subject could? They had the subjects, the landscape, the experts, but if the film was about the children, then show me directly and without preaching why their stories are important.
Well, the film doesn’t preach, but you get the idea. There are some things I was fairly surprised to see, like the anthropological witchcraft, but all in all…
I wouldn’t rent this again. The tone did not sit well with me.