BFF FILM & FESTIVAL BLOG
Erin Brockovich, Stephen Sodorbergh, and the Argument for Environmental Regulation
Read how Erin Brockovich continues to hold relevance to current conversations around climate justice.
Written by Marisa Bianco
Erin Brockovich Photo Credit: MovieStillsDB
“It all comes down to what this one judge decides”
Erin Brockovich (2000 dir. Stephen Soderbergh) is different from the typical legal movie. There is no climactic trial scene where the orchestral score swells to its peak as the lawyer or the witness gets their big moment to convince the jury of their case. The protagonist is neither the lawyer nor the plaintiff nor the defendant. Erin Brockovich is about the paralegal, the assistant. The action focuses on the research and the work behind the scenes, not the courtroom arguments. It’s a working-class woman going to bat for working-class people.
The film, famously based on a true story, takes place in early 1990s Los Angeles where the twice-divorced, single mom of three Erin Brockovich (Julia Roberts, in her Oscar-winning role) has reached a low point after being injured in a car accident and losing the resulting personal injury suit. Using her stubborn persistence, she snags a job at her former attorney’s office (Ed Masry, played by Alfred Finney), where she discovers evidence that the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has poisoned residents of the nearby town, Hinkley, CA, with chromium contaminated groundwater. Erin takes the lead on the case, gathering evidence herself, getting to know each and every plaintiff, and blowing past anyone in her way with savage verbal takedowns.
This film has more to offer than similar 90s studio movies because it is refined by the Soderbergh auteur style. We can see this in the warm, intense yellow filter through which we experience Southern California, contrasted by the clinical, unsettling blue light of the courtroom scene when the PG&E suit is allowed to go forward.
However, in the vein of the uplifting 90s-2000s mid-budget studio film, Soderbergh doesn’t dwell on the gravity of the situation in Hinkley. There is never any doubt in the viewer’s mind that Erin and Ed will be successful. I was most invested in Erin’s story at the beginning, when we feel the confines of her poverty and her desperation, as she skips meals to feed her kids. Susannah Grant’s script and Roberts’ performance do a great job of portraying the emotional realities of Erin’s financial struggle. After Erin is hired and really gets going on her investigation, the film's stakes start to fall away. Every time the lawsuit hits a roadblock (and it hits many), Erin overcomes it with ease. Ed wants to back out because the suit is growing too expensive. Erin convinces him to change his mind. Do they need a piece of evidence linking PG&E Corporate to PG&E Hinkley? A mysterious man shows up with the necessary documentation in one of the next scenes. The fact that this is a movie based on a true story makes it obvious that the legal battle will end in victory for Erin. If not, why would the movie have been made? This gets to the heart of my problem with the film—Soderbergh fails to convey the emotional stakes of the story to the viewer.
Erin Brockovich Photo Credit: MovieStillsDB
And the stakes are high, especially for the residents in Hinkley. In environmental law, people have two options to monitor polluting corporations: regulation and litigation. The film shows us how arduous and even futile litigation can be. The plaintiffs in Erin Brockovich are looking for retribution after they’ve drunk the poison water after the deadly damage has been done. They have neither the time nor money to go to trial, so they are essentially forced to choose binding arbitration.
And arbitration is scary. There is no jury. As Erin says to Ed in disbelief, “It all comes down to what this one judge decides.” “This one judge” could have a great rating from attorneys, or their rating could be filled with reports of abuse of power and lack of knowledge. If it’s a case in federal court, it could be a political appointee, chosen for their pro-corporate or anti-regulation stance. Our resources are much better spent preventing pollution and other types of environmental harm through regulation rather than attempting to punish the polluters after the fact in court.
I’d like to think that if this film were made today that it wouldn’t stop at condemning the responsible corporation. I think many modern filmmakers would examine why a profit-motivated corporation, given a monopoly by the government, is more concerned with its profit margins than its responsibility to the community it serves. The fact is that 634 citizens (the number of plaintiffs in Erin’s case) shouldn’t be the underdogs in a lawsuit; it shouldn’t be a David v. Goliath metaphor.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go listen to 90s Sheryl Crow songs while channeling my inner Erin Brockovich, taking down the greedy corporations and protecting the rights to clean air and water.
Erin Brockovich
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Year: 2000
Trailer
Streaming free on Peacock
A Letter to My Lost Elders
Thinking through queer lineage, grief, and Chantal Akerman.
Written by Jay Graham
Photo Credit via Criterion Collection
I watched Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977) in the belly of our Covid winter. Snow had been accumulating for a few days, its white mass swallowing tree trunks and lifting the lines from the landscape. Though I hadn’t been to mass since I was a kid, I noticed I was kneeling before the laptop screen, propped at the foot of the bed, while fat flakes flooded the window in my periphery. My legs folded beneath me so easily I wondered if they remembered the pose. The roof, arched above my head, must have been bending a little under all that weight.
Though she often acted in her movies, Akerman never appears in News from Home. Instead, she offers only her voice, which reads aloud a series of letters she has received from her mother after moving from Brussels to New York: “Write soon. I’m anxious to hear about your work, New York, everything.” The letters detail daily errands, minor illnesses, and updates about family friends, but they are also saturated with affection, anxiety, and appeals to write back. Akerman’s monotone performance only exaggerates the letters’ emotive content: “You know I live for your letters.” The intimacy of this voice-over collides with the film’s rigid frames. A fixed camera captures extended shots of New York—its sidewalks littered with newspapers, its humming subway stations, its streets washed in ambient traffic noise, its pedestrians, their faces grainy, its storefronts, their neon signs blinking on, off.
I am tempted to read these long shots as return letters: You asked me about my life, this place. Here is New York. Here is your absence on East 45th Street. I take the subway to record roads filled with bodies that aren’t yours. It sounds like light machinery, tires rolling over pavement, gravel falling in construction sites, train brakes screaming against steel beams, a mesh of voices, vehicles pushing through thick air, my voice reading over your words.
Photo Credit via Criterion Collection
To many, Akerman’s name is sacrosanct. We speak of her with a reverence that often borders on obsession, and the seismic Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has held a place in the canon of feminist and experimental film since its release in 1975. The daughter of a Belgian survivor of the Holocaust, Akerman frequently made art about her mother, and her body of work is deeply inflected by themes related to generational trauma, gender, quotidian rituals, and alienation. She is also among the first filmmakers to display queer sex free of spectacle. In je tu il elle (1974), her first feature film, sex escapes moralism. Akerman’s character hooks up with a truck driver and listens to him speak of the obligatory marital sex he participates in out of a sense of paternal duty, then travels alone to an ex-girlfriend’s place and devours several sandwiches slathered with chocolate spread before they fuck.
To be sure, Akerman expressed ambivalence about the categorization of sexuality and preferred to eschew neat labels for the messiness of experience. Yet, I have invented her into my queer family. What does it mean that I’ve positioned Akerman as a queer elder when she never embraced the term herself? In assuming her as a gay icon of sorts, there is the danger of reproducing the linguistic and conceptual limitations she hoped to evade. There is danger in claiming her as kin at all. Put more simply, it’s a narcissistic move, netting her in these frames of reference and this particular phase of the evolving queer lexicon.
Photo Credit via Criterion Collection
I should admit now that when I first watched News from Home, I was in the midst of an epistolary fever, ripping the covers off magazines all winter to make envelopes for the letters I was sending to my own mother 2,800 miles away. I folded the edges carefully the way she taught me, bled pens dry, described my daily tasks, recited my routines, made my appeals. I wanted to tether myself to various forms of family in the same way I wanted to reinscribe distinguishing features into the land around me after the snow had softened them. That is, I wanted to place myself.
Re-watching News from Home during Pride month, I imagined those first few shots as allegory. Here is the absence of so many of our queer and trans elders, whose lives were taken by AIDS, depression, mass shootings, overdoses, bashings, homicides. Once again, I watched with my feet tucked beneath me, hip bones stacked on top of ankles, blood pooling in my knees. This time, I noticed the silence. True to her spare style, Akerman splices the narration in News from Home with voicelessness. These stretches of silence occupy the film in the same way Akerman and her mother do, the same way our lost community members inhabit our consciousness if not our cities.
Of course, I don’t mean to say that my hands are left empty every time I reach for queer and trans elders—I mean that I keep repeating the gesture. I watch News from Home again, replay Arthur Russell’s songs, email that old professor, dog-ear the same pages in Giovanni’s Room, in Stone Butch Blues, write to the distant relative, return to that lesbian bar that’s been around since 1987, mimic the aesthetics. Maybe it’s no surprise that in Akerman’s study of alienation, familial absence, longing, and guilt, I feel a sense of kinship. To call yourself lost is another way to name yourself.
Born and raised in Seattle, Jay lives in Bushwick. You can typically find them making mixes, biking around Brooklyn, or reading outside Topos.
On Film Editing and the Math Proof
Film editing is a characteristic of filmmaking separating it from other artistic mediums and the math proof similarly characterizes mathematics in regards to other sciences. Analyzing the relationship of these characteristics to their fields, similarities arise between them that could be used to enrich both fields.
Written by Tashrika Sharma
Filmmaking and science have a long documented history, going as far back as early amateur filmmaker like Eadweard Muybridge who invented devices in the late 19th century to record movement. However, filmmaking and theoretical mathematics have little conversational history. One method of creating a conversation between the two fields could be by connecting them through their unique characteristics. While editing exists in all artistic mediums, editing in film is a technique that distinguishes film from other art forms. Whereas in mathematics, the math proof remains a mysterious combination of prose and symbols used to verify abstract statements unlike the hard sciences. These distinguishing characteristics of film and math reveal their ephemeral natures and thus provide one basis in which they can be related to each other.
“It may sound almost circular to say that what mathematicians are accomplishing is to advance human understanding of mathematics,” William Thurston wrote in On Proof and Progress In Mathematics, focusing on the psychological and sociological aspects of how math is practiced and not upon how to define it. The key aspect is that practicing mathematics involves advancing how human beings think and understand various aspects of the field. This can range from being part of a team that discovers a new result, or a team that rediscovers an old one. Thurston enumerates that aspects of math thinking involves: human language, visual, spatial, and kinesthetic sense, logic and deduction, intuition, association, and metaphor, as well as stimulus-response,and processing of time. Combinations of such thinking practices can lead to understandings that are harder to explain since they are often intangible, difficult to communicate, individual, and often the subtext of the conversation.
Photo credit: 8 1/2 (Dir. Federico Fellini, 1963), the audience is often between what the film director, Guido (center, played by Marcello Mastroianni), is fantasizing and experiencing as he embarks on making his film. He imagines Claudia Cardinale (left) gliding to give him a glass of water only to snap back into reality by the woman offering him the water (right).
The subtext is the unconscious aspect of communication that creates a more profound experience of the storytelling. “To me, the perfect film is as though it were unwinding behind your eyes, and your eyes were projecting it themselves so that you were seeing what you wished to see. Film is like thought. It’s the closest to the thought process of any art,” John Huston said in an interview published in Christian Science Monitor in 1973. The film 8 ½, which follows the creative process of the film director at the center of it, famously makes seamless transitions between the past, the present and the conditional future representing the thoughts of the director. While film is an immediate manifestation we experience, there are also internal understandings that arise in filmgoers. They arise from the thoughts guiding the films colliding with the personal associations each individual makes while watching.
Photo Credit: Meshes of the Afternoon (Dir. Maya Deren, 1943), “the woman (Maya Deren) later on in the film watches herself from a window experiencing an incident that occurred earlier in the film.” via Flicker Alley
Mathematics distinguishes itself from other fields in that ideas are communicated through proofs. A proof in the most general sense is defined as a clear flow of convincing mathematical ideas. While proofs are read linearly, readers often engage and process them non-linearly. Non-linearity in storytelling is often associated with surrealism or dynamic storytelling, one can see non-linearity in many of the sequences of the experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon which unfolds in a dream-like form. Proofs are not primary information but are a way to organize mathematical understandings and are extremely useful. These proofs are what subsequent generations encounter in terms of past work. The language they’re written in inadequately captures the way each generation thinks about the same ideas and communicates them.
Photo Credit: Meshes of the Afternoon (Dir. Maya Deren, 1943), “knife sequence is immediately proceeded by a key in the same spot” via Flicker Alley
While every field of art involves editing, filmmaking separates itself through the function of “separation” (or referred to in other cultures as “assembly”) of footage. This editing process produces a rhythm defined as the unseen but strongly felt guiding force behind an audience’s experience of watching. For these reasons, filmmaking is described as “sculpting in time” by the director Andrei Tarkovsky in his book Sculpting in Time. The editing process in this sculpting works similarly to how we blink, as remarked by Walter Murch in In The Blink of An Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. Murch wrote.
“the blink is either something that helps an internal separation of thought to take place, or it is an involuntary reflex accompanying the mental separation that is taking place anyway.”
The choices in visual discontinuity by the blink (the edit) create a path for the film to convey the language intrinsic to itself, quite like a dream, to an audience ready to be convinced. In mathematics, it’s hard to talk about anything without explaining it. The proof or the explanation is a way of making the invisible visible - of building a path to get everyone on the same page. The communal language of the mathematical proof presupposes that the reader is prepared to be convinced. In both fields, one is telling a story making an audience familiar with something that at first feels unfamiliar, but with inexplicable revelations in each part of the proof or film, one is also at the same time becoming unfamiliar with the familiar. The latter sensation occurs when we shift our experience in reaction to something, whether a mathematical object becomes deeper in our mental image of it or watching a film expands our understanding of ourselves or others. In both cases, the math proof and the film are both temporally dynamic and exist in ways that paintings, sculptures, and other biological, chemical or physical objects are not.
If the film edit works to make films feel like a waking dream, then math progress and the mysterious way proofs work are like that of a sleepwalker. In that sense, there could be a relationship between the waking dream and sleepwalking to create work that enriches math communication and filmgoing experiences.
Arts and Education: 16k and Margo & Perry
Symone Baptiste, director of “Sixteen Thousand Dollars” and Becca Roth, director of “Margo & Perry” go in depth on using episodic form and comedy as tools for truth and change.
Written by Lex Young
“Sixteen Thousand Dollars” directed by Symone Baptiste and “Margo & Perry” directed by Becca Roth each use different tools of artistry and storytelling to highlight the importance of the medium of film as a method for education and awareness, not just entertainment. Their growth as projects are a testament to their success and the importance of their work and messages.
Photo credit via “Sixteen Thousand Dollars” Trailer
Baptiste is a stand-up show producer and booker in LA who was a showrunner for season one of “Call & Response” and has interviewed and directed talent for NBC. “Sixteen Thousand Dollars” is an episodic short film that won Best Narrative Short at the 2020 Bushwick Film Fest. The short explores ideas of reparations through a struggling college grad who tries to figure out how to spend his reparation check received in the mail. A writer and director whose personal mission is to foster diversity in the comedy space, Baptiste challenges viewers to see slavery reparations in a brand new light.
“It was absolutely principal that we added nuance to the debate on reparations, bringing the tough conversations around the subject to the forefront and facing them head-on.” In “Sixteen Thousand Dollars''
Photo credit via “Sixteen Thousand Dollars” Trailer
She uses comedy to explore these nuances. “It became extremely apparent that addressing the matter through comedy was the right move; it lowered the barriers to understanding the complex subject and gave it an edge.” The film has been shown not just in festivals but to college students, believing that the short form, as well as the comedic approach, are valuable for education and entertainment. “It’s a testament to the validity and truth behind the story of Sixteen Thousand Dollars”. The short has also been shown at Slamdance in it’s episodic category. After making “Sixteen Thousand Dollars”, Baptiste was approached several times about turning it into an episodic show. She praises the writing of Brodie Reed and Ellington Wells, who also star in the short. “The sibling dynamic they created on the page is impeccable. People want to see more of that, and I don’t disagree.”
Photo Credit: Director Becca Roth
Becca Roth is a narrative and documentary filmmaker who tells stories that explore themes of queerness and identity. Roth describes filmmaking as an important personal tool for self-expression, and her main character, Margo, uses her artmaking similarly. “For me, filmmaking has always been very, very personal. I wrote my first film when I was a teenager as a way to cope with my feelings for a female classmate that I couldn’t talk to anyone about.” Margo is an artist who interprets her world and identity through drawings and cartoons. “Through her relationship with Perry and her growth journey as an individual, her art becomes less self-deprecating and more expansive, imaginative, and inclusive.”
“Margo & Perry,” a proof-of-concept short, is the story of a young woman who babysits for a girl she believes to be the baby she gave up for adoption as a teen. Roth has written and directed multiple projects, including the 2017 short “Lens'' featured in the 2017 run of Bushwick Film Festival. The feature screenplay of “Margo & Perry” is one of ten screenplays selected by the Black List and GLAAD for the GLAAD list.
Photo credit via “Margo & Perry” Trailer
The short “Margo & Perry” was created from the award-winning feature screenplay. “I had to take the more complete story of the feature and distill part of it into a shorter piece that still demonstrates the characters and themes of the feature while being able to exist on its own as a standalone film.” She explains the importance of Margo's identity in both the short and feature. “Margo is also a queer protagonist, which is featured more overly in the feature version of this story, but I made sure to make it subtly clear in the short as well, and that is done through her art.”
Both films utilize different techniques of artistry and storytelling to explore themes of identity and reparations, and their growth and success prove the importance of film as a method of education and expression. Baptiste and her team are moving forward with pitching “Sixteen Thousand Dollars” as a series. “We’ve put so much hard work into developing a post-reparations world for nearly a year, so it’s been a long time coming.” The feature narrative film of “Margo & Perry” is currently in development and will be Roth’s debut feature film.
2020
Director: Symone Baptiste
Starring: Brodie Reed, Ellington Wells, and David Gborie
~
2020
Director: Becca Roth
Starring: Sofia Black D’Elia, Annie Parisse and Charlotte Macleod
Lex Young is currently watching movies, writing and making things in New York. Catch more of their work on Instagram
Film as Poetry: When Art Intersects
Over the years, several independent filmmakers have married visual storytelling with poetic rhythm, be it through form, subject matter, or concept. This piece details three short films whose poetic elements amplify the complicated and mundane meaning of their characters' lives.
Written by Kennedy McCutchen
The intersection of two art forms into one creative entity has the potential to breed a magical and idiosyncratic experience; all the more so when those two art forms prioritize a kind of rhythmic sensory aesthetic that makes one treasure the budding trees of springtime or reexamine a kiss from a loved one. Over the years, several independent filmmakers have taken advantage of such artistic marriages in powerful and innovative ways. Poetry and its typologies have emerged as one medium on-screen as a subject, as an identity, and as an idea. The list of short films below consists of filmmakers whose poetic identities and interests reveal themselves as intricate and palpable stories.
Film as Haiku: Nettles (2018)
Photo Credits: Aaron Jaker, via Nettles - Chapters
A Bushwick Film Festival competitor and prize-winner, this short film written and directed by Raven Jackson exudes a haunting elegance characteristic of many women’s most subtle and traumatic moments in life. Composed of six nearly silent chapters, viewers are taken from body part to body part, both literally and figuratively. A little girl’s eye watches a father figure let his wet towel fall to the floor in what feels like a vacant home. An older woman’s back is quietly swept away in the currents of a muddied river. These little instances of difference and the liminal reminded me—and I’m sure many others—of my own intimate moments with fear, grief, healing, and sexuality.
Jackson is a published poet (her most recent work is a chapbook titled little violences), but her film does not prioritize nor celebrate poetry directly. Rather, it is the delicate haiku-like audiovisual experience that resembles something of an atmospheric slam session. The film’s short stories mimic the length and precision with which Jackson writes her poems. An excerpt from her poem “i watch papa bury our dog in a grave the size of a pond” strikes the same tone as her bodily Nettles chapters: “my jaws lock in mid-sentence and hands cover your last white leg with dirt.” Just as a haiku emphasizes the beauty of nature or the simple moments of life in only three lines, Jackson needs only the skip of a small girl’s jump rope over crunching leaves to foreground links between innocence, femininity, and the earth.
The fourth chapter, Throat, further displays the ephemeral and complex moments of a woman’s life. The audience watches the protagonist unflinchingly gut a chicken as the camera closes in on the innards of the bird, refusing to cut away. Confronting the uncomfortable while nevertheless carving a familiar ambience, the chapter continues to explore necessity and desire as we begin to watch the same woman masturbate. The director’s choice to juxtapose the scenes embodies the direct and often provocative nature of the well-known three-line poetic structure. Singularly evocative and desperately poignant, Jackson’s knack for stinging the viewer with an efficient, transient aesthetic keeps the tension high. Shot with 16 mm film and with little to no dialogue, Jackson’s work indeed reminds one of a rich haiku: short, intentional, and surprising.
Stream on The Criterion Channel
Film as Freeverse: How to Be at Home (2020)
Photo Credits: Andrea Dorfman’s YouTube Thumbnail
Directed by Andrea Dorfman in collaboration with songwriter and poet Tanya Davis, How to Be at Home is an endearing and timely short film made via still-shot animation. A narrator’s melodic voice recites a poem, a sequel to the pair’s first film How to Be Alone (2010), as Dorfman turns the pages of an illustrated book, each new leaf revealing a depiction of the words spoken. Made in the throes of the recent pandemic, How to Be at Home both comforts and mourns alongside our isolated bodies that are still coping after more than a year of living in the era of coronavirus. Kind suggestions of healing greet you at every corner. “Appreciate the kindness in the distance of strangers,” we’re told; “lean into loneliness and know you’re not alone,” our invisible friend says as hands hold along the bind.
“Feed your heart - if people are your nourishment, I get you. Feel the feelings that undo you while you have to keep apart.”
The film serves as a stylistically rhythmic lullaby, not abashing our self-pity nor ignoring the triggers that grind themselves against our identities and loved ones at every fresh news notification. It’s a short film about the familiar. It’s a two-dimensional pot clanging against a two-dimensional spoon. It’s a seagull beating above waves that can resemble our calmest spaces. It’s a poem, spoken and seen, reminding us that spaciousness in solitude can create a more holistic individual, one that can find connectivity and “truth” in the murk of death and isolation.
Stream on YouTube
Film as Elegy: The Poet and Singer (2012)
Photo Credits: Cinema on the Edge
“Hell subverting hell becomes heaven,” recites the poet of The Poet and Singer, a 21-minute short film directed by Bi Gan. The film follows an artistic pair along their casually murderous trek. Two men contemplate ambition, the Diamond Sutra, and toothaches in transitory non-places, all points from A to B: a river, a cave, a path along a field. Lightning bolts flash sporadically, cloaking the film with a sense of unexpected danger while maintaining voyeuristic awe regarding the extraordinary capabilities of nature. The poetry reveals itself out of the aforementioned toothache, out of meeting the father of a man they were paid to kill. A knife lingers from scene to scene; it doesn’t seem to surprise.
“Hell subverting hell becomes heaven.”
The lack of shock value is precisely why the melodrama of the film feels relatively unimportant. What does hold import is the contemplative and serene nature of Bi Gan’s artistic vision. For this reason, even given the abstract nature of the piece, The Poet and Singer best embodies that of an elegy, a reflection on a serious subject matter. A murder occurs along the river, but the philosophizing and ambition of the main characters’ are not limited to their callous act; in fact, they seem hardly troubled by it at all. Just as “the old man” claims the singer’s toothache “doesn’t matter,” neither does their crime. Instead, the political and spiritual realizations, as disguised as they may be in the film, are lamented with the poignancy of a silent paddle upstream.
Stream on The Criterion Channel
