SFIFF Dispatch. 7.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the San Francisco International Film Festival, San Francisco reaffirmed its place in the world of cinema with a convocation of local filmmakers (George Lucas, Rob Nilsson, Saul Zaentz, Chris Columbus, Peter Coyote, etc.), a stellar marathon interview/performance by Robin Williams at the Castro Theatre, and a storytelling session of reminiscences and images from the last half-century. (In the interest of full disclosure, I told one of those stories about being robbed at gunpoint while walking to a festival party at Tosca, a North Beach bar, and about getting stoned on the sidewalk on Filmore with Robert Altman after interviewing him at the Castro.)

There's more to this picture, much more, and one of the oddest and more entertaining pieces of that picture comes from Audience of One [site], a local documentary at the festival about a Pentecostal pastor who hears the call from the Lord to make a movie that came to him on a mountaintop outside Palm Springs. Richard Gazowsky heeds that call and tries to film an epic.

Can you blame him? Why should the clergy be any less credulous about their abilities - in filmmaking or in anything else - than the rest of the population, you might ask. And why should they be less averse to spending money on a project that's all about risk? It's not as if they're risking their souls.

Audience of One, by Michael Jacobs, saw its debut at SXSW in March and tracks the fate of Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph, Gazowsky's version of the Joseph story from the Bible, which looks inspired by Hollywood's vision of futurist Medievalism. Gazowsky tells Jacobs, "I want to do something like the Titanic." Whether it's a hit or a flop, it has to be big, says the earnest reverend, who is quite the large rotund figure himself. Gazowsky has the hat, scarf and girth of Orson Welles, and we'll see that he also shares Welles's talent for mismanaging an ambitious project.

There are no focus groups driving this story. The title refers to the one film critic who matters - the deity whom pious men like Frank Sinatra and Wayne Newton like to call "the man upstairs."

Perhaps it was all predestined. Gazowsky's church is a former movie theater. I didn't see a popcorn machine in the lobby, but the only thing that seems to have been changed by him (or by his mother, who previously headed the congregation) is the construction of a "church" tower that looms over the theater. The congregation that Gazowsky has gathered from street sinners and other believers seems willing to play (and pray) along - with the nutty story, with the inanity of shooting in Italy (a la Passion of the Christ, although Gazowsky is no Mel Gibson), and with the hemorrhaging of money. Was this blood-letting the cinematic version of the stigmata of the passion?

The documentary isn't Living in Oblivion, by far the best independent back-story "making of" out there (although Tom DiCillo has been honored at the SF fest). Yet Audience of One is its own laughable example of the "believing is seeing" syndrome.

By the end, Gazowsky still has no film to show for his vision on the mountain. He does have a mountain of debts and the humiliation of an eviction from the soundstage he was allowed to use on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.

To be fair, the Pentecostal would-be Preminger could have done much worse. The preacher Jim Jones, who started out in San Francisco, asked his congregation to act far more decisively - his staging of mass-suicide on location in the Guyana interior has ended up on the screen in a number of films. Jones groomed himself like a movie star and directed his flock like a tyrannical location manager. If the technology had been cheaper, who knows what he might have directed.

Let's not assume for a moment that Gazowsky knows what he's doing. The screen tests convoked by ads on Craigslist prove that unintentional humor can often be the best. Gazowsky's two dark-haired daughters can really look like starlets - they are named Misty Dejavu and Rocki Starr - but they're not much help when their father can't communicate with dozens of uncomprehending Italian extras.

In the broader picture, let's not forget that the former US Attorney General John Ashcroft was a Pentecostal, who began his term in 2001 stage-managing the religious renewal at the US Department of Justice. Ashcroft, you'll remember, was the man who draped the bare-breasted statues of Justice in the rotunda of the Justice Department. (His explanation was that the statues were in the background when television reported on official announcements that were made in the chamber - children might have seen those bare breasts.) He also pauperized the budget for investigating terrorism in favor of prosecuting pornography offenses. Whatever you say about Richard Gazowsky, he isn't a moralizer.

But Ashcroft's successors are. These are the people like Alberto Gonzalez who filled the Justice Department with Christian activist soldiers from a law school set up by Pat Robertson, who vetted the bona fides of lawyers representing the government and booted the ones who were found to be insufficiently loyal to George W Bush and his policies. (Loyalty oaths in the US in the 21st century? I shouldn't be surprised. NPR demanded one of me, in exchange for the promise of being allowed to work there again.) Once this scandal of faith-based corruption is resolved, I can't wait to see the movie based on it.

Michael Jacobs doesn't simply leave us with Gazowsky's colossal failure, although it sure is colossal. His church isn't just a house of faith, but a ship of hope. Even with the creditors at his door, Gazowsky tells his faithful that the church is ready to, among other things, create an airline and, after that, to send its members into outer space. It makes you impatient for the sequel, and for the outtakes from Audience of One when the DVD comes out.

A few words about other films from SFIFF that should not be missed.

Vanaja (Rajnesh Domalpalli, India; site). This debut film about a smart, spirited young girl caught under the weight of the village caste system in Andra Pradesh is the work of an Indian Columbia MFA graduate. Domalpalli captures the colorful pageantry and the oppressive power structure of this tiny corner of southern India with adroitness. In casting the beautiful teenaged non-professional Mamatha Bukhya as Vanaja, he has brought a real talent to the screen. His story of her abuse by the family of the local landowner doesn't shrink from painful realities that still rule the lives of the powerless in much of rural India, but Domalpalli finds hope in his characters' pride.

Rome Rather than You (Tariq Teguia, Algeria). Imagine an Algerian road movie in which a trio of slackers drives (or attempts to) on roads that have been so ravaged by years of war that their car bobs up and down like a small boat. These are not the ruins of North Africa that you'll find in the tourist brochures. It's hard to be hip in Algeria. It's hard to be anything, and we learn that when our trio run into police who are looking for an excuse to punish them. They find one - Kamel used to work in Italy and he's longing to go back there and make pizzas. You would, too, in an Algeria that's polarized between a corrupt government and violent jihadists. There's something of the early Godard in Tariq Teguia's first feature, which brings new meaning to the term "rock bottom."

Ghosts of Cité Soleil (Asger Leth, Denmark / US; site). This doc about the armed and drugged chimeres (ghosts) who operated autonomously in the slums of Port au Prince after abandoning Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004 takes on the visual mythologies of violence that we're saturated with from music videos and action movies. They're ripped and wrecked, and even they realize that, given the way they live, there's not much time left in their short lives to tell their stories. The difference here from the fool's paradise of hip-hop bravado is that it's all too real, and that the protagonists who confide in Asger Leth are now all dead. What's astonishing is that Leth lived through it. Critics are disputing the history of those years as Leth has shown them. The SFIFF question and answer sessions were something to witness. Yet no one is disputing his talent and courage. Asger is the son of Jørgen Leth, the documentarian and teacher. He has quite a future.

Still being updated: "Wrapping SFIFF."

Posted by dwhudson at May 15, 2007 9:46 AM