If I Want To Whistle, I’ll Whistle
Directed by Florin Serban   2010  Romania/Sweden

DEATH ROW
Directed by Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian    1979  USA  B/W

Don’t Kill My Father
2010  USA  Color

Sweethearts Of The Prison Rodeo
Directed by Bradley Beesley  2009  USA  Color

Meeting With A Killer
2001  USA  Color

Troop 1500
Directed by Ellen Spiro and Karen Bernstein   2005  USA  Color

Mi Vida Dentro or My Life Inside
Directed by Lucia Gaja  2007  Mexico  Color

TORTURE: America’s Brutal Prisons
Directed and Produced by Nick London   2005  Britain  Color

The Dhamma Brothers
Directed by Jenny Phillips, Anne Marie Stein and Andrew Kukura  2008  USA  Color

Hospice shorts:  Angola Prison Hospice   and  Prison Terminal (work in progress)
Directed by Edgar Barens  1999 and TBA  USA  Color

Was also interested to see that the festival was partly sponsored by “The Prison Show“, a radio program where callers can shout out to incarcerated friends and family.  I knew this kind of programming existed for hostages in Columbia.

Tonight, Central Cinema is hosting a Con Air Quote Along at 8 pm. Choice lines will be displayed on the screen for the audience to read aloud, and they’re providing everyone in attendance with a cap gun to fire as they please during the performance. (Remember to save a couple caps for the climactic explosion!) Cinematic purists should stay home; this will be a loud, boozy, distracted and distracting night at the movies, for Cage/Bruckheimer fans only.

Cap guns and yelling should neutralize an otherwise toxic movie.

via Slog

Rotten Tomatoes has a surprisingly good list of memorable prison break movies.

Cool Hand Luke, Brute Force, and Grand Illusion get to stand side by side with Con Air and Chicken Run.

In the U.S., we learn about prison through books, music, movies, and television. These images greatly influence public perceptions. I think that they actually serve to reinforce unconscious racism which leads people to support more draconian measures to curtail what they perceive to be black and brown criminality.

Further:

Prison stories in popular culture are framed in terms of personal responsibility and this obscures the structural factors and oppression that play a major role in landing people in prison in the first place. As such when asked why people are in prison, the public’s default response always focuses on personal failing. Popular culture depictions of prisoners feed into this narrative and I believe that this ultimately impacts public policy.

Imagined fears contribute to actual incarceration…

Her critique is fair for a lot of the drivel NBC and CBS air during prime time.

A path breaking drama like Oz doesn’t exactly fit the bill.  Here’s what the NYT had to say back in Oz’s heyday:

So far ”Oz,” one of HBO’s highest-rated dramatic shows, has received mostly favorable reaction. The critic Stanley Crouch, writing in The New York Times Magazine, praised it for its ”consistently brilliant acting — some of the best in the history of television.” The show, Mr. Crouch wrote, ”is a landmark for the medium.”

Others, however, have condemned it for its violence. ”Ultimately,” a critic for USA Today wrote, ”the show is as dehumanizing as the prison system it attacks.” Mr. Fontana and Mr. Levinson are in effect glorifying the violence they depict, another critic wrote, in The Village Voice: ”Levinson and Fontana estheticize the material at the same time they’re hyping its raw realism.”

Like with most things, it’s important to evaluate prison movies one at a time.  As Ms. Kaba points out, “Most people in America don’t know anyone who is currently or has been in prison since incarceration disproportionately impacts only certain groups. Most people have never set foot inside a prison either. As a result, popular culture images of prison fill this breach.”  Oz probably did more to make people think critically about hyperincarceration than most of what’s on TV.

Rather than defend Oz, I’d like to direct people to  Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo.  I guess you could call it a heartfelt documentary about a few women in an Oklahoma prison who rodeo once a year.  Here are four generally positive reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4.

What I like about Sweethearts is that the subjects have a lot of room to just talk about life.  Sure, some of what they say sounds cliche at first, but the movie busts through that kind of thing pretty quick.

The other reason I highlight Sweethearts is that it draws attention to the prison rodeo as rehabilitative program, as opposed to a gory spectacle.  As evidenced by the youtube video below, rodeo participants seem to be doing pretty well.

I have a few friends (in the women-over-60 set) who consider prisoners scum.  They’re all for death penalty and throwing away keys.  Sweethearts is the kind of movie that would totally mess up their world view.  It frustrates me that our media culture is so fragmented.  I can’t really force people to watch movies that would make them think like me.

At least they can’t force me to watch shit that makes me think like them either.

Usually loathe to talk blog with my drinking buddies, I asked if they were aware of the strike.  Of course they were not.  How did this happen?  I refuse to believe that my people don’t care about civil and human rights. I know they care, at least sentimentally.  I can’t believe that they wouldn’t be moved by this kind of non-violent Gandhi shit.

In Ill Fares the Land Tony Judt says:

If young people today are at a loss, it is not for want of targets. Any conversation with students or schoolchildren will produce a startling checklist of anxieties. Indeed, the rising generation is acutely worried about the world it is to inherit. But accompanying these fears there is a general sentiment of frustration: “we” know something is wrong and there are many things we don’t like. But what can we believe in? What should we do?

60 years ago, a whole bunch of 16-30 year old people would know with dogmatic certainty that the Georgia prison strike was awesome.  Why not now?

Maybe it’s simply a failure of imagination.

Most of my white middle class friends have no reason to know or think about people in prison.  The only ones who do have either been in jail for a DUI, or been involved in the criminal justice system in some capacity.  We have no reason to bother imagining what it’s like for the millions of people in the system.  We don’t know them, and we wouldn’t want to. I think that’s why old school prison movies seem so foreign and irrelevant.

Aesthetic differences aside, I don’t think a movie like Cool Hand Luke could exist today.  We’re trained to take pleasure in Luke’s self destructive public transgression.  Watching Luke lopping the heads off of parking meters is fun for anybody who’s ever gotten a ticket.

lopping the heads off parking meters, like the tops of mountains...

revel in transgression for a moment

Luke’s antics are what we know how to enjoy.  Thousands of people turned out to watch Jackass 3-d.  (I know one 40 year old woman who watched it).  Jackass is essentially a feature length montage of self destruction and spectacle.  It’s a super duper fun.  But it’s inherently passive.  Very few people actually go out and experience the liberating thrill of crashing a shopping carts into a wall.

what one does when he is free

We’re trained to distance ourselves from transgression.  We can mindlessly observe it for 90 minutes.  But when push comes to shove it’s “the man with no eyes” who our popular culture most glorifies.

peace officer, enforcer

Watching a movie about a jack ass who refuses to bend to the will of his authorities is unnatural.  We’re not accustomed to thinking about a prisoner as anything besides a threat and a problem.  The notion that he or she could be a freedom loving Johnny Knoxville is antithetical to most of what’s on tv.  Rebel heroes are only possible in alternate universes where the line between good and evil is overly explicit.

a bright line

So when thousands of Georgia inmates overcome daunting logistical challenges (800$ contraband cell phones, solitary confinement, racially defined gangs) and stage a massive non-violent protest. eh, that’s not heroic, in fact, it doesn’t even compute.

I’ve also had to widen my definition in response  to changing realities.  In coming years more and more people will leave the total institution and live under total surveillance.

So free

I’ve  become a lot more aware of the carceral state, ghettos, and sovereign prisons like Indian reservations and refugee camps. Despite spending a lot of life abroad, I’m wont to cordon of foreign problems like refugee camps.  There’s plenty going on in the US to occupy anyone. I don’t want to be some poseur jumping on a chic cause.  I always think of dread-locked hedonists, notionally supporting Palestinians, but mainly living for pleasure.

This morning The Stranger linked to Gaza Youth Breaks Out’s Manifesto for Change.  I was really moved by their sincerity:

Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli F16’s breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in; we are like lice between two nails living a nightmare inside a nightmare, no room for hope, no space for freedom. We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes;

At first it looks so ragy and adolescent, but it’s actually a poignant text.  The writers are asking for such basic liberties.

During the war we got the unmistakable feeling that Israel wanted to erase us from the face of the earth. During the last years Hamas has been doing all they can to control our thoughts, behaviour and aspirations. We are a generation of young people used to face missiles, carrying what seems to be a impossible mission of living a normal and healthy life, and only barely tolerated by a massive organization that has spread in our society as a malicious cancer disease, causing mayhem and effectively killing all living cells, thoughts and dreams on its way as well as paralyzing people with its terror regime. Not to mention the prison we live in, a prison sustained by a so-called democratic country.

The Manifesto kind of opens things up for me.  It lets me think about Gaza as a prison.  Which is super obvious… when one bothers to think about Gaza.  I feel comfortable calling Paradise Now a prison movie, and I don’t feel like a lazy hippie for expressing some sentiment of support for Gaza Youth Breaks Out.

Not so free

It’s so easy to write off Palestinian youth.  To take the attitude that they’re all caged and ruined.  Inherently threatening and susceptible to extremism as in Paradise Now. But ruined terrorists don’t say things like this:

We will start by destroying the occupation that surrounds ourselves, we will break free from this mental incarceration and regain our dignity and self respect.  We will carry our heads high even though we will face resistance. We will work day and night in order to change these miserable conditions we are living under. We will build dreams where we meet walls.

Happy New Year.

An older entry moaned about the dearth of resources for people re-entering society.  I’ve Loved You So Long shows what kind of support it might take a person to get back on their feet after 15 years in prison.

1. An adoring little sister who’s willing to support you no matter how reticent and angrily you behave. 
2. A nice place to lay your head at night.
3. A sophisticated and patient love interest who happens to have spent 10 years teaching inmates about literature. 
4. A smart niece that wants you to teach her cool stuff.
5. Plenty of cigarettes and time to mull things over.
6. A couple shots at jobs that a non-stigmatized laborer would covet.
7. Redemptive water.

This movie is really moving.  The acting is super good, and if you don’t cry, probably you have bad lachrymal glands.

It feels preachy at times, but that’s probably cuz I’m in the choir.  For example, the protagonists love interest is pretty comfortable talking about the thin line between convicted felons and free people.  He has this nice speech ready about how they’re all people.

It also tends to be an advertisement for how progressive and super cool France is.  At one point this pleasant guitar music comes on and a bunch of care-free guys in wheel chairs race down the street.  Cuz, you know, France is so inclusive and all.

I guess it’s not as cheery and fake as it seems though.  The friendly sister, who goes all out to help the protagonist re-enter society, is portrayed as a total bitch toward one of her students.  Her curtness is totally understandable in the context of a demanding middle class life.  But it’s repeated two or three times in this movie.  I look at it as a reminder that an important part of French society is not represented in I’ve Loved You So Long.  In a sort of round about way this is a movie about the North African immigrants  who live in the banlieues and have the majority of experience with cops and prison.

Tonight I found out via David Bordwell that the US has in fact detained Panahi:

Lest we Americans savor our superior virtue, consider this: Four months before 9/11, Panahi was traveling between Hong Kong and Argentina and stopped over in New York. He had been told he did not need a transit visa, but he was detained by American authorities at JFK Airport for lacking one. Here is Stephen Teo’s account in Senses of Cinema:

On his way to the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema on 15 April, 2001, after having attended the Hong Kong International Film Festival, Panahi was arrested in JFK Airport, New York City, for not possessing a transit visa. Refusing to submit to a fingerprinting process (apparently required under U.S. law), the director was handcuffed and leg-chained after much protestations to US immigration officers over his bona fides, and finally led to a plane that took him back to Hong Kong. As far as is known, this incident was not reported in any major US newspaper, even though The Circle was being shown in the United States at the time (another irony: for that film, Panahi was awarded the “Freedom of Expression Award” by the US National Board of Review of Motion Pictures).

We are in the season in which critics are likely to use the word courage casually, as in “Natalie Portman gives a courageous performance in Black Swan.” The ongoing struggle of Panahi and thousands of his fellow Iranians remind us what real courage, in the world outside the movie theatre, looks like.

How embarrassing.

Google gave me this nice Panahi quote “When a filmmaker does not make films it is as if he is jailed. Even when he is freed from the small jail, he finds himself wandering in a larger jail,”

Panahi is near to this blog’s heart because he’s made a really good prison movie. (sorry the trailer is so cheesy.)

The Green Revolution seems dead.

At least Panahi’s celebrity will remind people how much Iran has to offer:

h/t: David Hudson and The Lede.

Relax lah.

via fake criterions