Author Archives: Jason Olshefsky

Movies in April, 2015

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  1. Short Circuit Film Shorts Program at the Little, April 4: Jenn and I often appreciate short films so we couldn't resist checking out this rather under-advertised program, part of The Little Underground Film Series. First was an experimental film with distorted, shifting faces, and distorted digital audio. Then was a narrative that rambled around with a gay guy and his mentally disabled partner, touching on interesting things like enlightenment, but then abandoning them just as quickly. The third was about a girl who is sexually attracted to murder. —We made it partway through the fourth film about a young gay man going to a sleepover with some friends before we had enough dour, impenetrable, rambling student-quality films and left. In all, quite a disappointment.
  2. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow at the Little, April 4: That evening, Jenn and I returned to see this documentary in the Little Underground Film Series. It looks at the studio/estate of Anselm Kiefer in France where he builds giant sculptural spaces out of concrete, metal, and other materials. It is not an introductory documentary, so I was a bit lost not knowing a lot about Keifer in the first place. Although the artworks were impressive, I was turned off by the blaring horror-movie-style modern orchestral composition and found that the digital recording—with all its lack of dynamic range—did no favors to the use of dark shadows and bright sunlight in the artist's work.
  3. The Wizard of Oz at the Dryden, April 5: Jenn, Chris, and I went to see this special screening of a great 3-layer Technicolor print. The story is still engaging and amusing, and I picked up a couple things I had missed. For instance, Glinda adds snow to wake the dozing travelers … in a field of poppies … could it be cocaine she's "snowing" down? And I recognized the Scarecrow's blunder when he says, "the sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side"—that's only true on a right triangle which cannot be isosceles. And my favorite zinger was when Dorothy whacks the Cowardly Lion when they first meet, she says, "it's bad enough picking on a straw man, but picking on a little dog." Heh … strawman. It's interesting to also watch for L. Frank Baum's metaphors: set in Dustbowl America, the Cowardly Lion is political leadership, the Tin Woodman the industrialized worker, and the Scarecrow the farmer.
  4. Kumiko the Treasure Hunter at the Little, April 7: Jenn and I wanted to see this, largely from the trailer. It's about an antisocial, delusional woman who thinks she can find the treasure hidden during the plot of the movie Fargo. I felt I needed to write about it as soon as I could because, since Kumiko's decision-making process is so skewed, any recollection of the film will quickly vanish like the memory of a dream. I really wanted to like the movie, but it just doesn't quite make it. Kumiko is just too hard to like, not to mention too hard to comprehend. I felt like there was some inkling of a theme—the alienation of humanity in our modern world? the lonely path of pursuing money over the company of others? the similarities of people in Japan and America despite the appearance of polar opposite cultures?—but none quite fit. The cinematography, at least was excellent, and a testament to what a skilled operator can do with modern digital technology.
  5. Danny Collins at the Little, April 11: Jenn and I were looking for something to do and figured this could be an okay way to kill time. We had checked online reviews and the consensus was something along the lines of "a weak story is saved by good acting." The gist is that Al Pacino plays Danny Collins, a 1960s rock star who keeps singing the same songs today, but he tries to do better when a handwritten letter from John Lennon is discovered and given to him. When I left, I said, "that exactly met my expectations"—referring to the reviews we had skimmed. Indeed the story is rather eye-rolling bad with its artificial conflicts and saccharine resolutions, but Pacino is so affable, Annette Bening's hotel-manager Mary so sweetly plausible, Christopher Plummer's friend-and-manager Frank so witty, and the saccharine moments adequately earned, that the resulting movie is, well, entertaining.
  6. The Hunting Ground at the Little, April 14: I had a chance to see this documentary about rape and sexual assault on American college campuses—and how its occurrence is systematically hidden from the public. This isn't new to me, and I expected an affirmation of what I already knew. But I was quite horrified at the breadth of the problem, and at these women (and some men) who were raped and then ignored by the schools they adore—or worse, blamed for the forceful, uninvited actions of someone else. (Read more in my more complete discussion.)
  7. Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box) at the Dryden, April 21: With Louise Brooks as one of Jenn's favorite actors, we went to see one of her finest performances. It's story of a woman living as a courtesan as her world of comfort and wealth collapses around her. Brooks performance emphasizes the casual, innocent nature of the character—that despite trading sex for money, she treats it like it's any other profession, and eschews any emotional attachment to each man she is with (with one glaring exception). The story is boldly presented and avoids only nudity and intercourse, making it seem like it could have been made today. The whole thing is quite brilliant, and I think the snapshot-style act structure works well.
  8. While We're Young at the Little, April 23: Jenn, Chris, Jim, and I went to see this together. I was rather lukewarm on it—I'm too often disappointed by Ben Stiller performances. I was quite pleased, then, when I found his acting to be perfectly fine, but the script was shockingly astute. The film is about a couple in their 40s who rekindle their youth hanging out with a couple 20-somethings. As Jenn and I are right at the age of the "old" characters in the film, all those elements resonated well. And the writer had a stand-up comic's knack for observing and making relatable the quirks of our lives. It's a film that stuck with me and I think I'd like to revisit it in a while.
  9. Rochester International Film Fesitval screening at the Dryden, April 23: Jenn and I attended the first of four screenings this year. Although all the selections were competently made, I have to agree with Jenn's assessment that they all seem kind of flat and similar. I theorize that with the proliferation of cheap filmmaking technology, a much higher number of people are exploring short films as an introduction to filmmaking. As such, the stories are kept simple, and in most cases, unfortunately too simple. I'll mention my top three picks: I thought Tuning Oscar (Mikel Alvariño, Spain, 20 min.) was an amusing and somewhat spooky tale about a guy who's getting over his former lover. Children of Stateless (Moonsik Chung, South Korea, 14 min.), while perhaps the most flawed in the bunch, was a document of life as a Burmese refugee in the Mae-La Refugee Camp in Thailand, and for that reason, deserved attention to preserve it. And finally, Carry On (Yatao Li, China, 17 min.) was a polished and heartwrenching tale of a Chinese father trying to "protect his daughter from the Japanese who have occupied China during World War II."
  10. Ex Machina at the Little, April 24: Jenn and I caught this together. It's about an artificially intelligent robot in female humanoid but distinctly robotic form, and a test to determine if it can pass for "intelligent". Nathan the inventor and Ava the robot are well-defined characters, each with their own motivations: hidden, overt, and conflicting. Unfortunately the film splits its time mostly between Ava and Caleb (the young man doing the testing) and Caleb is flat and boring. Reviewing wise, I think Ex Machina is an excellent science fiction film, but as a movie, it's just so-so. Regardless, the visual effects are astonishing and it is easy to believe in Ava as a robot.
  11. Power to the Pedals: Wenzday Jane and the Culture of Change (Bob Nesson, U.S. 2014, 32 min.) at the Little, April 27: I biked through a light rain to see this, which turned my bad mood worse. I guess the movie is supposed to be an inspiration—how Wenzday Jane created a pedal-powered delivery company in the heart of Boston. But I saw it as a mere trickle of hope against a deluge of hopelessness. For instance, it was amusing to see Jane's worker pedaling recyclables to the waste management site amidst huge garbage trucks, but to me it only underscored how fucked we are—that we actually need fleets of garbage trucks to handle the waste we produce.
  12. A Sampler of Cinematic Gems from the Museum's Collection at the Dryden, April 29: Jenn and I went to see motion picture curator Paolo Cherchi Usai's selections from the museum collection. The world's first sound-on-film motion picture (in competition with—and quick successor to—record-based Vitaphone) called "[Theodore W. Case Sound Test # 4: Canary]" (US 1925, 2 min.) was fascinating to see—not because of its content but for its historical significance. In Absentia (Stephen and Timothy Quay, UK 2000, 20 min.) was a brilliant partially-animated non-linear narrative related to the asylum life of Emma Hauck, and incredibly scored by Karlheinz Stockhausen. To lighten things, Usai dropped in a hilarious short comedy Pass the Gravy (Fred L. Guiol, US 1928, 22 min.). Next was Kitchen Sink (Alison Maclean, New Zealand 1989, 14 min.) which the Dryden screened prior to Maclean's Crush on May 19, 2010—a dark tale in the style of David Lynch. Finishing up was the odd Gus Visser and His Singing Duck (US 1925, 3 min.)—this being perhaps the only film evidence of Visser's vaudeville performances.

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What's Going On?

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Indeed! I worked a while on the site and added The Events Calendar plug-in. I have been checking the development of various calendars, but liked this one because it supports importing events in bulk. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to enter data quickly, and the Internet—with its sub-second delays and several-second page-load times—just doesn't cut it for me. So I enter the event information offline and can import it en masse.

Anyway, what this means for you, dear reader, is that the events are now in a link above—right below the logo there:

Click on the Events link to get to the list of events coming up.

Click on the Events link to get to the list of events coming up.

From there the events are listed from the current time forward. You can figure out how to switch to calendar view and day-view if you'd like, or search for things. There are also links to Google Maps, and you can even export a single event or all the entries on a page to your own calendar. Partly for nostalgia, I bundle all the weekly events from Thursday to Wednesday in a category which I include in the weekly e-mail I send out. It's also so I can export all the events for a given week without having to go day-by-day, and without grabbing duplicates from future dates by accident (e.g. you can go to the category, say, for the week related to this post called JayceLand 2015-Apr-16 and export all the events on each page.)

I'll probably tweak things from time-to-time, but it seems like it's working for now.

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The Hunting Ground and College Rape

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I had a chance to see The Hunting Ground at the Little— a documentary about rape and sexual assault on American college campuses—and how its occurrence is systematically hidden from the public. This isn't new to me, and I expected an affirmation of what I already knew. But I was quite horrified at the breadth of the problem, and at these women (and some men) who were raped and then ignored by the schools they adore—or worse, blamed for the forceful, uninvited actions of someone else. The cover-up is so pervasive that there is even backlash against victims, accusing them of fabricating sexual assault stories for attention (although the broad consensus is false-rape accusations happen about as much as for other crimes; and that it's simply impossible to acquire accurate statistics.)

The supposed silver lining in the film is about a group of women who have successfully used Title IX—a law designed to offer equal access to education—to force universities to handle all accusations of sexual assault in a fair way, since doing otherwise fosters an environment that encourages sexual assault therefore denying an equal education. It has grown into a movement involving hundreds of universities across the U.S.

After the film, the panel consisted of two RIT representatives: Stacy DeRooy, and Dr. Dawn Meza Soufleris. In the discussion, it was revealed that SUNY Brockport and Hobart & Williams Smith were two local colleges cited in Title IX cases. Since the panel was from RIT, there was a lot of discussion of RIT's actions, but I was unimpressed.

I attended RIT starting in 1988. Although they made efforts to teach responsible sexuality, I wasn't sexually active and didn't seek out guidance. In fact, I tended to avoid it as much as I could. At that age, though, I was definitely a horny animal. And I did make lots of mistakes when approaching the opposite sex. I think the general problem was that I wished to avoid conflict, so I would engage in behaviors that brought me close to the woman I desired but didn't require that I ask permission. This was a very dangerous position to be in, and it was only dumb luck that my circle of friends did not encourage aggressive behavior. If I were encouraged to, say, corner a woman I desired, I think I might have. And while my 19-year-old self wouldn't have raped anyone, I guarantee it would not have been a mentally and sexually healthy experience for the woman.

So I look at it from that perspective: what is RIT doing now to address horny teenaged boys being given advice by their peers that may or may not be true, respectful and healthy? Unfortunately I was only able to ask what RIT is doing today—without the backstory.

Apparently they are complying with the The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (or Clery Act) and reporting crimes. I thought I'd play "prospective student" and see if I could find the report from the RIT website. There was no easy path—in fact, safety and crime were not mentioned on any of the main pages, and only after burrowing through Emergencies to Campus Safety that I found a link to the federal and state compliance documents. Indeed they noted reports of about a dozen sexual assaults each year, making the rate around 0.07% compared to 0.05% for rapes in Rochester (112/210,000 in 2012). Unfortunately, crimes are still filtered through Campus Safety which reinforces a conflict-of-interest. They really should abandon Campus Safety when it comes to handling criminal cases (assault, rape, theft, etc.) and work directly with the police.

They also have a program to encourage "yes means yes" and that that is not a blanket-"yes" but an immediate one. That's all well and good, but it would completely miss "past-me". I would have been aware of the policies and it would have somewhat affected my decisions, but it would not have done anything about my avoidance of asking. If my 19-year-old self could have articulated it: "sure, yes means yes and no means no, but if I don't ask, I don't have to deal with it."

I mean, these are some really deep-seated problems and I don't think it's unique to me. I grew up in a sexually conservative household, so there was no talk of sex—nobody was comfortable being open about it. What I derived from that is that sex is something shameful and not to be spoken of—remnants of that continue to haunt me. So what do you do with someone who has never talked openly about sex? How do you explain "yes means yes" and what an "enthusiastic consent" looks like? Where do you start with someone who is still thinking "how do I attract women?" as if it were a state of being rather than a play-filled negotiation between two individuals?

In the end, it is not a victim's problem or fault if jee is sexually harassed or sexually assaulted. It is entirely in the hands of the potential assailant, and it is from that foundation that all education programs should be built.

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Movies in March, 2015

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  1. 20,000 Days on Earth at the Dryden, March 4: Jenn and I caught this quasi-documentary. It's a fascinating film that ostensibly documents a "day in the life" of musician Nick Cave. However, it is fiction-within-a-fiction in that it actually documents Nick Cave's public persona, and as such is a fake documentary. Regardless, it's a unique and wonderful method of storytelling.
  2. A Year Along the Abandoned Road at the Dryden, March 5: I was thrilled to get to this first of two short films. This one is an unbelievable time-lapse film shot in motion along a road in a Norwegian lakeside village. It must have been a strange and unique experience to shoot—apparently taking one image each day, moving the camera a few inches, then waiting to take the next image the next day, and repeating for a whole year. It's an eerie and beautiful experience to watch, making one feel like an otherworldly being floating through the world unseen.
  3. An Injury to One at the Dryden, March 5: The title is taken from the Union phrase, "an injury to one is an injury to all", and the film documents the relationship of business and labor in the mining town of Butte, Montana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's a haunting and evocative film that highlights the philosophy that winners write history. In this case, the winners were the lucrative mining companies; the biggest loser being International Workers of the World (IWW) organizer Frank Little who was murdered by mining company goons parties unknown.
  4. Whiplash at the Little, March 7: Jenn, Chris, and I went to see this together, although I was leaning toward another movie. The first thing I noticed was the dark and muddy digital recording—in attempting to capture the early morning of New York like an homage to Taxi Driver, it only succeeds in making itself look like a 1970's horror movie with inky blacks and dingy colors. Fortunately, I got over that. The movie moves along well and pits two passionate characters against one another: one a driven, aspiring drummer, and the other a abusive music professor obsessed with perfection in his collegiate ensemble. I assure this is no spoiler: the moment of divining greatness is not something that can be found through calculation, but rather through passionate happenstance.
  5. The Gang's All Here at the Dryden, March 16: I went to the Senior Matinee today … I guess to feel even younger than at an average Dryden screening. I guess set in mid-war America, it makes sense, but otherwise it's about a reprehensible man who stalks and rapes a dancer (née "uses his soldier's bravado to win the heart of a dancer"), all the while stringing along his soon-to-be fiancée. Fortunately it works out in the end because the girlfriend knew all along it was just a relationship based on familial ties just like the rapist believes, and the dancer loves the rapist, so it wasn't rape after all! Howeverrr … it is worth seeing two rather unbelievable Carmen Miranda-centered Busby Berkeley dance numbers that push the boundaries of cinema and clearly pushed the limits of Technicolor filming (just watch those giant cameras shake as they are rapidly hoisted into the air—yikes!)
  6. Cotton Road at the Little, March 21?: Jenn and I caught just one of the films at the Greentopia Film Festival this year. It's the story of how cotton is grown in South Carolina, shipped all over the world (particularly China) where it is made into fabric and clothing, then shipped back to South Carolina. Notable to me was how the manual laborers—the American cotton farmers and the Chinese clothing makers—existed in insufferable conditions while each step removed lived in more comfort: the American industrial cotton gin, the refined cotton warehouses, and the Chinese warehouses for fabrics faring better; the shipping companies in both nations and the American retailers faring best of all. Jenn and I both found the music to be cloying and melancholic (revealing the only evidence of the filmmaker's bias), but many other people liked it. While the Rochester audience lobbed lackluster questions at director Laura Kissel, she revealed at one point that the hardest place to film was not in China but in American retail stores. One final note: the Greentopia Film Festival asked us to fill out a survey online for a chance to win an Apple iPad—without a lick of irony—despite the widespread knowledge that Apple's products are made in Chinese factories with working conditions as bad or worse than depicted in the film.
  7. What We Do in the Shadows at the Little, March 22: Jenn and I went to this hilarious mockumentary about a group of vampires living in New Zealand in modern times. I didn't know exactly what to expect, but I was pleased that I found it extremely funny. Perhaps it was from bottling up all my criticisms after my recent indoctrination into the Cult of Buffy, but the juxtaposition humor was plentiful.
  8. The Red Shoes at the Dryden, March 27: Jenn and I went to this Technicolor classic featuring the revered camerawork of Jack Cardiff—which was, sadly, projected from a restored 35mm print that itself did not use the Technicolor 3-layer process. It's that 3-layer process with its imperfect color registration and the impossibility of perfect focus (since each color is a different distance from the lens) that gives it its nearly imperceptible shimmer whereas the modern color emulsion made from digitally-scanned 3-strip negatives has perfect registration and a single focal plane that affords razor-sharp perfection, as undesirable as it is in this particular case. Anyway, the movie itself is quite good: music student Julian and ballerina Victoria join a ballet troupe with a hard-nosed director (making the later Whiplash comparable in subject-matter). As both rise to stardom, the latest production is The Red Shoes, based on the Hans Christian Andersen story in which a dancer wishes for red shoes which happen to be cursed and she can't stop dancing until she finally dies. Both get intertwined in one another as they are central to the ballet.
  9. Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales) at the Little, March 29: Jenn was excited to see this after seeing the name Agustín Almodóvar, thinking he directed it, but it was actually Damián Szifrón and Almodóvar produced it. It's a series of 6 short stories of vengeance. And as is the case with successfully-executed vengeance: it's always and already gone wrong. The tales are told as black comedy and largely succeed … I thought the more-petty violations made for funnier stories. In the end, it all felt kind of repetitive, and I was reminded how much I liked the similarly revenge-themed black-comedy, God Bless America, which I wrote about.
  10. OnFilm Shorts by Karpo Godina and Davorin Marc at the University of Rochester Hoyt Auditorium, March 30: I go to see this fantastic program—check out the blog post for the complete review.

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A Fistful of Movie Moments

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Bumbling around the various movie blogs I read regularly, I found A Fistful of Moments Blogathon! on A Fistful of Films blog (which I just started reading). The gist is this:

We all have them in the back of our minds; those moments that make us think "man, this is what the movies are all about". We relive those moments in our mind's eye, remembering them and dissecting them and adoring them. They come in all shapes and sizes, from all types of films, and yet they all share one very important aspect; they define why we love the movies. It could be the way that the moment is cut; the way it's edited together. It could be the way the moment uses it's actors to evoke a powerful emotion from us. It could be the way that music floods the scene and draws us even closer to the moment in question. It could be a grand climax, a breathtaking introduction or a simple interchange. It could be any and all things, because for every film lover, the list is different.

At first I thought I'd start by skipping the most famous, obvious examples—the opening of Citizen Kane, for instance—but then I found so many well-received movies in my own list that I couldn't resist including them. I'm also going to go ahead and mention these scene descriptions almost always contain spoilers—there's just no way around it. I'll vaguely sort them from more subtle to more bold.

So to continue to the spoiler-riddled list, please continue reading.
Continue reading →

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OnFilm Shorts by Karpo Godina and Davorin Marc

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The University of Rochester OnFilm group organized a screening of short films by Karpo Godina and Davorin Marc. I was very pleased to notice that the group was still vibrant despite having a complete (or nearly complete) change of guard.

Anyway, the Dryden's new film programmer, Jurij Meden, did an excellent job giving context to each of the five six films. Meden originates from Yugoslavia along with Godina, and he spent quite a while studying film in Marc's home country of Slovenia.

First up were two films from Karpo Godina. In the early 1970s he was interested in filming motion from a fixed camera position. His films of this era are fast-paced 8mm films. They screened Gratinirani Mozak Pupilije Ferkeverk (The gratinated brains of Pupilija Ferkeverk, Karpo Godina, Yugoslavia, 1970, 15 mins, Color, 35mm) first—a very odd film in which five people dance around abandoned natural salt evaporation ponds (I guess). (As a side note, I was scribbling notes into my Palm Pilot [Samsung Galaxy Player] but I couldn't transcribe fast enough so all I got was "Graduated brains of… P… Browned brains?" Thankfully, an obscure blog post led me to the complete title posted at The Northwest Film Forum; and that obscure blog has the translated title cards and scenes from this film.) Anyway, Meden said—I'm fairly certain this is the gist of his wild anecdote—the filmmaker and theater troupe Pupilije Ferkeverk went there and ingested a lot of drugs, filmed for a week, and had no recollection of the events save for the exposed film. It was produced by then-generous funding from the communist state, but was an indictment of the obedience-centric government, ultimately concluding that the only thing to do is to take LSD.

A year later, Godina produced 14441 kvadrat (About the Art of Love or a Film with 14441 Frames, Karpo Godina, Yugoslavia 1972, 11 min., 16mm). This time funded through the military, it was destined to be a propaganda film to glorify the army and military service. Godina was assigned an artificial rank to command a division of troops, alone, in a remote area. He made a rather humorous film centered on a folk song about having the men and women so close but never actually together. The centerpiece is the beautiful rolling hills with scattered soldiers running about in formations (and notably never using a weapon). Godina's recollection was that it was nothing like what they expected, so they destroyed all but one print which he personally smuggled out. However, Meden met with the army a few years back, and an aging officer told him revealed they kept the negatives—"we knew he was a national treasure!"

Davorin Marc was considerably different. He lives in a small fishing village and created over 200 films in his spare time. According to Meden, every single one is a completely different experimental style. Having little contact with the outside world, he thought what he was doing was entirely new and unique although worldwide, others had used similar techniques much earlier. First up was Ugrizni me. Ze enkrat (Bite Me. Once Already, Davorin Marc, Yugoslavia, 1978/80, 1:35 mins, Silent, Color, Super 8mm). It is a cameraless film where Marc bit the 8mm film stock. His unique biological imprint flutters by on the screen and it's actually quite fascinating.

Next was Ej klanje (Slaughter Ahoy, Davorin Marc, Yugoslavia, 1981, 16 mins @ 18 fps, Silent with separate sound on CD, Color, Super 8mm). In this, he uses several fixed-camera shots to show the slaughter (perhaps) and butchering of an animal (a pig, I surmised) as well as his own soundtrack. We watched the sole original copy which starts showing only the boots of a few people at the legs of a small table—the blood-slicked ground reveals ghostly reflections of people working at the table. A second shot reveals the splitting of the animal's head with a hatchet to retrieve its tongue and brain.

The official final film was Paura in città (1181 dni pozneje ali vonj po podganah) (Fear In The City (1181 Days Later or Smell of Rats), Davorin Marc, Yugoslavia, 1984, 21 mins, Color, Super 8mm transferred to 35mm). (I had managed to transcribe Parada on città? Fear of rats? which was enough to stumble on another Northwest Film Forum post.) It's split into two parts: the first being a sort-of "video diary" and the second a sort of "found footage." Both are filmed with a quick succession between starts and stops (presumably by the remote control you can see Marc holding in some shots) which gives the whole thing a fantastic frenetic pace with its quasi-timelapse technique, enhanced by Marc's staccato soundtrack. And since there was no footage to be found, Marc resorted to filming the television, sometimes adding motion to the quasi-timelapse technique. This was a 35mm restoration from the 8mm originals and it looked fantastic.

The unofficial final film was one Marc gave Meden recently. If I remember correctly, while "Fear In The City" was being restored, they sent samples of the 35mm stock to Marc to review. Marc sliced the film into strips the same width as 8mm film, creating Perf form me for Meden. As he noted, the projector will likely add sprocket holes and the film will be destroyed while playing, perhaps destroying the projector as well. As such, it was screened on a "less valuable" projector and the film just moved slowly through the projector, melting as it went through, and we never did arrive at a scene containing any images.

Interestingly, the American promise was always that filmmakers should leave their communist countries so they could make films without censorship. But as often happened, those who took the offer found there were no public funds like there were under communism so—just as both filmmakers more or less stopped in about 1991 when communism fell—immigrants also could not afford to make such artistic works. The heyday of the 1960s Black Wave political films followed by the Pink Wave of the early 1970s when the government changed were both generously state-funded.

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