Kevin Willmott’s "CSA: The Confederate States of America," an absurdist alternative history of the United States told in the form of a British TV documentary with commercial breaks, is the first great American film of the year—a work so original that all the usual labels slide right off. The word “mockumentary” doesn’t begin to do it justice. "CSA" is fiction, nonfiction and meta-fiction, and sometimes film history and film criticism as well. It is academic and streetwise, sketch-comedy wacky and coldly deliberative, kaleidoscopic and controlled. It’s like Jean-Luc Godard directing a screenplay by Dave Chappelle. It succeeds simultaneously as a comedy, a historical epic, an experimental feature, a send-up of PBS-cable documentary clichés, a dense and intricate work of speculative fiction, an inquiry into the terrifying arbitrariness of human events, a primer in how to achieve brilliance on a budget of nickels and dimes and a film editing achievement (by Sean Blake and David Bramley) in the same weight-class as "Zelig," "JFK" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," to name just three obvious stylistic influences. It’s a multitiered wedding cake of a movie.
To read the rest of the NYPress review, click here.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Due south
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
7 comments:
I missed this at the Dallas Video Festival last year, and I'm so pleased it's finally being released. I've been looking foward to it since it played in Park City back in...2004, was it?
Yeah, I think that's right. It actually played at the Dallas Video Festival around the same time on the same night as my movie "Home," and was pretty much the hit of the festival. My mild annoyance at that evaporated, though, once I saw the movie, which is simply amazing. It's a mockumentary in the way that "The Waste Land" is a poem, which is to say that noun is just an anemic starting point for a fairly monumental work. I've seen this movie twice and I intend to watch it again this weekend. There are five or six layers operating simultaneously at every moment, and every five minutes there's a gag so crazy or low that you can't believe the filmmaker went there. It's one of the great comedies about history; in fact I'd say the more interest you have in the primal rhythms of history and culture, the more you'll enjoy it.
Matt: Nice to hear some good word about this movie. A blogger acquaintance of mine is tangentially connected with the production and has worked with Kevin Willmott in the past (and apparently will do so again soon). I was actually preparing a brief nod to the movie on his behalf for this weekend (he has lots of information about it on his site), but since I haven't yet seen it I couldn't talk about the movie itself (it opens here in Los Angeles this weekend in a few theaters). So I'll be sure to include your review, plus this link to an interview with Willmott on Green Cine Daily. If the stars align just right, who knows? I may even get a chance to see it this weekend. (I remain hopeful...)
I am glad to hear Kevin Willmott is making another movie. Whatever it is I'm excited to see it. Although I wouldn't mind if he did another alternate history documentary. This one made me so happy. And it's quite remarkable in ways that I think will only become clear 10 or 15 years from now, when people have had the chance to watch it innumerable times and always notice new things. If he made another one like this every couple of years until he died, I think he'd die a legend.
I can't believe this film is just now making the rounds into a quasi mainstream release. I too saw this at the Dallas Video Festival last year and wondered what happened to it. Nice film. Also, wasn't this type of alternative history poised in a novel form previously? My brother is the bookworm of the family and when I was home at Christmas, he was given a book by an author I'd never heard of before. He went on to say this same author had written a book about time travelers who go back in time and supply the South with modern weapons, thereby easily handing them victory in the Civil War. The novel went on for another 600 pages or so about the aftermath of that event. Anyway, I guess in the time I typed this post, I could've reached for the cell and called my bro... but what the hell! This is more fun, no?
This should be a hoot! And it's also the first I've heard of it. Sounds like an elaborate, filmed version of an "Uncyclopedia" entry.
Can't wait for it to come to San Antonio (likely sometime in the middle of the summer, on one screen, for a week).
The alternate history is a durable genre with many precedents, including Philip Roth's recent "The Plot Against America." (If-The-South-Won-The-War is a particularly popular branch of that genre.)
But not since "Zelig" has it been attempted with such concentration, wit and technical & aesthetic precision. And arguably this is a greater movie than "Zelig" because of its scope. It's not just satirizing a particular type of person, the go-along-to-get-along man; it's taking apart an entire romantic/nostalgic strain of American thought, one that's driven much of this country's culture and politics since the Civil War.
Post a Comment