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    A Life, and Death, as a Mexican Journalist Shown in Documentary

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    The documentary “State of Silence,” premiering at the Tribeca Festival, uses personal stories to explain the bleak situation for journalists in Mexico.If you are going to make a documentary about danger, you have to take your camera to daring places. You have to point it at nefarious subjects, doing brazen things, and capture a level of authenticity essential for a credible film.That was the case for the crew on “State of Silence,” which explores the existential threats faced by journalists in Mexico. For the documentary’s tense opening segment, the team accompanied the reporter Jesús Medina on a nighttime search for illegal loggers cutting down trees in a remote forest in the state of Morelos. When Medina, with his camera in hand, encountered one, the unsuspecting transgressor was fully masked — and brandishing a thundering chainsaw.As Medina began his interview with the logger, the film crew was just a few steps behind, recording the scene while both men did their risky jobs, and as the journalist — no stranger to precarious assignments — de-escalated the situation into a businesslike conversation between two professionals.An illegal logger being interviewed for the film. The “State of Silence” crew accompanied the reporter Jesús Medina on a nighttime search for illegal loggers cutting down trees in a remote forest in the state of Morelos. La Corriente del GolfoThe reporter Jesús Medina.La Corriente del Golfo“Sometimes you have no other work option and you have to do this out of necessity,” the logger explained. Medina got the point, and his story gently morphed into a nuanced profile of a worker toiling to support his family, despite the hazards.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Are Movies so Bad at Making Civil War Look Scary?

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      The filmmaker has made it clear that “Civil War” is a warning. Instead, the ugliness of war comes across as comforting thrills. Early in “Civil War,” the writer-director Alex Garland’s dystopian blockbuster, a plucky young journalist named Jessie recalls an event called the Antifa Massacre. You can picture the eeriness that Garland must have assumed that phrase would conjure: familiar words, filtered through his apocalyptic vision, projecting today’s ideological rancor into the future. His film is an invitation to imagine what might emerge from America’s political divisions if we don’t back away from the fractious disaffection that has characterized most of the 21st century. But it is also vague about what the Antifa Massacre, or any of the war, actually is. Who was massacred? Who did the massacring? What were the stakes? All we know is that America has descended into a chaotic conflict: California and Texas have united to battle an authoritarian Loyalist government, while other states have gathered into various alliances. Beyond that, “Civil War” obscures the war’s political and social contours. One senses that, for Garland, the ideological dimensions are beside the point, a distraction from what he hopes is a searing vision of a future nobody wants. To that end, maybe, he has cast “Civil War” as an antiwar movie in the tradition of Elem Klimov’s “Come and See,” a 1985 fever dream about Nazi Germany’s invasion of Soviet Byelorussia. The power of “Come and See” lies in its images, which depict war’s depravity with the unsparing clarity of prophecy. One 10-minute scene forces us to watch a carnival of violence as German soldiers, who have gathered civilians into a church, set it aflame. Garland intends a similar revelation. In interviews, he and his cast have made it clear that they see “Civil War” as a warning. You can practically hear him whisper through every frame: This could happen here.François Truffaut once said that every film about war ends up being pro-war: Whatever a director points his camera at, even violence, becomes appealing, or at least intriguing. To make an effective antiwar film, a director must find a way to unsettle this relationship between image and titillation. I think often about the 1966 Italian thriller “The Battle of Algiers,” which depicts Algerian resistance to French colonial rule. It is, generally, a triumphalist take on the power of liberatory violence, and it has proved popular among armed insurgents. There’s a mournful, cautionary undercurrent, though, that sometimes overwhelms its heroic story. In one scene, two women smuggle bombs out of a ghetto and into French cafes. One leaves hers beneath a bar, and we wait while the camera cuts from one French face to another: a flirting couple, a sullen baby, a laughing barkeep, a waiter who looks directly at us. In that long wait before the bomb goes off, we are tricked into a moral accounting of political violence’s toll on human life. The movie reminds us that our attraction to violence also threatens to destroy the society we depend on, plunging us into a Hobbesian state of nature.This balancing act depends on depicting the social costs of war on the lives of civilians — something contemporary films about war on American soil have struggled to accomplish. “Civil War” follows Kirsten Dunst as Lee, a war photographer traveling from New York to Washington with her gonzo bro colleague Joel, hoping to photograph the president while Joel interviews him. They’re joined by Jessie and Sammy, Lee’s mentor. What unfolds is essentially a road-trip movie that shuttles this quartet from one apocalyptic set piece to another. They are journalists, but they do no reporting on the tragedies they encounter on the way to their big scoop. They don’t meet many people, and when they do, they are rigorously incurious. They arrive at a refugee camp, yet make no attempt to interview any refugees. Why are two soldiers shooting at another amid a Christmas display? Joel makes only a cursory effort to find out. These are war journalists with a strange lack of interest in covering the war’s victims or America’s shredded social fabric. Garland’s vision is almost entirely restricted to destroyed buildings and corpses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      How Damar Hamlin’s Recovery Allowed Us to Breathe

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      This weekend the narrative around the Buffalo Bills player flipped, from soul-searching about the violence of America’s most popular sport to something more hopeful.Last week came the horror of watching Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills safety, suffer cardiac arrest live on television, followed by days of national soul-searching about the violence of America’s most popular sport. This weekend, the narrative flipped.On Saturday night, before the Tennessee Titans and the Jacksonville Jaguars faced off for a division title and a trip to the playoffs, both teams gathered at midfield, then knelt and prayed together. Sunday afternoon, on the usually macho CBS pregame show, Boomer Esiason confessed his love for each of the other panelists individually, which prompted Nate Burleson, another former player, to say, “Love you, too, brother.”Before the opening kickoff of Sunday’s game pitting the Bills against the New England Patriots, Jim Nantz, the first-string play-by-play announcer for CBS, then delivered the N.F.L.’s message: “What we’ve really seen this week is a glimpse of humanity at its very best.” Nantz’s partner in the broadcasting booth, Tony Romo, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback, underscored the point. “People came together and put their differences aside,” he said. What started as a tragedy, he added, “has slowly turned into a celebration of life.”So what’s the ultimate takeaway? If Hamlin weren’t making a remarkable recovery, off his breathing tube, talking, tweeting and neurologically intact, it would probably be different. There would still be the outpouring of public good wishes but not the joy or shared pride and sense of common purpose. Like the movies and other forms of popular culture, football is a national barometer, after all. And the last week seems to have illuminated the country’s erratic condition — the violence but also the longing, or at least the posture of longing, for unity in polarizing times.Looking back, what made Hamlin’s collapse all the more shocking last Monday night was how it followed the most routine of tackles. At this point it’s a fair guess that no play all season has been watched more often online. The telecast didn’t keep showing the tackle out of a sense of decency. Instead, cameras lingered over the players’ anguished reactions, showing teammates huddling around Hamlin’s body on the field, weeping and praying while medics struggled to save him for nearly 10 minutes.On Saturday night, before the Tennessee Titans and the Jacksonville Jaguars faced off for a division title and a trip to the playoffs, both teams gathered at midfield, then knelt and prayed together.Gary Mccullough/Associated PressThe scene may have summoned to some minds famous paintings by artists like Giotto, Titian, Caravaggio and Dürer of mourning crowds surrounding Jesus as he is taken down from the cross or entombed. For centuries, church- and museum-goers have gaped, with something approximating the same mix of fear and confusion, at these pictures of violence and despair. America certainly didn’t invent rubbernecking.Or violent sports. Twenty-nine Formula 1 drivers died during the ’60s in Formula 1 or other racing cars; 18 during the ’70s. Auto racing was popular in Europe and considered all the more glamorous for being dangerous. Things changed after the death of Ayrton Senna, the sublime Brazilian driver, in 1994. New regulations and technologies arrived. A culture of safety emerged. In the United States, navel-gazing about football and violence is nothing new. Between 1900 and 1905, 15 years before the National Football League was founded, at least 45 college players died from broken necks and backs, concussions and internal injuries they suffered playing football, according to The Washington Post. The death toll troubled Americans enough that President Theodore Roosevelt and a number of university presidents pressed for reforms. Today we gather in front of our screens by the tens of millions to witness collisions of increasingly spectacular brutality with the expectation that modern players, vastly better trained and equipped than they were a century ago, will pop back up like John Wick and Spider-Man.Of course, we know that sometimes they don’t. The long-term effects of concussions have increasingly become a topic of public concern, alongside gun control, mass shootings and crime. But Americans juggle conflicted feelings about the violent game. Some parents, and even former N.F.L. stars, are discouraging their young children from taking up tackle football. At the same time, football, like no other sport, crosses politics, gender, race, age and class in the United States. N.F.L. games accounted for a whopping 82 of the 100 most-watched television broadcasts last year, according to Nielsen, making it the last remaining form of water cooler entertainment in our atomized culture.Not coincidentally pro football only took off as a national sport during the late ’50s and ’60s when it embraced television, which marketed football’s brutality as a counterweight to baseball’s languor. The league cooked up documentaries and highlights shows, memorably narrated for years by John Facenda, the voice of God. “The game is a time warp where the young dream of growing up and the old remember youth,” he intoned. As the writer James Surowiecki put it, NFL Films “tried to simultaneously convey the gritty reality of the game and mythicize it in a Homeric fashion.”This was also the era of America’s metastasizing debacle in Vietnam. A 1967 documentary, “They Call It Pro Football,” exalted N.F.L. linebackers who, like American soldiers in Da Nang and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, were on “search-and-destroy” missions. Head coaches like Vince Lombardi were lionized as tactical generals leading self-sacrificing armies of clean-cut soldiers to victory. The nation was on the verge of coming apart and football needed its own counter culture representative, who arrived in the green and white uniform of the New York Jets in the upstart American Football League. While campuses were erupting with antiwar protests, the Jets’ playboy quarterback, Joe Namath, with his long hair, fur coats and bedroom eyes, famously predicted the Jets would beat the N.F.L.’s ultra-establishmentarian Baltimore Colts and win Super Bowl III.When the Jets won, football not only survived the upheaval. It came out richer, more popular than ever and unified. At least on Sundays, Americans could dream about Hollywood endings despite their divisions.We are again a nation divided, and reading more than ever into the meaning of the game and what, wishfully or otherwise, it says about us. Buffalo fans this Sunday suggested Hamlin’s recovery was a metaphor for the resilience of a city battered by storms, decline and crime. As if on cue, the Bills returned the opening kickoff against the Patriots for a touchdown, the first time the team had done that in 18 years. A nail-biter through the first half, Buffalo pulled away in the second. “We all won,” Hamlin tweeted from his hospital bed. As Nantz, the announcer, put it: “Love for Damar, it was definitely in the air. Not just here. All across this league, this nation.”Then he asked the melancholy question that seemed to sum up the week. “The love, the support, the prayers,” he said, “why can’t we live like that every day?” More

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      in Movies

      Kim Ki-duk, Award-Winning South Korean Filmmaker, Dies at 59

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve lostKim Ki-duk, Award-Winning South Korean Filmmaker, Dies at 59He was celebrated for movies centered on society’s underbelly, but he was later accused of sexual misconduct. He died of Covid-19.The South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk in 2013 at the Venice Film Festival, where his “Moebius” was screened out of competition. A year earlier, his film “Pieta” had won the Golden Lion there. Credit…Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDec. 17, 2020, 12:42 p.m. ETSEOUL, South Korea — Kim Ki-duk, ​an internationally celebrated South Korean film director who made movies ​about people ​on ​the margins of society​ that ​often ​included ​shocking scenes of violence against women, and whose career was dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct, died on Dec. 11 in Latvia.​ He was 59.The cause was Covid-19 and related heart complications, his production company, Kim Ki-duk Film​, said. According to the company, he had undergone two weeks of treatment for the disease at a hospital in Latvia, where he had recently relocated and was reported to have been scouting locations for his next film.Mr. Kim remains the only South Korean director to have won ​top ​awards at the three ​major international film festivals: those in Cannes, Venice and Berlin. He ​spent much of his time abroad after allegations that he had sexually abused actresses began to haunt his career in 2017​.Few film industry groups issued formal statements on ​Mr. Kim’s death or his films. ​Film critics who shared their condolences and appreciations on social media faced blistering reactions from people who said that doing so was tantamount to violence against his victims.“I stopped teaching Kim Ki-duk’s films in my classes in 2018 when the program about his sexual assaults screened on Korean TV,” Darcy Paquet​, an American film critic​ who specializes in Korean cinema​, wrote on Twitter.​ “If someone does such awful violence to people in real life, it’s just wrong to celebrate him. I don’t care if he’s a genius (and I don’t think he was).”​But Mr. Kim’s films also attracted fans who said his depictions of poverty and violence ​helped spark important debates about life in South Korea. “I try to discover a good scent by digging into a garbage heap,” he once said of his approach to filmmaking.His movies often centered on society’s underbelly. One dealt with a coldhearted man who turned a woman he once loved into a prostitute. He also tackled issues like suicide, rape, incest, plastic surgery and mixed-race children.“Crocodile” (1996), his first film, tells the story of a homeless man who lives on the Han River in Seoul and makes a living by stealing cash from victims who kill themselves or by recovering bodies in the river and demanding rewards from grieving families. The man saves a woman from suicide and then rapes her.Mr. Kim in Seoul in 2012 with the award he had just won in Venice. He was the only South Korean director to have won ​top ​awards at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals.Credit…Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Pieta” (2012) is perhaps Mr. Kim’s most recognized film. A deeply unnerving tale, it follows a mother and son on a quest for revenge and redemption and includes graphic scenes of torture and violence. It won the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Film Festival. The year before, Mr. Kim had received an award at the Cannes festival for “Arirang,” a documentary about a near-fatal accident that occurred on one of his shoots.While his movies often garnered critical acclaim abroad, most of them were commercial failures in South Korea.“I made this movie so that we can reflect upon ourselves living in this miserable world where you are lauded for succeeding in life even if you do so through lawbreaking and corruption,” he said after his movie “One on One,” about the brutal murder of a high school girl, flopped in 2014. “I made it hoping that some will understand it. If no one does, I can’t do anything about it.”Many moviegoers, especially women, were disturbed by what they considered perverted, misogynistic and sadistic scenes of violence against women in Mr. Kim’s movies. The criticism grew significantly in 2017 when an actress starring in Mr. Kim’s movie “Moebius” accused him of forcing her into shooting a sexual scene against her will.He was later fined for slapping her in the face, but other charges were dismissed for lack of evidence or because the statute of limitations had expired.More actresses came forward with accusations of sexual abuse. Women’s rights groups in South Korea rallied behind the victims, accusing Mr. Kim of confusing “directing with abusing.”He ultimately became known as one of the many prominent ​South Korean ​men​​ — including theater directors, prosecutors, mayors, poets and Christian pastors — to face serious accusations of sexual misconduct as part of the country’s #MeToo movement. In 2018, the local broadcaster MBC aired “Master’s Naked Face,” which examined the allegations against Mr. Kim.Min-soo Jo in a scene from “Pieta” (2012), perhaps Mr. Kim’s most recognized film.Credit…Drafthouse FilmsMr. Kim denied being a sexual predator and sued his accusers for defamation. The cases were still pending in court when he died.Mr. Kim was born on Dec. 20, 1960, in ​Bongwha, a rural county in the southeast of South Korea. His early formal education ended in primary school. His father was reported to have been a disabled Korean War veteran who abused him.As a teenager, Mr. Kim toiled in factories and sweatshops. He enlisted in the South Korean Marine Corps and later enrolled in a Christian theological school, before moving to Paris to study painting when he was 30.When he returned to South Korea in 1995, he was determined to become a film director and began churning out one low-budget movie after another, winning international recognition that few South Korean directors were able to achieve.Mr. Kim is survived by his wife and a daughter.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More