The Quavers at the Wexner Center - Columbus, Ohio

You can sort of get a sense of the theater from this photo. I’ve come to feel like the dimensions and qualities of the room itself play a big part in how the show goes. This is starting to feel like a pretty optimal setup. The theater fits about 250 people, so it’s not huge, but it’s not tiny either. Somewhere in between – the kind of place you can actually talk to everyone without using  a microphone, if necessary. Also, the stage was pretty low – about three or four feet off the ground. So the effect is that it’s possible to stand up there and speak very directly to people – you can make eye contact and face contact and converse in an almost intimate way with everyone in the theater. This creates a connection that I think is important for UTOPIA.

And finally, the Wexner Center did a good of filling the place. It wasn’t sold out, but it definitely felt full, and that kind of “energy” (I hope I’m not sounding hopelessly Northern California here) — the energy of a full house – is probably more important than anything else in creating a momentum for the piece to work. If it’s full, people laugh more, they’re more engaged, and this creates a loop – almost like a feedback loop – where the audience gives me a lot of energy and I give it back, and so on.

Anyway, like I said, the show went really well. The Quavers were great. The audience was lively and engaged. And it all felt good – both during and after. I was very happy that nite to get a Facebook message from the great Bill Horrigan, who runs the Film/Video Dept there and whose smarts and taste I’ve admired for many years. He wrote a glowing note about the piece which I was thrilled about:

The effect of the piece reminded me of what someone once wrote to describe the sensation of seeing the Berliner Ensemble performing live, epitomizing Brecht’s dream of theatre: “skimming, speculative, beautiful, fun.” And to have conceived the piece as you have, precisely as NOT a conventional film but as an invitation to/insistence on having live people and music addressing live people coming together for this occasion only, is itself a vindication of the utopian impulse, to its persistence and self-justifying imperative. Lovely event; let a thousand such flowers bloom.

We did some shows with Brendan for the first time at the Kitchen in October and I was really struck by the much fuller sound.  For these Houston shows, we also rewrote the last eight minutes of the piece, and I like this new version; it ends on a more hopeful note. These Houston shows were part of the Cinema Arts Festival Houston, programed by Richard Herskowitz



It was a lovely encounter. Lots of Bona Sento (good feeling) all around. After the film, the audience gave the Esperantists a big round of applause, which was nice.

SF Chronicle photo by Liz Hafalia

April 23, 2010|By Julian Guthrie, San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco documentary filmmaker Sam Green is interested in exploring stories of hope – hope that is misguided and dashed, hope that may eventually be realized.

Green’s new film, “Utopia in Four Movements,” to be screened Sunday at the San Francisco International Film Festival, uses four stories from the 20th century to look at the state of hope and imagination today. And, as a nod to the power of coming together, Green has made a film that can only be seen live. He narrates onstage, while a soundtrack and lyrical score are also performed live.

“I wanted to create an experience that couldn’t be reduced to something watched in passing or sitting alone at home with a laptop or mobile phone,” said Green, 43, who was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004 for his documentary “The Weather Underground.”

“With this film, you have to be there,” Green said. “It’s almost a performance or dance piece. Watching something about utopia, and doing it all together with a lot of people in the same room, creates an energy. It’s inspiring.”

The movie itself, a pastiche of archival and original material, of still and moving images, tackles utopia through four vignettes connected by Green’s poetic explication. There is the artificial language called Esperanto, designed by a man in Poland who grew up amid ethnic divisions and envisioned a universal language that would end war and cultural conflict; a 1939 time capsule from the World’s Fair in New York; the world’s largest shopping mall, located in China and now a ghost town; and an American exile living in Cuba, full of optimism and surrounded by blight.

“After making ‘The Weather Underground,’ I wanted to do something that was hopeful,” said Green, who grew up in East Lansing, Mich., and settled in the Bay Area 20 years ago after earning a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley. “I want people to walk away from this hopeful, not in a Pollyanna way, but in a way that acknowledges the complexity and the difficulties of the world.”

Live narration

The idea for narrating the film live came organically, and took him by surprise.

“It started off as a way to do a presentation, or a sort of live rough cut about the project,” said Green, who teaches part time at the University of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute. “I was thinking about how to string these stories together and have it make sense. The more I thought of it, the more I realized utopia was a collective experience.”

- Julian Guthrie, San Francisco Chronicle

SFIFF All those with curious minds, step right up, we have live cinema waiting for you in this dark room. The idea of “live” or performance-generated movies has taken on a new vitality recently via the light-projecting likes of Bruce McClure, whose ear-splitting and eye-blasting appearances in San Francisco usually sell out. On a smaller local level, Konrad Steiner’s neo-benshi programs have united local writers and a wide variety of filmic subject matter in creative and sometimes entertaining ways. At the San Francisco Film Festival, live music by bands for silent works has become a reliable main attraction. But Sam Green’s and Dave Cerf’s new meta-documentary Utopia in Four Movements adds a new facet to the phenomenon: instead of utilizing an over-familiar voice-over, it unites live narration by Green with a musical performance overseen by Cerf, allowing for degrees of spontaneity and change.

Utopian, isn’t it?  At the Mission bar the Phone Booth on an early Monday evening, Green can’t help but tease out his thoughts on the very word. “To me, utopia is almost a metaphor for hope, or hope in the imagination,” he says, shortly after we’ve been flirted with (and flashed) by one fierce female patron. “It’s about trying to be hopeful these days, which is hard. Utopia is almost a way to make up hope. In some ways it’s so preposterous. The word even has negative connotations these days — people are told not to be utopian.” Half an hour later, he returns for another analogy or two: “Utopia is a thing that never really exists. It’s like a flower — it always wilts. Even if there’s a moment of great utopian energy, it can’t last.”

Utopia may not exist in fully realized forms, but the quartet of mutations in Utopia in Four Movements (five if you count the movie) fascinate as real-life fables. The first segment explores Esperanto, which was invented in the late 19th century with the aim of its becoming a universal, international language. As Green puts it, Esperanto is “a wonderful idea that can’t be,” an idea that he illustrates with short direct portraits of contemporary Esperanto speakers that, uncannily, takes on a colors-of-Benneton feel.

Esperanto has also yielded some memorable black-and-white cinema, namely a 1965 Esperanto horror film shot in Big Sur by Conrad Hall, which stars a pre-Star Trek William Shatner. San Francisco movie maniacs may recognize Incubus through the efforts of Will The Thrill and Other Cinema’s Craig Baldwin. “William Shatner wrote a memoir in which he talks about it,” Green says, before adding some information that reflects Utopia’s ever-changing nature –and utopia’s pitfalls. “I’m trying to do an interview with him because he’s practically the most famous person to have spoken Esperanto. But the world’s most famous Esperanto person is probably [financier] George Soros.”

The idea of utopia isn’t new to Green, whose best-known feature The Weather Underground (2002) digs deep into the multi-faceted realm of ’60s radicalism, riding out its actions and repercussions. The second part of Utopia, set in Cuba, adds a new chapter to Green’s explorations of thorny political contradiction. Like Assata Shakur, the segment’s subject lives in Cuba as a fugitive. In the present, she’s engaged with Cuban hip-hop, but she remains tied to her past as a radical in America. “It’s about the last embers of revolution,” says Green.

One of Utopia‘s movements examines the potential of forensice science in a manner quite different from pro-law enforcement US true crime television, showing how the smallest reinforcement can be regained from sites of mass tragedy. But the movie’s sojourn in China is in some ways its most vivid. There, Green takes an extended trip to the world’s largest shopping mall, in China. The subject matter is akin to dramas such as Jem Cohen’s Chain and Jia Zhangke’s The World (both from 2004), but this is a case of reality trumping fiction. “Almost every article I read about China and capitalism talked about how the world’s largest mall was there now,” says Green. “But nobody described it as a total failure. We were at the mall for ten days, and it was soul-killing. There’s something about a gigantic failed mall that is profoundly depressing.” Luckily, an encounter with a Teletubby who eventually removed its mask added some life to the experience.

The world’s largest shopping mall — at least for now: Green says it is slated to be bulldozed — may be grim, but it’s also richly symbolic when history is integrated to the picture. “Victor Gruen who essentially invented the [shopping] mall in the US in the 1950s was a socialist who came to America,” Green says, as “This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven” gives way to “I Feel Love” on the Phone Booth jukebox. “In turn the mall has gone to China, and the grounds of cultural revolution became the site of a government-funded bust of a mall. In a way, it’s the trajectory of the 20th century.”

Today, we tiptoe into the 21st century, with a new president and old-new ways of seeing and making movies. “A year ago, when I was looking at [Utopia], people were saying ‘Aren’t you going to change everything because of Obama?’,” Green remarks. “It felt like cotton candy hope. When [U.S. presidents] are the limits of your possibility, it’s pretty lame.” Truth: Green may have used utopia in his title, but perhaps it’s time to come up with some fresh formulations of hope as well.

-  Johnny Ray Huston, SF Bay Guardian

One of the advantages (and nightmares) about doing a live performance film is that you can practice up until the last minute…

……..
I’m happy to report, that all went brilliantly. The audience laughed and stopped to have long discussions afterwards – maybe this is a jumping off point for each of us to ask ourselves what we are doing (or not) to improve the world we live in. If audiences leave having this kind of discussion, then I think the work is doing it’s job…

producer Jasmine Dellal’s full ifp blog post:http://independentfilmmakerproject.blogspot.com/2010/02/ifp-alum-jasmine-dellal-on-premiere-of.html