Moving Midway.

"The critic Godfrey Cheshire narrates his penetrating first film, the documentary Moving Midway, and his point of view is always right there on the surface," writes David Edelsein in New York. "At the same time he's telling a story (brilliantly), he's thinking through it, testing its underpinnings, opening it up to history and analysis and divergent perspectives; and both strands - narrative and critical - come together with hardly a seam."

Updated through 9/14.

Actually moving the ancestral home "occupies the middle portion of the movie and turns it momentarily from an ambling first-person rumination into something like Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Like many white Southerners, the current generation of Hintons has a nostalgic, sentimental relationship to the past, and a wary, ambivalent attitude toward modernity. At the heart of Moving Midway is the desire to preserve that warm, respectful sense of tradition and continuity while at the same time looking clearly at the less noble realities of history and making some attempt to rectify them."

Cheshire's "subject is precisely the self-aggrandizing illusions about race, class, and identity that have shaped the self-image of Southern landed gentry, stoked by Hollywood movies from Birth of a Nation through Gone With the Wind to the television series Roots," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "Cheshire's mission is to show that slavery and its sustaining ideology were institutionally and constitutionally 'unkahnd.' Mission accomplished, but for all its subversive intent, the tone of Moving Midway is no more bitter or hopeless than that of the forgotten side of the family."

"Cheshire's intelligent reflections on Midway's legacy and his honest conversations with a long-lost African-American cousin make for some fascinating sociological voyeurism," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "But as with a lot of first-person docs, a certain amount of indulgence soon creeps in; for a movie about the concept of home, Moving Midway has a nagging tendency of resembling little more than a home movie."

"Ross McElwee with more sociopolitical powerpoint," suggests Mark Asch. "[T]he whole clan tries so hard to be nice; you really want the genteel multicolored family reunion be a hopeful scene of Southern reconciliation, and not just smiling for the camera and insisting 'our slaves were treated well.'"

Jeremiah Kipp talks with Cheshire for Filmmaker.

Updates, 9/13: "With the increasing homogenization of the landscape, the dying out of antiquated notions of Southern identity (as still articulated by Cheshire's 79-year old mother) and an increasingly prevalent understanding of the South as, in the filmmaker's words, a 'multi-racial culture' (which can no longer be contained by the simple black/white dichotomy), comes the foreseeable end to such regrettable myths as that of the glorious plantation," writes Andrew Schenker. "Whatever the negative effects of cultural homogenization, there is at least this one positive to be found. In the end, this may be the true lesson of Cheshire's remarkable film."

Online listening tip. At the House Next Door, appropriately enough, John Lichman, Vadim Rizov and Keith Uhlich talk with Godfrey Cheshire.

Updates, 9/14: "Arguably, Cheshire could have made his movie stronger by digging a little deeper, but it's asking a lot of a good North Carolina boy that he try to capture on film a racial dust-up at his cousin's party with his mama on the premises," writes Phil Nugent. "As it is, the movie feels warm but not exactly cozy. Like this year's presidential campaign, it draws much of its fascination from what goes unsaid."

"If it doesn't match the accomplishments of Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg or Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself, to some extent it synthesizes them," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Cheshire's sensibility is more prosaic than Maddin's flights of fancy, but he does include a ghost in his family history."

Posted by dwhudson at September 12, 2008 6:17 AM