It's Sundance's last year in Park City (Utah, that is, if it were the Park City a couple minutes outside of Wichita, that would have made everything a lot simpler). Here's hoping the mountain snow doesn't prevent a drive to Boulder, CO for next year's fest!
Wednesday, 1/28
Public Access
When I was a kid, nothing seemed cooler than the idea of my cousin and me having a show on a public access channel, where we could do whatever we wanted and also be on TV (this was pre-Wayne’s World, which I say just to bolster my already obvious and considerable street cred). Of course, after we saw Pump Up the Volume, nothing seemed cooler than having a pirate radio station, because that was even more transgressive, but being kids with ideas and little idea how to implement any of this, of course we never did anything about any of it. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, there’s something about public access television that is inherently attractive and exciting to a whole lot of people, or at least was, before this age when technology lets us all broadcast (“broadcast”) ourselves to anyone at any time.
David Shadrack Smith’s documentary makes use of piles and piles of archival footage to tell the story of public access television, specifically focusing on Manhattan Cable Television, which began in New York City in the early 1970s. And those early days also make for the most exciting parts of the film, with people just trying things and seeing what sticks. So many different kinds of people, all with their own little worlds and ideas just throwing it all up there for anyone (and everyone) to see, both informing and being informed by the explosion of creativity and subversion and excitement taking place in the city at that time. The film also uses voiceover interviews with major players in the development of public access television, which helps us understand where they were coming from idealistically and practically, and it all only adds to the fun.
The movie’s tone and pace become more measured as more calculated elements move into public access TV, people who have developed their own aims and agendas beyond “let’s just see what we can do with all this.” And while the pure excitement wanes, this allows for a number of case studies that help to describe the development of the medium both in ways that pushed boundaries about as far as they could go (and sometimes further), and in ways that also seem to describe the progression of any new technologies and art forms, as people find ways to monetize and publicize what they’re doing. This is all most obvious in the amount of sexually explicit material that ends up being shown on the public access channels, with programs that became incredibly popular and also challenged Time Warner (which ran the stations) and the public and our perceptions of “decency” and what should be allowed. But we also see more marginalized and/or unrepresented groups exert their newfound power (the Gay Cable Network, feminist programs, Squirt TV), reflecting a major part of the early concept of what public access TV should have all been about and also helping us see the interplay between how these shows impacted society and how the shows themselves impacted their creators. And more than anything, the movie is a rich document of specific moments in time and larger societal change over those the course of those times. I’ll always wonder what my cousin and I would have done if we’d ever actually had a public access show. It would have been stupid, that’s for sure.
Levitating
We don’t know what’s happening as Levitating opens, but whatever it is, it’s thrilling. A large ring of people surround other people who are moving, jerking, dancing, gesticulating in all sorts of unusual ways while musicians with wildly different instruments all play their own songs, in a way that both feels like unrelated chaos and also somehow comes together to create an invigorating, coordinated whole (not entirely unlike New Orleans jazz, although that’s certainly not the first thing you’d think of here). It becomes clear that what we’re seeing is a trance session, in which the dancers are being inhabited by various animal spirits and the musicians are guiding them through those trances, and, well, talk about kicking down the door to start your movie.
The tone of much of the rest of the film is not exactly what you might expect after such an opening, but that’s not to say it’s not quite a lot of fun, and it thankfully doesn’t leave those trance parties behind. I’m not sure they ever quite reach the highs of that first scene, but that’s a lot to ask, and besides, director Wregas Bhanuteja finds a whole lot of other ways to keep us involved. We follow Bayu, a young man in rural Indonesia who lives with his father and who dreams of becoming the top spirit channeler for the Central Trance School, the best trance center in the area. His father seems to be kind of a loser (this is highly debatable, but that’s not obvious at first), and he frustrates and aggravates Bayu, who is desperately trying to keep his dad from selling their house to a huge corporation that’s buying up all the land around them and moving himself and Bayu to Jakarta. The school is also about to lose its land to the corporation, but they’ve found a way to save themselves—throw a huge trance session fundraiser to get the money to pay the landowner so he doesn’t sell to the corporate guys (for his part, the landowner wants to keep the land with the Trance School, but also the corporation is offering a lot of money).
So, yes, we have a “big event to save the school” going on here, plus a teenager who dreams of bigger things, plus a girl he meets who he maybe has a crush on, and what’s not to like with all this. And then you throw in animal spirit possession and those electric trance sessions? Twist my arm. Bayu has to compete to get the top spirit channeling spot (the story beats just keep on coming, keep ‘em coming!), and we see him play his special flute against all of the other competitors, who have drums, electric guitars, harmonicas, all sorts of stuff. And we get to see each of them use different animal spirits, leading to all sorts of bizarre dances and movements from the people who are channeling the spirits: turtles, chickens, heck, even leeches. And throughout, fantastical images slam into the reality we’re watching, and especially as Bayu’s anxieties and thoughts intrude into the trance realm he creates, causing all sorts of problems for him and the dancers.
Yes, of course, this is another example of me wishing I had more cultural context for what I was watching (I say this a couple times every Sundance), but the broad story strokes are so entertainingly familiar and the imagination on display is so engaging that it’s plenty easy to watch this for those things alone. I will say: you wouldn’t really call this a horror movie, but it does take quite a dark turn for a while and there are a few scenes with an extraordinary amount of blood. Since all I’ve really seen are other Indonesian movies that also have huge amounts of blood, this didn’t seem all that surprising to me, except that I didn’t exactly expect it from this one. At any rate, queasy stomachs be warned.
