documentary

DocsLisboa 2023: Chutzpah. Something about Modesty. An Interview with Monica Stambrini

Chutzpah. Something about Modesty by Monica Stambrini was one of the most daring films I saw at DocLisboa 2023.

At its core, the film tackles the theme of the fragility of identity. The filmmaker is trying to piece together her old identity with her need for change. In the process she reviews her multiple roles as a daughter, as a mother, as a partner. The ambition to become a filmmaker is left aside early in life or postponed for later. We become privy to her everyday life, the obstacles she encounters. The opening scene also talks about the fragility of cinema itself, the camera being threatened from the very beginning: “Mum, turn the camera off or I’ll smash it”. And these two fragilities come together in an interesting way in the film.

The concept itself is extremely intriguing. In the filmmaker’s own words: “In the midst of a personal and work crisis, I begin to film everything obsessively: my parents, grandparents, children, friends and lovers, myself and psychotherapy. Some footage is consensual, some is ‘stolen’. This way my personal-intimate becomes narrative: the recent separation, the pain of my children’s distance, my parents’ separation, my inadequacy as a mother and as a filmmaker.”

The following interview with Monica Stambrini was conducted via Zoom in November 2023. 

Dana Knight: I loved the concept of your film. The title is an oxymoron, Chutzpah means audacity while pudore is translated as modesty but is something more akin to “shyness”. There is a “forward going” movement in Chutzpah and something holding back in pudore. That is an interesting tension and the film seems to be born out of it. Maybe you could tell me more about how this personal film came about …

Monica Stambrini : I was in a very big crisis, mainly the one that’s in the film, a crisis usually happens when several things come together. I was both in a professional crisis and a sentimental one, I wasn’t happy. 

But something that’s not in the film, actually it is in the film, it’s the fact that I was having problems finding work as a film director. The ideas I suggested to agents and producers were not considered, it was a big crisis. At some point, not knowing what to do, I started thinking “I have this footage”, nothing professional, it’s amateur, I filmed these images in the time before Instagram. The film started 10 years ago, that’s when I split up. So I spoke about it to my film editor, we are friends and we always work together. And I started writing down the voice-over and collecting all these images and together we started building the film. And what was funny and exciting is that I started filming everything. So at that point my life became a film. So I was very excited, like any film director, when he gets to shoot a movie, he can kill to get what he wants…

So I had this fantastic energy but also a bit of a moral question: what am I allowed to show regarding other people. I am careless about myself, I don’t care about shame or being naked. It was therapeutical.

There is something very daring about the way you show yourself on screen…

I did quite a bit of thinking about this…there is something about women especially, either Chutzpah or modesty, and you’re right, it’s not the right translation of pudore. Maybe women were taught to keep their private lives private for so long, first of all their sexual desire. Men can go around saying “I like you, I like you”, but women aren’t allowed to do that. Now women are getting their voices out more, and wanting to be naked. I think there is a genre coming out.

There are moments of humour and lightness in the film which could have otherwise become quite heavy. Your kids are very funny. What comes to mind is the counting scene on the loo… 

(Laughing) Also because I’m wrong in all the answers I give him…Symbolic of how parents teach kids the wrong things, we give them the wrong answers.

You filmed one of your therapy sessions by hiding the camera under your coat apparently…and confronted your therapist by saying that therapy is immoral, what happened there?

What happened with the psychotherapist in the film is what happened in life. She put me in front of a decision, “Either we do a therapy or you do your film, the two things can’t go on together”. She didn’t like the idea of me filming the sessions, she didn’t want to be part of the film, she wanted me to go into a deeper therapy. As my father says in the film, the two things couldn’t go together. 

To me it wasn’t immediately obvious: “I’m talking about myself, where is your privacy involved?”But it’s like a rule of therapy, you break a certain law by filming the sessions. So I stopped filming and went into proper Freudian therapy, three times a week. 

Would you like to share something about your experience of psychotherapy that is not in the film?

I could have moved to yoga, meditation, ayahuasca, religion, one can find many alternatives to lean on to when you’re in need. But somehow therapy was my thing, my father is a psychotherapist, I grew up with it so I decided to go into proper Freudian therapy, three times a week. I believe it helped me. Of course it did not solve all my problems.

You had mixed feelings about psychotherapy at the beginning of the film but do you feel you gained some insight through making this film?

Definitely. In real life, I actually went on with my therapy because I decided I wasn’t ready to make this film public. Because at the time I was really suffering. 

When I finished the film, 6 months ago, I had the chance to record my voice with a proper microphone, in a proper studio, but I decided to keep that old recording because I’m not an actress and that voice I had at the time, you can tell I was really feeling it. 

When I was making the film, I wasn’t very objective because I was so involved. But when I watched it again after eight years, when my therapy finished, I started laughing, the whole time. All of a sudden, I thought: ”This girl who’s suffering so much, she isn’t going through anything dramatic really, it’s stuff that everyone goes through, at least once in their life so what’s the drama? Instead I was laughing about myself. And I was benevolent towards myself, finally. The “me” suffering, the “me” separating, the “me” in crisis…I was laughing at myself and this gave me the strength to make it public. 

You saw yourself with detachment …

Yes, and that’s what’s fascinating about human life, at some point you look back and you’re more benevolent.

Psychoanalysis is a lot about the relationship with the parents, that’s probably why they occupy such a big chunk of the film. They are both very interesting figures and complete opposites, a bit like the oxymoron in the title. 

Absolutely. And that is the tragedy of every child with separated parents, your biggest wish is to see them back together. But that’s not possible. You are the sum of those two people. And to be honest I don’t know any couples with kids who are still together after 15 years. So we should probably start asking ourselves…

If marriage is a lifetime endeavour?;)

Yes, what’s it going to be like in 15 years. 

Would you say that psychoanalysis makes you feel like you’re a bit doomed, like in a Greek tragedy?

What I understood after all these years, what Freudian analysis says is that we are all doomed, we all live through traumas that parents probably don’t even remember but for us were terrible events. And those traumas will always be there, there is no way to get over them. 

Actually there is a way to get over them, and it’s to recognise them, to see them, to make peace with them. As long as you don’t leave them unconscious…This is how Freudian therapy can heal you, by looking back at your traumas as an adult, you put them in a different context, they looked enormous but now they are small and not so big anymore. 

It’s like a change in perspective. The traumas are there, just get over it. As to what cognitive behavioural therapy does, instead of drinking, do exercise, instead of smoking, go out for a walk. 

But I like Freudian analysis, I like to go deep to the root and I like the darkness, I am attracted to what is unsaid, unspoken, to what isn’t meant to be shown. 

Before this film I did two porn films. The whole topic of showing what is not supposed to be shown is very dear to me. I like cinema when it provokes. I like chutzpah in films, things that are not easy. 

They were also shown at DocsLisboa a few years ago…

Yes. 

And while on this topic, do you feel you revealed as much as you wanted or you held something back in your new film?

Well, as you could see, there was a masturbation scene and there was some censorship involved, a veil. So I did hold back a bit. But I did film everything at the time, including me having sex with my partners. But I decided not to show that. For my kids more than my parents. I didn’t want to end up doing what I accused my father of in the film: “How could you expose me to your sex life?”. Otherwise I would have ended up doing to my kids what my father did to me…

But in the case of your children, that experience would have been mediated through cinema…which is different than experiencing something directly. 

Absolutely. 

Also, another instance of mediation is a letter your mother wrote to you. 

When I was splitting up from my husband, she wrote me a very passionate letter, putting me in guard, telling me “I understand your decision, I went through this suffering myself so if I can spare you anything…” It was a beautiful letter. Because mainly she shared her experience. But in the end she was happy that I split up. 

And you’re also happy with your decision now.

Yes, I had to do it. I think couples, families, it’s very difficult to change in a couple. It requires a big love and maturity. And I needed to change and wasn’t able to do it within the couple. But a separation is full of sorrow, especially when you have kids. 

It’s a topic we all relate to. We don’t see a lot of your husband in the film though. And definitely not nearly enough of your lovers… 

I was very scared that he would say “No, you can’t do this film”. Due to privacy issues of course.  Because you can’t film someone and stick them in a film without them giving you their approval. That’s why he’s more of a voice in the background. And also the separation wasn’t his fault, it was all about me. And I quite like the fact that the only time you see him, we are always in a car, the metaphor of a family, all stuck together, getting lost. 

Actually he saw the film and he liked it. 

Where will the film travel to next?

In Milan, there is going to be a screening at the end of November, it’s an old independent film festival, it’s going to be the closing night film. 

Possibly at Film Madrid next year. 

And on the platform IndiePix, it’s an independent platform, like Netflix for independent films. 

Why This Year’s Golden Bear is Bad Cinema but Good Art

Oh, the highly coveted cutie…

coveted cutie

I’d like to start by making clear that, after the initial bafflement at the Berlinale Awards Ceremony last Saturday passed, I’m actually very glad this year’s Golden Bear went to Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not.

However, this has nothing to do with the film itself, but with the strong public reaction it stirred, especially in its home country, Romania.

There is a huge misunderstanding around this film, which could explain why the press generally disliked it and why many high-profile critics wrote extremely bad reviews about it.

Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not is not really cinema, it’s an art installation, in an unfortunate case where the programmers mistook the medium/format for the final product.

And if you judge an art installation by cinematic criteria, of course it falls short. First, it comes across as highly pretentious and cerebral.

One of the first things I found striking about the film (apart from its insidious visual style that draws so much attention to itself), is the fact that, although the “characters” speak incessantly about their emotions in a tentative exploration of human intimacy, no emotion is actually being transmitted to the viewer.

And for very good reasons:  cinema normally uses a dramatic framework to explore human feelings and emotions, it doesn’t make characters just talk about them.

Well, this is experimental cinema, one might argue. But according to the filmmaker, it’s not. Adina Pintilie strongly rejects this label. And who are we to contradict her, who else knows better what she made than the filmmaker herself?

Another line of reasoning could be that this is a highly conceptual, hybrid construction, more of a documentary mixing reality and fiction, with some of the people you see on the screen playing themselves and talking about their real emotions directly to each other or to the camera. But if it’s real, why does it sound so contrived? Being real and sounding real are two very different things. Good cinema makes believe, in other words, it makes things that are not real, sound and appear real. This film does the opposite – a total paradox. And this is through no fault of the actors and all those participating in it. If you read the transcript of the film, it would probably sound very intelligent. I for one blame it on the film’s style. 

Another of my contentions has to do with the unnecessary adornment of the film with all sorts of film gimmicks that give the impression of something very sophisticated (think Godard in Le Mépris) but in reality don’t serve any clear purpose: such as placing a camera in the frame, to kind of highlight the filmmaker’s intrusion into the artwork. Through this device, the filmmaker is addressing Laura: “You’re probably wondering why I’m in your bedroom”…). But the use of this technique here is ill-inspired, it only distracts and puzzles the viewer or makes him/her ask unnecessary questions (such as one blurted out loud at the press screening: “Yeah, why are you in her bedroom?”).

On the subject of questions being raised by the film, another issue is that the film verbally asks them: “How do they f*cking manage?” (Meaning: how do people manage with their conflictual emotional baggage?). This is, we were informed at the press conference, the core question the film intends to raise. Again, good cinema doesn’t need to verbalise these questions, the viewer is supposed to ask those questions himself/herself. Or are we patronisingly being told what we should ask, think or feel here? When you see a film about the Holocaust, whether documentary, fiction or hybrid, no one is musing on screen: “Oh dear, how do these people actually manage?!”

On the plus side, I’d like to argue that, as paradoxical as it might sound, Touch Me Not is good art. Why? Because of the huge reaction it stirred in the filmmaker’s own country, following news of its being awarded the Golden Bear.  Some TV personalities had very heated words to say about the film, while apparently even the Coalition for the Protection of Family is getting mobilised against it! Scary stuff.

But the film is being attacked in Romania for the wrong reasons. To quote a TV personality who posted on his social media: “A woman trying to cure her frigidity by watching a guy masturbate in front of her. That’s the film. I know, it’s me who doesn’t get wanking as art. All Golden Bears leave cinemas empty, they are cheap films with whores and swearings sold to stupid people as art. Berlinale can take its Golden Bear and shove it up its @ss…”. And on and on, he’s not the only one.

While there is no substance to this statement, while I completely disagree that all Golden Bears are bad films (one only needs to think of, more recently, Fuocoammare or the surreal Of Body and Soul), this kind of reaction points to a debate to be had about what the Golden Bear films should and shouldn’t be, what types of characters should populate them ( i.e. on the virginal side, rather than “whorey” side). How can you even begin to explain to a guy like this the depth of fascination that characters of prostitutes always held over the cinematic imagination? 

But leaving all arguments aside, aesthetic or otherwise, good art should stir sh*t up. What is its purpose, otherwise,  if not to stir things up and make the invisible (thoughts, feelings, ideas, mentality) visible?

Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs is cinematic perfection, but so what? If no one reacts to it, if it leaves people pleased but ready to move on, possibly energised but quasi-indifferent…Isle of Dogs is great cinema but does it function as art, in this sense?  And for that alone, for the strong emotional reaction the film triggered, Adina Pintilie’s film/art installation deserved the Golden Bear.

Regarding the film’s reception in Romania where it hasn’t even opened yet, the pertinent question to ask is: what, really, is the public’s problem with this film? It’s not that it contains sex scenes or nudity, we all know that sex sells.

My conclusion is that Touch Me Not was indeed misunderstood. But I seriously doubt that the reason critics disliked it has anything to do with the subject matter, with them being made uncomfortable by what they see on the screen (as the filmmaker herself hinted at) or with them being conservative or prude (some journalist’s misguided assumption). 

It’s simply to do with the fact that their expectations haven’t been met: this film is an art installation masquerading as cinema, it belongs in a different kind of art space, a gallery or maybe a museum. And I’m pretty sure the art world will appreciate it. 

adina.jpg

 

Patricio Guzmán’s beautiful doc The Pearl Button at IFC Center & other NYC cinemas today

the pearl button

Seasoned filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, whose groundbreaking 1975 The Battle of Chile was a key event in the history of the documentary form, follows his astonishing recent work Nostalgia for the Light (2011) with a similar exploration of familiar themes such as memory and the historical past. The Pearl Button was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Script at 2015 Berlin Film Festival and is opening in NYC at IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York City this weekend.

Knight: The Pearl Button is a very beautiful and moving film. I was very impressed with the way you used the metaphor of water, that is usually associated with life, to symbolise death and tragedy. And you used this metaphor to link two apparently unconnected stories: the story of the indigenous people who lived in the waterways of Western Patagonia and Pinochet’s dictatorship practice of dumping political prisoners in the sea.

Guzman: First of all we have to consider that Chile has 2,670 miles of coastline, that is a lot of water. Particularly in the South, there are a lot of channels entering the continent. Those channels were once inhabited by six different indigenous groups. And they were all executed by white men at the beginning of the 20th century.

There’s also the story of Jemmy Button, an indigenous inhabitant who was taken to England to be “civilised”. He agreed to go in exchange for a single mother-of-pearl button, hence his English name. When he was brought back to his community in Patagonia, he couldn’t readapt, he remained very much isolated, he died alone. These were discoveries that I made on a trip to Patagonia and served as the basis for the film.

I spent 10 days navigating through the channels with a small vessel, and when I arrived back in Santiago de Chile, I came across another story: a pearl button was found stuck to a rail brought to the surface by ocean divers. And I immediately made the connection between Jemmy Button and this other button. And with that, I pretty much had the whole film. And yes, it is my claim in the film that the ocean contains the history of all humanity. 

Knight: There is a reflection in the film about “the memory of water”, about how water remembers things, events, people. I was wondering if you were referring to the latest medical research from Japan where doctors discovered that water has indeed memory and the ability to form a molecular imprint of everything that comes into contact with it?

Guzman: Actually there are studies about the memory of water that are much older than that. Even in the 19th century in the diaries of FitzRoy, he mentions the possibility of water having memory. There’s another very interesting book by a researcher called Theodor Schwenk, it’s called Sensitive Chaos, published in 1962. This book also talks about water having memory.

Knight: I suppose those were theories whereas now there’s actually scientific proof that water has memory. And not many people know that.

Guzman: That’s true. The very first scientist who started to talk about that was a French scientist in the 1950s. And no one believed him!

Patricio Guzman

Patricio Guzmán during the making of The Pearl Button

Knight: Has the metaphor of ‘sea as cemetery’ been explored by other Chilean artists before or is this the first time it’s been put together in this way?

Guzman: The first time in cinema yes. As to the other Chilean artists I’m not completely sure.

Knight: Could you talk about the potential of beauty and beautiful imagery to convey horror and horrific events in such a powerful way? From this point of view, your film is like a cinematic oxymoron. There’s a disconnect between form and content in your film that mirrors the disconnect that must take place in the human brain when witnessing such horrors.

Guzman: The landscape where I shot the film is very beautiful, especially the channels in the South. There are waterfalls of ice and the sea has a very deep blue colour. There are also volcanos. That’s where the five main indigenous tribes lived and were very happy. And they all died within 2 years after the white men arrived. They wanted the land all to themselves so that they could bring cattle. They hired gunmen to exterminate the indigenous people. Those who remained alive were taken to the missions where they got contaminated with microbes brought from Europe. Today there are only six indigenous people alive.

Knight: What aspect of filmmaking have you found the most challenging in the making of this film?

Guzman: The most challenging part was navigating through those channels, there are very few boats that venture that way. Days and weeks can pass by without encountering any other human beings. And storms happen out of the blue. In those cases, you have to take shelter in a narrow channel and wait for it to pass.

There was another challenge near the coast of Santiago where Pinochet’s political prisoners were dumped. In this case the challenge was not geographic but the fact that there are still very few people willing to talk about it. All in all, it was a difficult film to make.

Knight: This was actually my next question: I read in your interview with Frederick Wiseman that the Chilean television is still a bit reluctant, even now, to show your documentaries on TV, is it true of this film also?

Guzman: We don’t know yet if the Chilean television will be interested in this film because the film is opening next week in cinemas in Chile. So we’ll see what happens.

THE OUTRAGEOUS SOPHIE TUCKER opens in NYC July 24 (press release)

THE OUTRAGEOUS SOPHIE TUCKER is the rags to riches story of one of old time showbiz’s biggest personalities. From 1906 through the beginning of television, Sophie Tucker and her bawdy, brash, and risqué songs paved the way for performers such as Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Bette Midler, Cher, Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Beyoncé.

sophie tucker

After eight years spent reading hundreds of Tucker’s personal scrapbooks, visiting fourteen archives, and interviewing dozens of family, friends, and fellow icons of stage and screen, Susan and Lloyd Ecker have completed their comprehensive documentary about the Last of the Red Hot Mamas.

“Sophie was like the Forrest Gump of the first half of the 1900s,” says producer Susan Ecker. “She was close friends with seven U.S. presidents, King George VI, young Queen Elizabeth, Charlie Chaplin, J. Edgar Hoover, Al Capone, Judy Garland, Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra and every other notable of her era.”

“After immersing ourselves in Sophie’s 400+ personal scrapbooks and meeting all of Tucker’s surviving friends and family,” says producer Lloyd Ecker, “this film biography is the complete uncensored tale of this vaudeville, Broadway, radio, television and Hollywood legend. Though she obsessively documented her life, Sophie loved to exaggerate for dramatic effect. Over the years, she told multiple versions of each important event. At the end, not even Sophie knew the difference between truth and tall tale”.

Director’s Statement – William Gazecki

Sophie who? Wasn’t she the fat lady always singing “God Bless America”? (NO… that was Kate Smith). Like many people today, that’s who I thought of when I was initially offered the job of directing a documentary about Sophie Tucker.

gazecki

William Gazecki

When Tucker was alive, she was indeed buxom, and somewhere in my mind I knew I had heard of her. One of those “tip of the tongue” memories. Later I realized it was probably from seeing a couple of Sophie’s 25+ appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, the most popular of all the early television variety shows. Those were the days of my childhood when Elvis and the Beatles were thrilling me as a teenager. But Sophie was there too. As I would soon discover, throughout her life, Tucker was everywhere, like a real female Forrest Gump.

When I first met Sue and Lloyd Ecker, they kept me enthralled and intrigued with Sophie tales for hours on-end. I laughed, cried and was amazed… story after story after story… some funny, some touching, some unbelievable (for instance, Tucker befriended both gangster Al Capone and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover). The Eckers knew Tucker so well, they spoke about her as if she was family. What an interesting and compelling life Sophie had. The kind of inspiring and iconic personality about whom you want to know everything. So I happily took on the project.

My first task? Find all the Sophie Tucker experts and get them scheduled for interviews. Unfortunately, there were no Tucker experts. Try as I may, no one on the planet knew as much about Sophie as Sue and Lloyd Ecker. Why? Because no one had ever done that much research on this forgotten icon. The couple had just completed four years of reading, scanning and indexing Tucker’s 400 personal scrapbooks, learning all the stories that in some instances spanned seven decades. They also spent an equal amount of time travelling throughout the U.S. and England interviewing and taping every person they could find who actually knew her. Most of them were successful retired performers who began as one of Sophie’s opening acts. None of them really knew her that well, being not much more than young upstarts when they worked with the “Last of the Red Hot Mamas”. But they remembered Tucker, and still loved her.

As they traveled on their “Sophie mission”, the Eckers had carried a video camera, shooting interviews with everyone they met. My second task was to watch all of these endearing recordings. Sweet as they were, mostly there was a dearth of unusable material for a traditional film biography. The stars had all been kids, impressed for life by a unique and powerful woman in the twilight of her greatness.

In the end, what seemed obvious turned out to be the best choice. The Eckers were the ideal candidates to narrate the movie. They had to be, or there wasn’t going to be a movie. “Let’s do a little experiment,” I said, and away we went. Fortunately, during their college years Lloyd had worked as a comedian and Sue as an actor. Once on-camera, they were wonderful. The rest is history, which you can now enjoy by watching “The Outrageous Sophie Tucker”!

New York City
Greenwich Village – Cinema Village
Upper West Side – The JCC in Manhattan

Social Media:

Facebook.com/OutrageousSophieTucker

Twitter: @SophieTucker SophieTucker.

Tumblr.com Instagram.com/RealSophieTucker

DOC NYC 2014

Hailed as “ambitious” (New York Times) and “selective but eclectic” (Village Voice), DOC NYC burst upon the scene in 2010 and has since become America’s largest documentary film festival. Based at the West Village’s IFC Center, Chelsea’s SVA Theater and Bow Tie Chelsea Cinema, the eight-day festival showcases new achievements in documentary film along with panels and conversations.  It also seeks to make connections that happen “only in New York.”

In 2014, the festival showcased 150+ films & events, presented by 200+ filmmakers & special guests. Below is a selection of interviews with filmmakers who presented their work at DOC NYC 2014.

RIC BURNS Interview – Enquiring Minds: The Untold Story of the Man behind the National Enquirer 

MARY DORE Interview – She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry

JOHANNA St. MICHAELS Interview – Penthouse North

NORAH SHAPIRO Interview – Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile

TONY SHAFF Interview – Hotline