German artist Stefanie Schneider takes Polaroids with expired stock in Instant Dreams
INSTANT DREAMS (Willem Baptist, 2017)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, April 19
212-529-6799
instantdreamsmovie.com
www.cinemavillage.com
There’s an eye-opening “wow” moment in Willem Baptist’s documentary Instant Dreams in which Polaroid camera inventor Edwin H. Land, in a short 1970 promotional film, The Long Walk, reaches into his pocket, pulls out a black wallet that resembles an iPhone, and refers to it as a “camera that would be, oh, like the telephone, something that you use all day long, a long-awaited ultimate camera that is a part of the evolving human being.” The shot is shocking and eerie; how did this visionary see the future so clearly? In Instant Dreams, Dutch filmmaker Baptist (Wild Boar, I’m Never Afraid) follows four people obsessed with the Polaroid camera, which was invented by Land in 1948 so we could “press a button and have a picture”; the company stopped making its iconic white-bordered film for the cameras in 2008, but that has not stopped enthusiasts from continuing their passion. One of the four is Christopher Bonanos, a New York magazine editor and author of the book Instant: The Story of Polaroid; in the movie, he shares some of the history of Land and Polaroid and takes pictures of friends and family, especially his young son, who he says will be among the last to experience the feel and smell of a developing Polaroid photo, which can take between one and three minutes to finish. He also talks about Land’s prescience about the next era of photography, pointing out that “the idea would be that you would just shoot pictures, all day long, a future in which one would document one’s life all the time.”
Dr. Stephen Henchen is a research scientist formerly with Polaroid who explains, “My mission is to reinvent the instant film and keep this analog experience alive into the digital age.” As part of the Impossible Project, which aims to make Polaroid film available again, he spends time in labs experimenting and writing down formulas, trying to re-create Land’s patented process, but he notes that “the molecular design of the instant film is very, very complicated. Analog instant film is the world’s most chemically complex, completely man-made product ever.” German artist Stefanie Schneider uses her limited amount of expired Polaroid stock on photo shoots where she photographs models and her longtime partner in scenes depicting memories, desires, and fantasies, embracing the film’s unpredictability and imperfections. (Baptist also includes clips of Schneider’s 2013 short Heather’s Dream, starring Heather Megan Christie and Udo Kier.) And Ayana JJ, a young Japanese woman, represents the younger generation, shooting photos in a bustling Tokyo — until Baptist reveals a surprise near the end, complete with the commanding voice of Werner Herzog.
Author and editor Christopher Bonanos takes Polaroid photos of his son nearly every day
Baptist supplements the film with colorful, kaleidoscopic animation representing the chemical reactions involved in the Polaroid process, evoking the resolutely analog psychedelic imagery of the Joshua Light Show. He also provides numerous close-ups of people’s eyes as they look at the world — and then try to capture it on film. It’s fascinating to see how the bulky Polaroid cameras were the progenitors of the smartphone and the digital age of social media; at one point, Bonanos attends a birthday party and takes a seat on a couch, where many of the attendees sit for their portrait. This social interaction, which would not have taken place without the camera, brings Bonanos together with people he might not otherwise have spoken to, and they spend at least several minutes with each other, first posing for the photo, then waiting for it to develop. It’s a clear metaphor for today’s Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, lacking only the internet’s instant face-to-face sharing over distance. The film points out that in March 1974, Land wrote, “We could not have known, and have only just learned, that a new kind of relationship between people and groups is brought into being by instant film when the members of a group are photographing and being photographed and sharing the photographs.” With Polaroids, it occurs in different elements of time and space, the cameras supported by devoted fans unwilling to let their memories disappear amid technology run amok.
Filmmaker Sandra Luckow documents her brother’s battle with mental illness in the very personal That Way Madness Lies… “What happened to Duanne? And why didn’t we see this coming?” she asks. Luckow, who for her Yale thesis in 1986 made Sharp Edges, about unknown fifteen-year-old figure skater Tonya Harding, follows the sad tale of her brother, Duanne, as he spirals out of control, trapped in a system that is not built to help him. “Our eccentricity defined who we were, but where was the line between creativity and crazy?” Sandra says about Duanne, who had his own very successful business as a car restorer — he was considered a magician at it — before his troubled mind destroys his ability to function. He experiences manic episodes, falls for conspiracy theories, and believes he is destined to marry an internet self-help guru. Duanne was also an amateur filmmaker himself, and Sandra includes footage from short movies Duanne made when he was a kid, as well as his recordings from his stays in Oregon State Hospital, where One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed. Sandra and Duanne’s elderly parents, the mother a dollhouse builder, the father also an auto specialist, are at a loss as to what to do as Sandra shares information about Duanne’s exploits, which grow ever more confounding and threatening, particularly as he sides with scam artists instead of his family. “My big mistake has been trying to circumvent the suffering,” Sandra tells a lawyer of her attempts to help her brother.
Roger Paradiso’s The Lost Village takes on a subject near and dear to many a New Yorker’s heart: the gentrification and corporatization of the city, which is replacing affordable housing and mom-and-pop shops with luxury buildings and fancy boutiques. However, the film provides no new insight into the dilemma; in fact, Paradiso even hurts his cause by speaking with a fairly random assortment of people, including some fringe, less-than-objective, not very articulate figures, and demonstrating little skill with a camera. “People came to the Village because it was different,” he explains, stating the obvious. “They’re trying to change the character of the Village, trying to make it a hipster’s suburban mall version of what was once a great Village of artists and working-class families. It’s enough to make a Villager puke.” The film begins as a screed against NYU’s massive expansion into real estate, pointing out that many women students have become sex workers in order to afford their tuition. Mark Crispin Miller, NYU professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, shows a radical 1960s spirit in arguing against the university’s policies, but the rest of the film is scattershot and hackneyed as Paradiso, who previously wrote and directed the movie version of Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, marches in a handful of economists, brokers, journalists, and activists who give meandering lectures that sound like “Voice of the People” letters in the Daily News. And it doesn’t help that the film looks like a 1970s relic in dire need of restoration. There’s an important story buried somewhere here; perhaps the series of talks accompanying numerous screenings at Cinema Village will shed more light on this critical topic. [Full disclosure: I’m an NYU graduate with a degree in Cinema Studies.]
According to a disturbing new survey published this week by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and conducted by Schoen Consulting, twenty-two percent of millennials have never heard of the Holocaust, while fifty-eight percent of Americans believe that “something like the Holocaust could happen again.” The report was released just in time for Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. At least one millennial is doing something about that. On April 13, Serena Dykman’s extraordinary documentary, Nana, opens at Cinema Village, where the twenty-five-year-old first-time full-length feature director will participate in Q&As following the 7:00 screenings on Friday and Saturday. When she was a child, Serena had heard such words as “Holocaust,” “Auschwitz,” and “Mengele” but didn’t know exactly what they meant, though she knew they had something to do with her grandmother, Maryla Michalowski-Dyamant, whom she called Nana and who died when Serena was eleven. A decade later, after being in Brussels during the attack on the Jewish Museum and in Paris during the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Serena decided it was time to read the book she had been carrying around with her for two years but had been reluctant to open: her grandmother’s memoir. She then finally understood what all those words meant, and the impact they continue to have on her and her mother, Alice Michalowski, Maryla’s daughter.
Directors Antonio Tibaldi and Alex Lora put the viewer right in the middle of twin brothers Abraham and Shraga’s desperately crowded and traumatic situation in the compulsively watchable observational documentary Thy Father’s Chair. After their parents died, the slovenly, unmarried Jewish scholars just plain stopped cleaning up after themselves, allowing newspapers, magazines, food, garbage, kitty litter, and myriad other items to pile up around them. They were not collectors hoarding valuable possessions or personal mementos; they were simply unable to organize anything or throw stuff away in their Brooklyn apartment. Only when their upstairs tenant stopped paying rent in protest, demanding they clean their place — the tenants had to deal not only with bad odors from the brothers’ apartment but with vermin as well — do they seek out assistance, hiring an Israeli man named Hanan of Home Clean Home to come and make their apartment safe and livable again. But it’s no easy task, as Abraham watches Hanan and his hazmat-suited team very carefully, continually trying to talk them out of tossing away certain items HCH insists must go; meanwhile, Shraga just moans on and on as he downs bottles of wine. (One of the only ways to tell the identical twins apart is by the wine stains on Shraga’s white shirt.)