"Losers and Winners" Won Best International Feature Documentary Prize at Toronto's Hot Docs

According to the blogger at All These Wonderful Things, "Losers and Winners" won Best International Feature Documentary at Toronto's Hot Doc's festival. Cool.

I saw it Wednesday at SilverDocs and really liked it. The film is so understated in a way, almost in a haiku like way, though I guess the analogy is off since haiku is a japanese form. What I liked was the way the documentary doesn't advocate, it just observes. While the title is "Losers and Winners," the movie doesn't tell you what to think -- doesn't hit you over the head with a Germany is the Losers/China the Winners. Sure, at one level it is obvious that these are the roles, but at the same time, for example, the Chinese are working long hard hours far from family and home, so they are losing some things too.

I was surprised at how hung up the Chinese seemed on Maoist shibboleths. (Though again I mixing my metaphors cross culturally. Actually that may be okay, since the culture clash/culture mix is a theme of the film!)

The filmmaker at "Still in Motion", who is apparently attending the serious-business-part-of-the-SilverDocs-festival and caught the Wednesday night showing that I attended, called it "a wonderful film about one of the strangest culture clashes I’ve seen." Also seeing the movie on Wednesday was this reviewer at Knowledge Problem, who appreciated the understated nature of the documentary: "The beauty of the film was in this very lack of any overarching organizational principle other than the story." (Italics in original.)

Viewing the film at hot Docs, Bob Turnbull at "Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind" wrote:

Although I ended up missing the interactions between the two cultures as the focus stayed with the workers, it's a film that works on several levels at once and remains entertaining and informative.

The blog's subtitle gave me pause: "Random mostly film based scribblings - just like 20000 other people..." As of a few weeks ago, that number is 20001. Or, actually, given reports about how many blogs get started all of the time, 27598 blogs on film!

The movie was too understated for some. Moviepie Musings found it "mind-numbingly dull." I guess it is not for everyone.

"Losers and Winners" and other Economic Stories

From the June 8 Washington Post column by Steven Pearlstein:

Through the magic of "product placement," consumer- product companies have become adept at using movies to boost the recognition of their brands. But when it comes to how movies and television portray business generally, the corporate community has been a miserable failure. Invariably, business serves as the negative backdrop against which the central personal or political drama can unfold, while corporate managers serve as stick-figure foils for heroes and comic buffoons.

As is often the case, however, Hollywood's blind spot offers a target of opportunity for independent filmmakers. And, indeed, you'll find some wonderfully insightful views about business and work life at the Silverdocs, the documentary conference and film festival next week in Silver Spring put on by the American Film Institute and the Discovery Channel.

Among the documentaries mentioned are: "Losers and Winners," by Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken (a German coke plant is moved to China); Ben Niles's "Note by Note" (about the manufacture of a grand piano); Doug Pray's "Big Rig" (about trucking and truckers); "Calcutta Calling," by Andre Hoermann (about a call center worker from Calcutta); and, Rob VanAlkemade's documentary, "What Would Jesus Buy?," (based on the life and songs of Rev. Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir).

Film production subsidies in Europe

Not exactly on target, by economics blog Marginal Revolution has a post on EU country subsidies for film. The sum up by Tyler Cowen:

It is remarkably difficult to make movies that people in other countries wish to see, and it is not obvious that film subsidies are helping matters.

Wait a minute! Didn't Pirates of the Carribean 3 just rake in about$250 million outside the U.S. in its opening weekend in addition to the $140 million U.S. box office claims. Course Disney probably manage to finance its film without subsidies.

Smoking out the facts about movies and tobacco

Can a movie change the world?

In my lead post I mentioned violence as one topic, out of many possible topics, for which the relationships between movies and behavior have been extensively researched.

The MPAA ratings board has put another such relationship into the news by suggesting that tobacco use in movies may become grounds for an R rating. The American Academy of Pediatrics doesn't think the MPAA is hardcore enough. They recommend a required "R rating for all new films portraying smoking (unless they show smoking by a real historical figure who actually smoked)."*

I'm interested in the relationship between movies and the values that support civil society. Does it matter what you watch? How does it matter?

Violence and tobacco are two realms for which the question of the relationship between watching and doing has been researched. Can I generalize? What other specific topics have been researched?

*Does this mean that even a film like Ross McElwen's "Bright Leaves" would get an R rating? Doesn't that strike the general intelligent person as a generally stupid thing to do? I haven't seen the movie yet, but I've been meaning to since the time I read this review.

Planet Earth: Seed Magazine believes the moving image "is arguably the most powerful emotional tool in our cultural lexicon."

In Seed Magazine, Laura McNeil is writing about Planet Earth:

To transform our relationship once again, this moment of environmental crisis must be undeniable to us. We need to feel it. As with the plight of Ethiopia during the 1984 famine and with AIDS in the early 90s, rational arguments must be supplemented with emotional ones. We saw images of African babies with distended bellies and listened to the musicians who formed Live Aid, and we were changed. We heard ardent testimony via Angels in America, Magic Johnson, and Rent, and we were changed. An accumulation of spectacle brought an emotional dimension to issues that, for many, were still very abstract. Our perspective changed because we finally took it personally.

The moving image has a remarkable capacity to imbue us with feeling, to embody an experience that allows us to live and breathe in another place and time. When it's done well, it is arguably the most powerful emotional tool in our cultural lexicon.

...

It's perhaps ironic that our scientific and technological prowess, that which we have so often wielded to subdue nature, is what now allows us to see our planet in ways that celebrate—even enhance—its beauty and its worth. Seeing the natural world as a technicolor spectacle overwhelms us. There can be no indifference to life when life looks like this. Indeed, in our filmic age, a time of YouTube and 2.5 televisions per every American household, the potential for the moving image to change our perspective has never been so strong.

I appreciate the testimony to the correctness of the view underlying the blog here - the idea that the moving image does move minds - but I'm not convinced by the examples. Course, maybe my problem is that I haven't seen Rent or Angels in America. Clearly Rent falls in the 'culture and commerce' box, so maybe I should find the DVD.

But rather than mere testimony confirming what I already believe, I want to find scientific studies on these issues. Hell, I'm sure I could dig up a hundred essays with a hundred amens.

What is the evidence?

What is Supply Chain Cinema?

Somehow culture and commerce intersect. Read a book, watch a movie, wander in an art gallery, and it can change the way you think. Maybe just a little bit, maybe a lot; maybe immediately, and maybe not for some time. Or not at all. Why? Why does it happen when it happens, and why not went it doesn't.

How does it work? How does a story or movie or painting move from words or images into my head or yours, and become tied up into the webs of meaning already filling the place.

I assume that, if a book or film leaves a memory, necessarily it has rewired my brain just a bit.

For me, now, and for some of you readers, the words "Blue Velvet" conjure up an image of Dennis Hopper and the name of David Lynch, but before I wandered into the theater one Saturday afternoon about twenty years ago the words "blue velvet" would have conjured up a mental picture of fabric. Somehow Lynch and Hopper and Isabella Rossilini and Kyle MacLachlan successfully rewired my brain.

What difference does it make? After all, it isn't as if readers/filmgoers/patrons of the arts are simple robots, downloading a program of action dictated by the artist. Some people emerged from the theater after watching "Hotel Rwanda" thinking that Paul Rusesabagina was a brave man and an inspiration, others may have become more sensitized to other historical, recent or ongoing tragedies in post-colonial Africa, while others walked out thinking 'wow, crazy people killing each other for nothing.'

By the way, this is Supply Chain Cinema. You see my examples are movies and so while I've pointed to movies and books and fine arts, I'm most interested in movies. I don't read too fast and can't wax too poetic on a painting. Not my strong points. For the most part I will talk about film and ignore the rest.

I like to watch.

And because I'm a somewhat geeky, economics and policy type -- interested in how people understand the world, what helps and what hurts that understanding of the world, and how that understanding translates into helping and hurting other people -- after I watch I wonder. What does it mean. How will I be different? How will others change?

Of course one related question gets lots of attention: culture and violence. Does watching violent movies make the watchers more violent? (Or less?) If I go see "Atlas Shrugged" when it comes out in 2008, will it make me more libertarian? So the question is, "Does Gordon Gekko matter?"

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.

A lot of people seemed to make a big deal of the movie "Wall Street," often quoting or misquoting Gordon Gekko's lines. Why?

What difference does it make?

That's what I want to know. That is why I am blogging here at "Supply Chain Cinema."