Tag Archives: filmmaking

An interview with Noemi Charlotte Thieves

I had a chance to interview Noemi Charlotte Thieves on January 10. We were at a going-away party in Brooklyn and fell into conversation. The conversation was SO INTERESTING that I asked Noemi if we could step outside so that I could capture our conversation on my iPhone. (The ethnographic opportunity is always now.)

Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. We had to find a fire engine and cue the fire engine and the driver couldn’t hit his mark. Finally we just had him drive into frame. I mean does the NYFD not give these people ANY media training? (We love. We kid.)

Noemi was wonderful to interview, an ethnographer’s dream, a gift from the gods of ethnography. He’s thoughtful, clear, vivid, expansive, intelligent, and illuminating.

I think Noemi is perhaps also a glimpse of the culture we’re becoming.

This interview 20 years ago would have been painful and sad. We were a culture of two solitudes. Filmmakers could be popular or they be experimental. And they were tortured by the choice. They were forced to choose one side or the other.

Sometime in the last 10 years, the two extremes began to draw together. (And ironies of ironies, this was roughly the period in which the two extremes of American politics began to drive apart.)  Genre and art have yet to find one another, but, as Noemi points out, the hunt is on.

So far, as Noemi also points out, it’s been a happy rapprochement. The popular stuff, while democratic and accessible, was obvious to the point of being laborious and “jump the shark” awful. And the artistic work was, too often, obscure. It was, actually, as the phrase has it, “deservedly obscure.” (There was a time when Canadians refused to watch anything that came from the National Film Board. They were effectively boycotting the work they were as taxpayers helping to fund.)

To combine the two extremes is to begin to construct a single American culture, a place where democratic clarity and artistic risk work together. Now, we have to figure out what to do about the politics.

(Thanks to Jeremy DiPaolo and Katie Koch for the introduction to Noemi. (How is Sweden?))

 

The middle is a dangerous place to be

IMG_1642According to a Goldilocks logic, the middle is a good place to be. It’s the Via Media between two extremes.  It’s the place politicians [used to] fashion compromise.  It’s the place most of us look for balance. Typically, the middle is a place of safety.

Or at least it used to be.  My first glimpse of this when someone told me, years ago, about “glocal.”  This is a portmanteau made up of “global” and “local.”  What falls out is the middle, the spaces between the whole of the world and one’s immediate community.  In a strange twist, we became more cosmopolitan and more provincial at the same moment.

The death of the middle is especially evident in the world of movies. We have block busters on high.  They have budgets of one or more hundreds of millions. We have a great tribe of indies below. The budget here is typically tens of thousands, effectively whatever the filmmaker can squeeze out of their own and their parents’ credit cards. In the middle, the pickings are scarce. Judd Apatow mostly. Not, as they say, that there is anything wrong with that.

The death of the middle is also evident in the world of music.  Here is Derek Thompson on where we stand.

The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn 77 percent of all revenue from recorded music, media researchers report. And even though the amount of digital music sold has surged, the 10 best-selling tracks command 82 percent more of the market than they did a decade ago. The advent of do-it-yourself artists in the digital age may have grown music’s long tail, but its fat head keeps getting fatter.

But today while reading an very interesting essay by David Autor, I came across this chilling passage.  There is, it turns out, a hole in the employment market as well.

“the structure of job opportunities in the United States has sharply polarized over the past two decades, with expanding job opportunities in both high-skill, high-wage occupations and low-skill, low- wage occupations, coupled with contracting opportunities in middle-wage, middle-skill white-collar and blue-collar jobs. Concretely, employment and earnings are rising in both high- education professional, technical, and managerial occupations and, since the late 1980s, in low-education food service, personal care, and protective service occupations. Conversely, job opportunities are declining in both middle-skill, white- collar clerical, administrative, and sales occupations and in middle-skill, blue-collar production, craft, and operative occupations.”

Are these missing middles related?  I leave that to readers.

Autor, David. 2010. “The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market Implications for Employment and Earnings.” Center for American Progress: The Hamilton Project. http://economics.mit.edu/files/5554.

image: I took this photo in London this fall.  I like the way the lamp standard divides the Victorian beauty on the right and the modernist beauty on the left.  A razor thin middle.

post script: the paragraph from Derek Thompson was added several hours after the post went up.

Tyler Perry is making a movie in my hometown

Tyler Perry is making a movie called in my hometown. It’s called We the Peeples.

We haven’t see this much excitement for some time.  Small packs of teen girls can be seen rocketing around town, hoping they might fall into frame and rise to stardom.

The book on Tyler Perry is that he discovered no one was making films for the rising African American middle class, so he started making them himself.  This proved the path to power and riches.  Mr. Perry is now a force in the film biz.

Not without criticism.  Spike Lee has accused him of trading in African American stereotypes.  I haven’t done a study of this issue, but I can’t help feeling that Mr. Lee might have offered us a more culturally nuanced reading on this one.  (And if there is a guy who is good at nuanced cultural readings, it’s Spike Lee.)

Every community that undergoes rapid transformation begins to treat the old regime, once so hated and so hateful, into something fond and bath-like.  I can’t say what We the Peeples is about but my guess is that it has a certain nostalgic quality.  It may play out stereotypes but it does now that, and because, this stereotypes have lost their force.  (As someone once said, nostalgia is history with the pain removed.)  So it’s okay to turn them into nostalgia. Okay?  It’s necessary.  It is a way to secure the world now that so many changes are taking places.

I haven’t done a study here but I got a glimpse of this when sitting in a bar at the Marriott (I think it was) in Kansas City.  There was a convention in progress.  African American women had assembled explicitly to address this question: how to you raise kids in a middle class suburbs.  As every winner of the American lottery learns, prosperity is not without its challenges.  I got the 411 from a husband, who was nursing a drink in the bar as his wife and many wives set to solving the problem.

Welcome, Mr. Perry.  We are grateful for your filmmaking.