Tuesday, March 03
More of What's in Store
Festival time is approaching so fast I can not truly comprehend it. But now, it is just a few days until our screens light up with the films we have selected. I talked about a few of these films in a previous entry, and now I want to tell you about a few more films coming your way.
Ropewalk: A Cordage Engineer’s Journey Through History — I must confess. When Ropewalk appeared on the pile of films to be reviewed, I was among that group of viewers who looked askance at the cover. ”Ropewalk? Someone actually made a movie about rope?” Snicker, smirk
Yes, my friends, someone actually did. It’s a film about rope, but here’s the thing: the film is both exactly what you think it is, and yet it is also nothing like what you are imagining.
There is a simple explanation for this paradox. I think most people have never given much thought at all to the subject of rope, and so, lacking knowledge, it is impossible to predict what might be contained in the film; my guess is you’re bound to be at least a little surprised by something in the film. Perhaps that doesn’t apply to some readers who may have long been students of the twiney arts, so I will be the first to fess up: what I learned from the film is that I knew practically nothing about rope, but now I do.
Ropewalk shows how rope is made and its close relationship to human progress throughout history. Name a significant step in human development, try building a giant stone temple or sailing a ship without it. At some point in the process, you’re going to want to have some rope; that’s just the way it is.
But additionally, the film is a history of the Hooven & Allison rope making factory in Xenia, Ohio, as well as a personal document in which the film’s narrator, Bill Hagenbuch, an engineer who made rope creation his life’s work, offers humble insights into his career. He provides a valuable eyewitness account as the industry and technology gradually evolved, and synthetic ropes began to supplant traditional natural fibers. Though the changes eventually left Hooven & Allison behind, Hagenbuch reveals that the story of rope is in no way finished. As science continues to improve rope with newer stronger fibers, new uses open up, including proposals to tether platforms in space to earth.
Of all the films accepted for our festival, I think Ropewalk might be the film that would have been of the greatest interest to our festival namesake. Leonardo da Vinci was a genius, true, but perhaps his greatest gift was that of boundless inquiry. He was interested in just about everything, and rope was no exception. In fact, at one time he made sketches for a rope making machine, though, like many of his ideas, the machine never made it off the drawing board.
Luck of the Draw
In 1972, I was a freshman in high school, and to be honest, the Vietnam war wasn’t much on my mind. For as long as I could remember, the war had been a major part of the news, even before we deployed combat troops in 1965. But by 1972, I don’t think I, or anyone I knew, could really say what all that fighting was about. It had begun with some vague stuff about dominoes and communism, but by the time I was a freshman, I think the predominant reason cited was that American’s can’t be quitters. “These Colors Don’t Run!” was a prominent bumpersticker/T-shirt/foreign policy philosophy. If we get out now, the thinking went, then what had everyone else died for?
That was pretty much my attitude, too, at the time, having grown up surrounded by a lot of those talking points. That might come as a shock to people who know me in my present incarnation as a mad-dog progressive, but yes, I was once one of those incipient die-hard conservative types.
I’m sorry for putting so much of myself into this prelude, but I felt it was important. When I started watching Mitchel Resnick’s Luck of the Draw, my first reaction was a shamefaced realization that even though my beliefs are so different today, I still had never thought much about what it must have been like for young college-age men back then. As President Nixon and Henry Kissinger inched slowly, ever so slowly, toward their “peace with honor,” the war machine still had to be fed, and America’s young men were expected to face a senseless draft that could only serve to send them off to possibly die in service of a cause that had already been lost.
The draft has been an issue in a number of feature films over the years, but I can’t think of a film that has tackled the subject as directly as Luck of the Draw. That realization amazed me because the subject matter is so inherently dramatic.
On lottery night, 1972, a group of college men gather in a dorm room to watch the televised drawing of birthdates from a jar. With the death toll in Vietnam already topping 58,000 soldiers, a high draft pick could be tantamount to a death warrant. It seems like the scenario of a horror movie. March 6? You get to live and pursue your plans for the future. March 7? Ooooo, sorry. Here’s your M-16, now off you go!
The men in the room, understandably, take issue with that, but with varying degrees of emotion. Some fatalistically await the drawing of the numbers, while for others the wait is pure psychological torture. Though the quality of the actors varies somewhat, Resnick does pull a nice ensemble performance from the group. They really seemed of that place and time to me, their predicament is real and palpable. In spite of a low budget, the world of 1972 is recreated nicely, with period details that are thoroughly convincing. For the first couple of minutes, I thought I was watching a documentary. Also done well was a secondary layer to the film in which Resnick subtly uses his tale about 1972 and Vietnam to point out undeniable parallels to the war in Iraq. Separated by decades, the same rhetoric is still driving the bus, the same justifications for why more people need to die before we can call it a day.
Barring unforeseen circumstances, Mitchel Resnick, the film’s director, should be in attendance at the festival. Come out and see the film. I think it should make for an interesting post-screening discussion.
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