;)
Imagine the documentary community's position on the current Hollywood writers strike. Go on, scriptwriters, hold out for more residuals! Make 'em realize Stephen King's Deuce Bigalow and Kumar Go To Hostel III won't happen without you! Another argument that nonfiction cinema can plug the hole in our souls left by the prospect of a missed season of Desperate Housewives is Crossing the Line, a quirky you-couldn't-make-this-up feature examination of a footnote from the Cold War. The film is relevant in a 21st century of saber-rattling and unease at commie-stronghold North Korea.
The footnote's name is James Dresnok, one of four mostly low-ranking American soldiers who defected across the grim border between North and South Korea to join Kim Jong Il's chilly dictatorship in the early 1960s, achieving positions of prominence in the spy-instruction schools, film industries and the propaganda blaring forth from Pyongyang. Dresnok perseveres to this day, fishing with Korean buddies, teaching English, raising his mixed-race kids. As other notorious Iron Curtain turncoats such as Kim Philby and Dean Reed died before the Soviet bloc collapsed, getting Dresnok interviewed is an outstanding coup here by filmmaker Daniel Gordon (who previously got the totalitarian state on film in 2004's A State of Mind, which was ostensibly about young North Korean gymnasts preparing for a massive public display in honor of Kim Jong Il). Don't expect any groveling or Man Without a Country repentance; Dresnok is sticking to his decision to side with North Korea, and he talks like a committed party man, a true believer, as much so as those who will forever insist invading Iraq was a brilliant idea.
But it's not to say Dresnok doesn't want to be understood as someone for whom the world's most isolated, troglodyte-Marxist climate must have seemed preferable to Dogpatch, USA. He and fellow defectors, high-school dropouts all, hailed from poor, white Southern backgrounds of broken homes, uncaring fathers, floozy mothers, abuse and alcoholism. The military was supposed to be a safety net, but being posted to the Korean DMZ, its tacky strips of prostitutes and bars, obviously wasn't. The deal was sealed in Dresnok's case by his first wife's desertion. When he got caught forging documents so he could be AWOL to patronize a favorite whore, Dresnok walked across the DMZ to the North rather than face court-martial.
We hear that not long after their individual defections, the four Yanks attempted to leave North Korea and sought sanctuary in the Russian embassy, but the narrative rather curiously brushes that incident aside (naturally, the filmmakers worked under conditions of strict supervision). Instead of a rebuttal to Dresnok are the horror stories of a cohort who did manage to leave. Even so, the documentary's well-spoken anti-hero is surprisingly persuasive, as a sort of Winston Smith who taught himself to love Big Brother because there was no alternative. And you've got to wonder, if James Dresnok hadn't made his Mephistophelean separate peace, would he today just be a forgotten dog-tag number languishing in the VA labyrinth instead of an apparently happy comrade-citizen with a third wife and prestige? Maybe this ultimate traitor is, after all is said and done, Alex de Toqueville's idealization of the American, someone who remakes himself for opportunities in the brave new world. - Charles Cassady Jr.
Crossing the Line- ***
Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall
At 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 2
Blood of a Poet - ***
Well, if American cinema artists have hit the bottom of the remake pool to the point that they're now doing Alvin & The Chipmunks (which I'm sure gets away from the campy, silly Alvin & the Chipmunks of the 1960s and back to the original, dark, brooding, psychotic Alvin & the Chipmunks of the 1930s and '40s), then let's cut European art-house types some slack. Lech Majewski's Blood of a Poet (aka Glass Lips), which the Cinematheque is showing as part of a Majewski series dubbed "Unearthly Delights," shares its anglicized title with Jean Cocteau's 1930 surrealist landmark, and maybe the same mission statement, as Cocteau's four-act short feature was dubbed "a realistic documentary composed of unreal happenings."
Majewski, a Polish artist billed as a stage director, screenwriter and novelist as well, developed Blood of a Poet originally as a multiple-screen video-art installation; I'm guessing, since I don't go out of my way to patronize multi-screen video-art installations (Alvin & the Chipmunks is coming; one only has so much time) that the feature sets those separate screens into what constitutes chronicle order. Free of dialogue, with just occasional music, the string of carefully composed images that result make a dream narrative of sometimes extraordinary pictorial beauty, some Freudian Symbolism 101, and enough Eastern European hotties in states of undress to keep the viewer's attention.
A plot is discernible: A young man in an insane asylum is fixated on his mother and reflects back on his childhood. Dad was a businesslike, chilly sort (far less naked and blond than mom), and apparently took a dark-haired, chic office minx as a mistress, sending the boy over the edge into anger and obsession, with recurring Catholic-crucifixion motifs (as well as Nazi-style salutes). In the confines of the loony bin, the heavily-medicated son, in flights of imagination and fantasy, achieves some type of closure. There's little direct echo of Cocteau (maybe one flying sequence, and that may owe just as much to Magritte) and, while Majewski may be following his own muse through some occasionally annoying and pretentious territory, the romantic pathos of the wistful final sequence is genuinely moving. It's recorded that theaters showing the 1930 Blood of a Poet offered a $25 prize to anyone who could figure what the thing was all about. Not quite that degree of a challenge here, so put that money in escrow for any poor audience sitting through the whole Cremaster cycle. - CC
Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque
At 6:45 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 2