Twelfth Annual Embarras Valley Film Festival: Film Culture and Civil Rights in Illinois

The Embarras Valley Film Festival celebrates its 12^th year with a focus on civil rights in Illinois. Our theme, "For All the World to See II: Film Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights," expands on the Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights exhibit and program in Eastern's Booth Library: http://www.library.eiu.edu/exhibits/civilrights/. Held annually in Charleston, Ill. since 2004, this year’s festival will be held Nov. 2-4 on the campus of Eastern Illinois University.

The festival kicks off at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 2 with the screening of “Chi-Raq” and an introduction by Political Science professor and film studies minor faculty member Kevin Anderson in the Coleman Hall Auditorium, Room 1255. As a modern day adaptation of the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes, Chi-Raq is set against the backdrop of gang violence in Chicago. The murder of a child by a stray bullet prompts a group of women led by Lysistrata to organize against the on-going violence in Chicago's Southside, creating a movement that challenges the nature of race, sex and violence in America and around the world. 

Thursday evening, the 25 official selections from the Student-Produced Short Film Contest will be shown from 3:30-5:30 p.m. in the Coleman Auditorium. The three winning films will be announced during the screening. Over 190 entries were submitted for this year’s contest from student filmmakers throughout the U.S.

On Friday, Nov. 4, EVFF coordinators will introduce “Between Two Rivers” at 4:00 in Coleman Auditorium. Filmed, edited and directed by artists Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan, Between Two Rivers offers a remarkable insight into a community struggling with severe economic, social and environmental pressures. With lyrical and striking contrasts between the past and present, the film explores the multiple factors that have led to Cairo, Illinois’s rise and fall, from booming river-trade and juke-joints to mob-lynchings and race riots which tore apart the community. Between Two Rivers illustrates the long-term impact of the violent civil unrest, economic boycotts, curfews and martial law that so deeply divided the community.

The EVFF is a yearly event honoring a person or theme relevant to the Embarras Valley, which encompasses much of east-central Illinois. Past festivals have honored Gregg Toland, William Phipps, Burl Ives, James Jones, Joan Allen, Lincoln, Gene Hackman, silent films, films for and about children and young adults, Dick Van Dyke, Richard Pryor, and documentary films. Now in its 12th year, the Embarras Valley Film Festival’s mission is to encourage broader appreciation for and study of film as a potent vehicle for human expression and communication through the exploration of cinematic arts involving people from Illinois and alumni of EIU. This year’s festival is sponsored in part by the City of Charleston Tourism Fund. Other Festival co-sponsors are the Coles County Arts Council and Booth Library, EIU.

All festival events are free and open to the public.

For more information, contact Murray at rlmurray@eiu.edu, Kit Morice at kmorice@eiu.edu, or David Bell at dsbell@eiu.edu. You can also visit the website at castle.eiu.edu/~evff/.

There Will be Blood (2007) and the Power of Spectacle

Oil frontier films equate land acquisition with a sense of progress as a way to tame the frontier, no matter what the consequences for native cultures or the land itself or whether few (from a progressive perspective) or many (from a populist point of view) gain access to its benefits. This focus on property and profit contributes to the battle between “big guys” and “little guys” that inevitably leads to overuse of land. The “land rush” of 1889 and 1892, especially, evolved from a rush for farm and ranch land that culminated in wildcatting, oil booms, busts, and ultimately the spectacular nature of the force of oil gushers and oil field fires in Oklahoma and Indian Territories, Texas, and California. There Will Be Blood (2007) demonstrates filmic spectacle that both reveals and disguises ecodisaster on the oil frontier.  

Oil well fires and spectacular land runs play on what Nick Browne calls the “rhetoric of the spectacular.” Browne asserts that “formally, the rhetorical parameters of the spectacular work by modulation of cinematic scale, repetition, and perspective.” Here, filmed oil well fires take on spectacular qualities when they assume the large-scale dimensions that such fires produce, when they are shot repeatedly or for a long duration, and when they are shot from an angle that emphasizes the fires’ force. Oil well fires and spectacular land runs play on what Nick Browne calls the “rhetoric of the spectacular.” Browne asserts that “formally, the rhetorical parameters of the spectacular work by modulation of cinematic scale, repetition, and perspective.” Here, filmed oil well fires take on spectacular qualities when they assume the large-scale dimensions that such fires produce, when they are shot repeatedly or for a long duration, and when they are shot from an angle that emphasizes the fires’ force.

There Will Be Blood (2007) attests to the continuing power of spectacle in oil frontier Westerns. In spite of its attempts to critique unfettered capitalism and development in oil fields, it is spectacle that underpins both the aesthetics of the film and its melodramatic center. In his Rolling Stone review of the film, Peter Travers highlights the repercussions of Daniel Plainview’s (Daniel Day Lewis) greed as a critique of unfettered capitalism, asserting,

This is [Paul Thomas Anderson’s] bloody and brilliant Citizen Kane. … Social history isn't his concern. He's out to show how violence of the flesh and the spirit is hard-wired into the American character…. He rapes and pillages in the name of progress. and winds up estranged from the human species he has long ago forgotten to call his own.

But Travers also notes the spectacle on display in the film that entices the eye when he asserts, “if you want proof that cinematography can be an art form, behold the brute force of the images captured by Robert Elswit, a genius of camera and lighting who can make visual poetry out of black smoke and an oil well consumed by flame.” He calls There Will Be Blood “a beautiful beast of a film,” perhaps because it rests on spectacular images. 

Roger Ebert claims, however, that “Watching the movie is like viewing a natural disaster that you cannot turn away.” From the first oil pipe accident that kills a partner and gives Plainview a son, H.W. (Dillion Freasor) to the spectacular blast that takes H. W.’s hearing, spectacular effects propel the film’s narrative and facilitate its melodramatic center—Plainview’s fight with church and country and mourning for his now deaf (and no longer a commodity) son.  But they also highlight the environmental consequences of the oil frontier. Although There Will be Blood entertains through spectacular effects more than it emphasizes environmental degradation or resource exploitation, it also illustrates illustrates the economic, sociological and ecological repercussions of conquering the oil frontier, perhaps the last frontier in the modern age. Spectacle both reveals and disguises ecodisaster.

Smoke Signals (1998) and Environmental Adaptations

After watching Charlie's Country (2013) about aboriginal journeys,  Smoke Signals came to mind. In Smoke Signals, the so-called ecological Indian faces neither banishment nor annihilation because he adapts the hell of both the reservation and the wider Euro-centric world into a home. By translating four of a series of disjointed and primarily bitter stories from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven into a filmic collaborative journey with what he calls “integrity,” Sherman Alexie has constructed a narrative of environmental adaptation with a clear and cohesive structure that follows an evolutionary pattern focused on place. Characters in Smoke Signals embrace a focus on “adapting themselves to their circumstances in every possible way” while the film adds the element of ecology and emphasizes a relationship between human and nonhuman nature through Victor Joseph (Adam Beach) and Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams) journey toward Mars, Arizona, where Victor’s father’s ashes remain.

To build this narrative, the film follows a three-act narrative grounded in ecology:

• Establishing the reservation as an inhospitable setting for human and nonhuman nature.
• Leaving the reservation on a journey of landscapes.
• Returning to the reservation able to transform hell into a home.

 
 

The Reservation as Hell on Earth

The reservation’s ecology seems less than life sustaining during the film’s first act. Social images of reservation life highlight some of the real economic, environmental, and social problems still prevalent for American Indians. In one scene, for example, we see a drunken Arnold Joseph (Gary Farmer), Victor’s father, who stumbles out of his house, throwing firecrackers to prolong the celebration. Beer cans and fireworks cover the lawn. The party is over, but Arnold fires a roman candle into the house, and the curtains and living room furniture burst into flames. Thomas’ voice tells us that the “fire swallowed up my mother and father,” but Arnold catches an infant thrown from an upper story window, saving it from the raging fire. It is Thomas, and Arnold places him in the arms of his grandmother (Monique Mojica). When the grandmother thanks him, he says he 
“didn’t mean to,” a sign of the guilt he will carry that the father validates when he cuts his hair and, as Thomas states, “practiced vanishing.” Thomas and Victor have almost literally been “born of flame and ash” on a reservation where the only hope seems to be survival. 

A Journey of Landscapes

The opening act closes when Victor and Thomas consult with their mother figures and move closer to their journey to retrieve Victor’s father’s ashes. Although Victor bears his pain in isolation, Thomas helps his grandmother make fry bread, illustrating the communal strength on which environmental adaptation can be built. Victor associates fry bread with relationship building when he hugs his mom and compliments her on her bread, the best on the reservation. As Arlene explains, “I don’t make it by myself,” Arlene tells him. “I got the recipe from my grandmother and she got it from her grandmother, and I listened to people,” she says, showing him how building a new and better life—or fry bread—requires a collective process. When the two arrive in their father’s valley, his friend Suzy Song (Irene Bedard) continues this communal approach by offering Victor his father’s ashes. Thomas amplifies the connection with a story about Victor’s mother feeding a hundred hungry American Indians with fifty pieces of fry bread, a clear reference to the loaves and fishes parable from the Sermon on the Mount and interconnected relationships.

Transforming Hell Into a Home

One last conflict moves Victor and Thomas toward environmental adaptation and serves as the entrance into the third act of the film. While fighting over visions of Victor’s father, Victor and Thomas crash Arnold’s truck, avoiding a car parked in the middle of the highway. They turn what could be a dangerous altercation with police “off the Rez” into a triumph, changing Arnold’s past crimes into communal solutions. Instead of leaving the scene and avoiding a confrontation with police, Victor helps an injured girl from the accident, running all the way to the town hospital for assistance. Even when questioned by the police before leaving the hospital, Thomas and Victor transform an expected altercation into a ride home. The driver of the car responsible for the accident accuses Victor of assaulting him, but before Victor can defend himself, the white police chief (Tom Skerritt) lets them go, saying, “Mr. Johnson’s wife Holly says he’s, and I quote, ‘a complete asshole.’”

In Smoke Signals, Victor and Thomas turn a bleak hell on the reservation into a thriving ecology in a narrative of environmental adaptation that includes collective views of human and nonhuman nature and provides a living community. Victor adapts to his once-bleak environment and finds hope and life. For Victor and Thomas, who have been born of ashes and fire, it is the water of the Spokane River that leads them to love and life, because it is the river that at least metaphorically turns Arnold into a fish, connecting him and the two young men who scatter his ashes with nature and each other. They have fulfilled, as Meeker explains, an effective evolutionary process, “one of adaptation and accommodation, with the various species exploring opportunistically their environments in search of a means to maintain their existence” (164). As Meeker concludes, “The lesson of ecology is balance and equilibrium, the lesson of comedy is humility and endurance” (168). Victor and Thomas learn all of these lessons well.