Movie Review: American Anarchist

American Anarchist *** / *****

Directed by: Charlie Siskel.

 

The Anarchist Cookbook was written in the early 1970s by an angry, 19-year-old young man named William Powell. The book combined information on weapons and combat, and how to make explosives, that Powell culled together from information he found in military pamphlets at the library, as well as Powell’s rage filled rantings calling from armed revolution in America to overthrow the corrupt system. It was published by a sleazy publisher looking to make a quick buck – and immediately caused controversy – a controversy that has never really gone away, although there have been long periods of time in the almost 50 years since it was published where it lies dormant. Powell himself sold off all the rights to the book for $10,000 at some point in the 1970s, so even though the book keeps on being published, he isn’t seeing any more profits. He has largely stayed out of the spotlight ever since.

 

The documentary American Anarchist is essentially all about Powell as he talks to director Charlie Siskel about why he wrote the book, and what he’s done with his life since. It seems like he quickly grew out of his anger – as many young men do – and became a teacher – one who often worked with kids with emotional problems. He seems more embarrassed by the book than anything else – he certainly no longer agrees with it, and thinks his angry rants in the book are now drivel. The book has affected his career – schools he applied to be more often than not sent copies of the book anonymously, which often sunk his chances from being hired. He seems like a quiet, intelligent well-educated, polite man. He has also mastered the art of denial – he has essentially buried his head in sand to almost all the incidents that his book may have help to inspire. He says he didn’t know of any of them until a friend of his saw Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine – and wrote to him about how the book was mentioned in the film, as being an influence on Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. At that time, he wrote a message for Amazon to put on the book’s page, saying he wants to the book to die a “quick and quiet” death. He wrote an op-ed for The Guardian 12 years later essentially arguing the same thing, when they approached him in the wake of another school shooting, in which the Cookbook was said to inspire.

 

Powell’s pleas of ignorance clearly are not enough for director Siskel – who grows increasingly frustrated throughout his conversations with Powell – as he pushes harder and harder (I would argue at some point, too hard) to get some sort of reaction out of Powell. He lists all the incident he could find – dating back to the 1970s and including things like the Oklahoma City bombing – in which the Cookbook was at the very least owned by the people who made bombs that killed people. He shows various Youtube clips of idiotic young people testing out the explosives Powell’s book told them how to make – including many, many close calls. Siskel very clearly wants Powell to take some personal responsibility for it all.

 

Honestly, I think Siskel pushed Powell too hard at points in the movie – not necessarily because I disagree with him - although, Powell is correct in saying that he never did anything violent to others, and the people who did, made their own choices, and certainly in the age of the internet, his book is no longer necessary for people who wants to know how to make bombs, or find the angry rantings of violent young, white guys – but more because I think the documentary is at its strongest when Powell trades to evade taking responsibility. I think about what a director like Errol Morris would do if he interviewed Powell, as Morris is a master interviewer at giving his subjects enough rope to hang themselves with, without every pushing as hard as Siskel does here (Morris does this brilliantly in both Mr. Death and The Fog of War – and tried in The Unknown Known). A simple, quiet scene like when Powell e-mails Senator Diane Feinstein, who called for the banning of the book, but giving up when he gets an automated response from her office, says more about Powell, and how he has dealt with the book than when Siskel pushes him to the point of anger.

 

In short, I think there is a better, more complicated documentary to be made about Powell and his book – which sadly, will never be completed, since Powell died a year after filming the movie took place. Siskel clearly feels righteous anger towards Powell, and wants the audience to as well – and up to a point, we do. A better, more confident documentary may well have examined the way in which Powell has compartmentalized the actions of his youth – has put it away, and doesn’t want to think about it anymore, because it’s easier not to. That’s something that anyone could relate to – and making us empathize with Powell is trickier than making us condemn him. As Powell’s wife says at one point, a lot of people have done stupid things when they were long – it’s just that most of ours didn’t get published.

Movie Review: Finding Vivian Maier

Finding Vivian Maier
Directed by: John Maloof & Charlie Siskel.
Written by: John Maloof and Charlie Siskel.

It would probably be too kind to describe Vivian Maier as “eccentric”. She worked as a nanny for most of her life, but didn’t seem to stick around in any of the jobs too long. In Finding Vivian Maier, filmmakers John Maloof and Charlie Siskel track down many of her former charges, most of whom – but not all have fond memories of Maier. There are allegations of abuse from one former charge, and everyone agrees she was at the very least strange – taking them on outings around Chicago, where you had to keep up or be left behind, freaking out over newspapers – which she kept stacked everywhere. She was fiercely private – and almost everyone who knew her admits that they didn’t really know her. She is described early in the movie as “pack rat” – but she was really a horder. But she was also a talented street photographer – who left behind thousands upon thousands of photos – many of which she never developed. She died in poverty in 2009, and co-director Maloof discovered a box of her negatives at a storage auction. He bought them, started to look through them, and thought they were good. From there, he set about trying to figure out who Vivian Maier was, and why she didn’t show her work to anyone.

One could criticize the documentary Finding Vivian Maier for a number of reasons. The first being that is Vivian Maier really wanted her work shown, than she probably would have taken steps to achieve that during her life – an there’s no real evidence that she did that. There is ample evidence that she was an immensely private person who didn’t want people going through her stuff, and didn’t like to reveal her true self to anyone – which is now precisely what Maloof is trying to do. You could also argue that the documentary itself is really a marketing tool for Maloof. He now owns most of Maier’s work – and he has complained that many in the art world still do not take her seriously (although some do – and they are seen in the movie). The more interest in Maier he drums up, the more he can sell her work for, and make a profit for himself.

Those are fair criticisms to a certain extent – but ones that in all honesty didn’t really bother me while watching the film. For one thing, Maier is now gone. She made the choice to remain private throughout her life – and that was her choice to make. But exposing her work now cannot hurt Maier – even if she didn’t want the attention while she was alive. As for Maloof trying to make money for himself – all filmmakers do to a certain extent. And I think the documentary that he co-directed is a fascinating exploration of a complex person.

The film is a mystery more than anything else. Maloof and Siskel track down as many of Maier’s former employers and the children she helped raise as he can and interviews them. What emerges is a portrait of a woman who was alone by choice – an obsessive collector and documenter of her time. She took what she thought was an undemanding job so she could pay the bills, but also allowed her the freedom to do what she really loved – which were her photos. Those photos are mainly beautiful black and white portraits of people she met on the street – often the poor, who she shoots with dignity and respect. The photos are haunting in many ways, because they capture the full spectrum of life in and around Chicago (where most of the photos were taken) during her lifetime.

The interview subjects cannot agree on much when it comes to Maier – not even what she preferred to be called. Some look back with fondness at her eccentricity, some with pity when they find out how her life ended – in poverty and alone. It’s clear that Maier was afflicted with some sort of mental illness – but since she never sought treatment for it, we’ll probably never know what it was.

One of the questions that ran through the documentary – stated by Maloof and many others during its runtime is “Why?”. Why did she take all these pictures and yet never show them to anyone? She obviously had passion and talent, yet she didn’t try to get any recognition. To me the documentary pretty much answers that question, even if Maloof doesn’t quite think so. Part of it, I think, is that to some people getting fame, money and recognition for their work just isn’t very important – it’s doing the work that matters most to them – and Maier was able to do that. Her mental illness probably played a role in it as well. She obviously had an obsessive personality – her hording shows that – and she may well have not been able to stop herself from taking photos even if she wanted to. It was something she “had” to do – and so she did it.

Finding Vivian Maier is a fascinating, though necessarily incomplete, portrait of a woman who had the soul of artist even if she didn’t pursue her art professionally. There will always be mysteries about who Vivian Maier was, why she did what she did, and what it all meant to her. That’s because that’s the way she wanted it. What she left behind are her pictures – that are somehow enhanced by not knowing everything about her. They raise even more questions about her.