REEL UNDERGROUND

FILM REVIEWS
AND CALENDAR
BY PAUL D. GOETZ




Teens' AIDS Video Attacks Fear And Ignorance

"What Begins with A?"
(a 25-minute, broadcast quality video written and performed by teens of the Heart of Glass Foundation with support from Kids In Film and the Seattle arts community). Asia is a 16-year-old girl infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome(AIDS). She's afraid to tell anyone except her boyfriend Josh because if her friends at school find out "I wouldn't be just Asia. I'd be that girl with AIDS." Her fears are not unfounded. When her secret is discovered, ignorance fans the flames of fear into cruelty like wind feeding a wildfire. And it's not just her schoolmates who are in fear's grip; Asia, too, is in danger of withdrawing into isolation. Eventually, valuable wisdom on dealing with fear is shared.

"What Begins with A?" is not another sex education tool conceived by adults and easily tuned out by youths. Written and performed specifically for teens by local teens who have been affected by HIV/AIDS or other life-threatening illnesses, it's a moving, thoughtful exploration of the real feelings that kids in peril deal with on a daily basis. The video's performers are members of Heart of Glass, a nonprofit organization founded by Verna Appel that offers them and their friends emotional support. The group uses music, art, creative writing, film, video, and dance to empower teens and explore feelings.
14-year-old Nichole, whose mother suffered a heart attack and died recently, said that making the video and being part of the group gave her the confidence to return to school. "The video helped me creatively express my emotions," she said. "I was scared that the kids in school would treat me differently, but I realized that if they were truly my friends they wouldn't do that to me." Zack, a 19-year-old hemophiliac who has HIV, appreciates the volunteers' willingness to teach and listen, and the confidentiality of the group. He also had some advice for those whose ignorance about HIV/AIDS has made them fearful: "Treat us normal. We're normal people. Have fun, get to know the person, because you may learn quite a bit." While most of the teens bond in group situations, they are often more comfortable opening up when Appel, her volunteers, and peers provide individual attention. It's a shift in focus that will eventually guide the next video project.
Still in its infancy, the group is already experiencing growing pains. Forced to keep it small, its 25 to 28 members meet in Appel's condominium, but the word is spreading and teens are starting to come from as far away as Bremerton and Bellingham. "We're growing faster than the number of volunteers, money, and space will allow," Appel says. "I'm hoping to come up with some donated space." Their immediate goal is to develop an educational package to accompany the video and then distribute it nationally to schools, libraries, AIDS organizations, teen groups, community centers, and churches. "What Begins with A?" can be purchased for $14.95 by calling Heart of Glass at 322-3187.

911 Media Arts Center
(117 Yale Avenue N, 682-6552)

April 8
"The Oracle"
(written and directed by Antero Alli). Set in Port Townsend, San Francisco, and the "bardo terrains of the soul realm," this promising 70-minute debut feature (shot in Hi-8 and 3/4" video and Super 8 film) is a visionary exploration of an elderly bedridden man's interior journey toward death and beyond. It's also a sometimes humorous, sometimes heartrending portrayal of his family's changing perceptions of the process of death.

Grandpa (Art Janelle), whose wife died six months earlier, has been asking questions in his sleep. As his daughter Kathryn (Marzee Crum) says to Sarah (Amanda Shaw), the on-call nurse, "He's usually the last one to ask anyone anything. He's always the one with the answers." But Grandpa is in a different terrain now, and his granddaughter Ariadne (Kathryn Rice) seems to understand better than the grownups around her. "He's pretending to be sick," she says. "He's not sick, just dying." This is confirmed when, shifting to Grandpa's dreamscape, we discover that Ariadne is guiding him through a series of stations to a mysterious nomad woman who will, in turn, lead him to a deity called Rocketman. In the process he comes to know compassion, humor, and freedom. While this may sound ludicrous, Alli's visual realization of these terrains is nearly spellbinding. His use of James Koehnline's colorful bardo collage art and an expressive manipulation of picture and sound (including slow motion, posterization, and color tinting) provide a hopeful sense of wonder while still respecting the mystery.
Back in the waking world, Grandpa's estranged son Brandon (Joel Gilman) has, at Kathryn's request, finally decided to come home. His arrival provides for a poetically pure moment of transcendent reconciliation that is priceless. It also provides possible answers to Grandpa's key questions: "Where do the things in dreams go? Do they pass to the dreams of others? And does the father who lives in your dreams die again when you awaken?" Throughout, Alli makes effective use of poet Pablo Neruda's "Book of Questions," which provides Grandpa's sometimes enigmatic, sometimes penetrating sonorous chant. While "The Oracle" suffers slightly from some tight performances and some loose editing, this is still one work that resonates meaningfully long after you've left the theater.

The Sanctuary Theatre
(Scarecrow Video, 5030 Roosevelt Way NE, 524-8554)

April 15-16
"Kes"
1969) (directed by Kenneth Loach). Scarecrow Video has been showing films in its cozy, 20-seat screening room on alternating weekends since October 29 of last year. Most are unavailable on video. This is a rare screening of Ken Loach's critically acclaimed second feature: an unsentimental, socially conscious study of English working-class life. It focuses on a Barnsley schoolboy who sees a chance to transcend his bleak existence when he catches, trains, and grows to love a kestrel (or falcon).

Neglected by his working mother, beleaguered by his brutish brother, and disenchanted with a largely cruel, impersonal school system, Billy (David Bradley) spends much of his time in isolation, delivering papers, shoplifting, and taking walks in a nearby wood where he watches with envy the falcons nesting in the ruins of a castle. The falcon perfectly signifies Billy's deep-seated desire to take flight, to "fly in a pocket of silence," to be "wild, fierce, and untamed."
At first, the idyllic time he spends with the falcon only serves to intensify the dreariness of his time spent at home and in school, but eventually these worlds begin to merge. A scene in which Billy is coaxed out of a daydream to gradually captivate the rest of the class with his growing enthusiasm as he tells how he trained the falcon is a beautifully instructive lesson in the transforming power of connecting personal experience with the educational process.
"Kes" is a deceptively simple tale, rich in authentic detail and loaded with integrity. Loach's extraordinary use of mostly non-professional actors and Chris Menges' unobtrusive camera style provide a heightened sense of realism and, ultimately, a remarkable poignancy all the way through to its uncompromising resolution.

The Varsity
(4329 University Way NE, 632-3131)

April 28 - May 4
"Martha and Ethel"
(co-written and produced by Jyll Johnstone and Barbara Ettinger, directed by Jyll Johnstone). This fascinating documentary is, ostensibly, a portrayal by Johnstone and Ettinger of their two very dissimilar nannies (who were part of their families for over 30 years), and a look at the confusion arising from why their parents would hire someone else to bring them up. In actuality, it's more a revelation of the filmmakers' inability to ask the tough questions of their emotionally distant parents. While pent-up anger comes through between the lines, most of the film revolves around these care-givers' backgrounds, the effects they had on the families, and the eventual attempts by both filmmakers to make a more substantial connection with them. The film keeps returning to their socialite mothers (the fathers barely register) who continue to side-step the reasons for their chilly reserve. But why shouldn't they? They're never asked.

Johnstone's nanny, Martha Kneifel, was severely disciplined as a child, and later enrolled in a two-year program to become a baby nurse where she was instructed in strict German child care procedures. Coming to America during the rise of Nazism with no family ties, valuing order and cleanliness, she was, to Johnstone's mother, the perfect nanny: a strong disciplinarian with a definite sense of right and wrong. Unbending, distant, and given to a liberal use of the wooden spoon, Martha was hated and feared by the family's five children. Ironically, Johnstone would make an attempt to bond with Martha, not with her mother, by taking her back to her German hometown as she neared 90.
By contrast, Ettinger's nanny, the guileless Ethel Edwards, raised by a mulatto grandfather and black grandmother, seemed to absorb greater tolerance by immersing herself in multi-cultural activities as she made moves to North Carolina and Connecticut. Completely untrained in child rearing, she proved to be a natural, and would become a friend and role model to the Ettinger family's six children, totally accepting them even during the 60s when their parents weren't even speaking to them. Ettinger and Ethel would also make a sojourn to Ethel's hometown in South Carolina where Ettinger marvels at "the miracle that led her to us."
While all of this is warm and uplifting, and these two women are so interesting they nearly justify the movie by themselves, the real interest lies with the mother-nanny, mother-child relationships. Johnstone's mother led a highly visible social life and rarely had time or inclination for the children. Here the filmmakers squander the opportunity to confront her lame explanations. Describing Martha's role, she says, unchallenged, "She was completely responsible for them, but I was the mother, regardless," as if giving birth to babies by itself is enough to make one a mother. Though Johnstone complains that she didn't have a sense of love as a child, she turns silent when placed alongside her mother. It makes you wonder who's behind the camera.
Mrs. Ettinger's hesitancy to treat Ethel as an equal (even after the two of them lived alone together for years following the Ettingers divorce) may be why Ethel, at times, treats her like one of the children. The plain-speaking Ethel's adamant insistence on her place in the family, emphasized by her tendency to repeat phrases like, "You don't have to birth a child to love it," creates a contrasting tension with Mrs. Ettinger's unwillingness to admit that Ethel was essentially a better "mother" to her children. But then, again, these issues are never directly addressed from daughter to mother. It makes you wish Mike Wallace had been asking the questions.



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Contents on this page were published in the April/May, 1995 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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Copyright © 1995 WFP Collective, Inc.
Goetz