Dialogue with Directors at Guelph International Film Festival
The Punks are Alright follows the interconnectivity of three punk rock bands from across the globe and how that music changes the youth culture. Crawford films The Forgotten Rebels in Canada, the Blind Pigs in Brazil, and Superman is Dead in Indonesia and interviews the band members as they talk about what the music means to them.
You started as a film editor with the National Film Board, so why did you decide to make the jump from editing to directing with this film?
Well I was watching so many other people’s films and was being really critical of them that I finally said, “Time to get off me ass and do it myself.” I got into film to make films and be a director, and I was always waiting for that great epiphany of an idea that was so brilliant it would come to me in my sleep and I'd wake up and say, “That was the movie I was born to make.” Those don’t usually come, and you sort of have to chase the best idea you’ve got.
What about the film itself—how did you come up with the idea?
I came up with the idea to do a short film about the Forgotten Rebels and that’s all I had. These guys have been around since ’77; they’ve never made it big, but they’re still together, and they somehow managed to have fans all over the world, even though they’ve never been signed to a major label. So I thought that was a pretty cool, interesting story right there and that’s all I had. But once I started it, the next thing I knew was that I got an e-mail from Brazil and that opened up a whole other aspect to the film. Then once I went to Brazil, they told me about Indonesia, so the thing kind of opened up like a flower; it was a very organic process.
So these bands found you, you didn’t actively seek them out?
Well, I put a sign up the Rebels' website saying that I was interested in fans of the band and it didn’t matter where they lived, just anywhere in the world, especially outside Canada because I wanted to see how far their reach was. But no, it’s true; the guys in Brazil contacted me.
At what point did it become less a film about the Forgotten Rebels and more about this world-wide punk culture?
I think it’s when I went to Brazil. You know what it’s like in Canada—punk music is this rebel music; it’s about protesting, and at the end of the day in Canada, I don’t know how much there is to protest against. So I started to see how these people lived, and I realized that the resonance of punk was much, much deeper in Brazil and then even more so in Indonesia.
The film took four years to make, so what all was involved in those four years in terms of shooting and development?
It took a hell of a long time because I didn’t get any money from anybody. It was the usual thing where I would film for a while and then you have to get a job and make some money so that you can carry on with it. I went to Brazil twice and I went to Indonesia once, and it took some time to save up money to go to these places—and I went for months at a time. I wouldn’t recommend for anyone to make their first film this ambitious; it’ll kill you.
Did you ever figure out why punk catches on the way it does in these places, or how it crosses borders and cultures the way it does?
It’s kind of interesting because there was a military dictatorship in Brazil for decades and it kind of dissolved on its own in the mid 80s, and that’s when the punk scene started there. So they’re a good ten years behind than everyone else. In Indonesia it’s brand new; it’s only been around for ten years, and they used to have a military dictatorship too. So you can look at it in a way that punk is a manifestation of democracy because these military dictatorships did not want these kids running around with Mohawks and listening to music that had all these negative things to say about the government. There’s a real anti-punk thing in Indonesia right now, but some of these Muslim clerics who are against it can’t stop it no matter what they do, and the more they’re against it, the more the kids are attracted to it.
I was wondering about that because Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, and it’s also one of those places where there is that friction between the modern and the traditional...
That country is constantly in a battle for whether they want to be moderates or whether they want to enact Sharia law. But there’s two sides to this—allegedly, there are some places where Muslim clerics have chased kids in the streets, literally trying to kill them because they were dressed like punks; that’s one side. The other side of this is that I went to punk clubs in different parts of Indonesia and you go into this basement that could be anywhere, Hamilton or even Guelph or Manchester, England. You walk in and there’s this intense music playing. All the kids are moshing, they’re having a great time, and then at five o’ clock in the afternoon they stop. And all the kids that want to, go to the sides of the room and do their prayers for ten minutes and everyone else is quiet respectful. And then after 10 or 15 minutes when all the prayers are over, a new band gets up on stage and they start moshing again. That’s an incredible thing, an aspect of religion coexisting with punk that I don’t see in Canada. I mean, you don’t see the Catholic church embracing punk or anything else like that.
How do you reconcile the way that punk music is so popular abroad because it’s a counterpoint to an oppressive system to the way it’s popular here?
I haven’t, I’m kind of wrestling with that myself. I don’t even know, on some level, why punk even exists here, because inherently it’s this thing that’s rebelling against something. I actually don’t know what people are rebelling against right now, I mean there’s lots of poor people in this country, there’s a war going on Iraq and other things that should be rebelled against, but I don’t see anybody really doing this here. Like in Brazil or Indonesia, you can’t walk outside your door without being hit by something that’s just morally wrong like the poverty, the crime, and the corruption.
What about the music itself—like if you plucked a punk rocker from the streets of Canada and put them in Brazil or Indonesia, would they recognize the sound, or do these guys put their own spin on punk?
They’re starting to. I think it’s like anything; you have to mimic things for a while and copy them before you can start feeling comfortable in their own skin; kind of like crawling before you walk. Like the Brazilian guys, obviously their influence is the Forgotten Rebels, but you can also hear bits of Rancid, but now they’re starting to sing in Portuguese, which is their language, incorporating their own sounds and feelings into their music. So it’s slowly becoming independent of us and our punk scene.
The photography of Edward Burtynsky has captured the beauty in devastation as he visits huge construction sites and industrial operations to document how human activity is impacting the landscape. In Manufactured Landscape, Baichwal follows Burtynsky on his latest project in chronicling the huge modernization effort in China.
How did you meet up with Edward Burtynsky and decide to make a film about his photography?
Well my last film was about a photographer, so it really wasn’t my intention to do another; there was no plan to it. It’s hard to represent one medium in another in an intelligent way, and I think that there’s lots of film about artists that either show their work because this artist did this work or you use the work as illustrative back-up. I really wanted to do something different, and I have followed Ed’s work for more than ten years when he was doing his early quarry stuff. I was always intrigued by how he was able to bring up questions about impact on the planet non-didactically, in a way that was really powerful. And there was something about the fruitfulness of that ambiguity that stayed with me through all of his work.
The film came to me in a very odd way through an old friend of mine, who I’ve worked with on and off with since 1998. Someone came to him that shot a whole bunch of mini-DV footage of Burtynsky on location in China and India but couldn’t shape it into something, so he asked me to look at it. And I said sure and was fascinated by the notion of going in forensically and working with found material. But after looking at this 80 hours of footage with my editor, I realized we couldn’t make a film with that footage. So we went back to Ed and said, we’d love to do this but we have to shoot more. And then we just embarked on this relationship.
I was wondering if you could talk about the specific challenges of making a film about photography...
It’s very difficult representing one medium in another. When I was making the Shelby [Lee Adams], it was very much centred on a philosophical question of representation in documentary photography and documentary film. In Ed’s case, I knew that I didn’t want to make a film that was a conventional artist’s portrait or something that was a biography. What I wanted to do was use the photographs as a departure point, and we try to extend the narrative in an intelligent way into a motion picture film. I also wanted to recreate the visceral experience of looking at one his pictures which are huge and overwhelming. You’re confronted by scale and then you realize that all the little black dots are actually people, so we wanted to be able to move back and forth between the wide view and the detail. It was hard sometimes because there are all kinds of technical problems in showing photographs in film, like how you move in the photograph, like getting shimmering lines if the aspect ratio is not the same; it’s very hard to respect the frame and still have it quite large. Also there’s finding a way in respecting the integrity of the photograph and translating it into film.
What was your process in shooting was it just you following Edward around or the two of you deciding together where and how you were going to shoot?
One of the things we had a problem with is that Ed’s work is heavily researched based: he spends two years having a scout going to these places, take photographs, and sends them to Ed, and he would spend a lot of time figuring out whether he wanted to go to this place and exactly the best vantage point to shoot from. So often he’ll get there and if the light’s right he can get right to work, and for us, we’re coming to a place we’ve never been and trying to figure out where the stories are. You can shoot something very superficially and just say, "we’re covering this area but we didn’t want to do that." So there were many occasions where Ed was sort of patiently waiting for us or he would move on ahead and we would stay an extra day or extra two days and meet up with him later. We were there for a month or three-and-a-half weeks in total.
Visiting these places with Burtynsky, were you surprised how he was able to turn something like the Three Gorges Dam, this huge industrial operation, into a work of art inside the photograph?
It is interesting because the fact that it’s non-didactic is echoed by the fact that it’s very aesthetically seductive. These photographs are beautiful to look at and then you realize that it’s a photo of oil filters. In some cases we were in devastating environments with nothing natural as far as the eye can see, there was nothing organic left in it. So when you see how he manages to find the iconic sense of scale in these places it’s pretty extraordinary. We also would often start with the same frame and then extrapolate by putting on the long lenses and exploring the detail within that frame.
What was the appeal of shooting in China—was it because there’s so much industrialization there?
There were a couple of things. First, we knew we wanted to follow Ed as much as we could—and he really is the author of the film, he’s not necessarily the subject because he goes away and comes back again. Because his latest series was in China, that was our opportunity to be with him on that level and basically document him taking the photographs that were part of that essay. At the same time, China was also fascinating for me because China is the quintessential example of Industrial Revolution; the scale is so much vaster than any other Industrial Revolution in history; it’s become the sort of archetype for what that means. The film is not about China being bad, it’s about pointing out all of our implications on this Industrial Revolution, and everything going on there is for all of the things that we think that we need over here.
Wal-Mart has been a controversial topic for the last few years as the company and its practices have found themselves under greater scrutiny. The camera of Kirby follows a group of clean-cut students from Concordia as they embark on a cross-country trip to take the battle to the public and get them informed about where they’re shopping.
How did you, Sergeo, hook up with the Wal-Town guys?
KIRBY: Well the fortunate thing was that we all occupied the same school, so the connection was made by Ezra [Winton] the team leader. I had just finished another documentary that dealt with political issues at our school, and he want me to come along on their tour to film it. So I then started looking into the issues involved.
Tim, how did the Wal-Town group get started?
MCSORELY: It began at Concordia with a group called Uberculture, and one of the things that we focused on was the way that corporations affected local culture. For Ezra, the town that he grew-up in sort of hollowed out when Wal-Mart came to town. Knowing that this wasn’t a unique thing we thought we’d do this tour and talk to people about what was going on, bring information, and get a first-hand view of how Wal-Mart is affecting communities.
What was the challenge in paring down all the footage of a 36-city tour over two years into a simple, one-hour narrative?
KIRBY: That’s always a gargantuan task. Definitely, it was trying to focus on specific members of the group that portrayed a trajectory in discovering something within themselves, so that was necessary. There’s also a sense that the film is not just static moments; it has to go somewhere. So you need to have an event that produces a significant response. In the first tour, there wasn’t much of that reaction to what had happened, but luckily by the second tour, there was a full reaction and that was where I pivoted most of the narrative.
What was the most surprising thing you heard on the road as you were pulling up to Wal-Marts and handing out literature?
KIRBY: I think I have one and it was a woman that remarked, “Wal-Mart’s American? I never knew it was American.” That was kind of a shocking moment because I don’t know who could live in a bubble so excluded that you’re not aware of the origins of a company of Wal-Mart’s size or that it comes across in such a benign way that you think it’s local. That was predominate throughout, this idea that it’s a local store, the idea that a sense of local ownership could be obtained from the store being nearby.
MCSORELY: You have to look at Wal-Mart as company too, because Wal-Mart Canada isn’t owned by people in Canada, it’s a privately held subsidiary of Wal-Mart Incorporated. There’s no way a Canadian, unless you own shares in an American business, can directly influence the corporation, it’s policies or anything like that.
Overall, what was the general reaction to what you were doing and did you notice that reaction change as you kept touring because in the last few years there’s been an explosion of criticism against Wal-Mart?
MCSORELY: Well, there was a lot of mixed reaction. I think one of the things that we started to realize being outside the Wal-Mart is that you get very different reactions than in community meetings and meeting people in a town hall kind of setting. When you’re outside the Wal-Mart you get a lot people who have their reasons for going there like they’re low income or they don’t have much choice. And on occasion we’d get a lot of aggressive people that weren’t very happy we were there but at the same time we’d get a lot of support from people that understood the issues but didn’t see any alternatives to shopping at a store like Wal-Mart.
In different places we’d get different reactions. In Quebec we’d get a different reactions because there was a lot of media coverage around the unionization of the store in Jonquiere. So we’d meet people who were shopping there but at the same time they were very critical of how Wal-Mart was treating the employees.
What about the corporation itself—because you got an interview with a representative of Wal-Mart Canada and they’re usually reluctant to talk on camera?
KIRBY: They didn’t want to, but somebody else had already gotten the interview and I just sort of sprung it on them and said I was driving out there. I was just coming along for the ride in a way. But that was the one time; they didn’t grant anymore. I tried to call a couple of more times for a follow-up, but they didn’t respond.
MCSORELY: At one point during filming they agreed to do a debate with us once we got out to Vancouver, but then they kind of just stopped returning our phone calls after that and nothing came of it. But that was one of the things we hoped for because in the media they were challenging us and then we do and they showed they didn’t really want to.
What were the challenges in getting this film made in terms of logistics?
KIRBY: Fundraising for a film of this nature is already hard because you’re criticizing a major business within the Canadian structure, even though that wasn’t necessarily my angle; I was embedded as it were with a group of anti-Wal-Mart activists. Also there was a lot of resistance from the National Film Board in terms of my relationship with the group, you know how friendly was my friendship with Uberculture and was this an objective documentary and all this. Well no, it wasn’t going to be an objective documentary, but I was just coming on as a filmmaker.
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