Vivian Maier

What’s in your attic? What’s in your basement? Things you no longer care about? Or things you don’t want people to see? Well, let me ask you this: what would you do with those intimate artifacts? Chicago historian and photographer John Maloof explores the world of American street photographer and Nanny Vivian Maier in his documentary Finding Vivian Maier.

Vivian Maier was born in 1926 in New York city and died in a nursing home in Chicago in 2009 at the age of 83 after a slip and fall on the ice. She hid things in her bathroom—a space she turned into a dark room wherein she developed many of her photographs; she dared any of her charges or employers to step foot therein. In another home, she told her employers “I come with my life, and my life is in boxes,” and those boxes filled up their garage. Those are the boxes Maloof bought for $400.00 at an auction in 2007, and what he found were 30,000 negatives he began to scan onto his computer. During this process, Maloof realizes that he has come across pictures of artistic value that document street life from the 1950s-1970s. He went back bought the remaining boxes, which totaled some 100,000 negatives.

For all of the sensationalism about the new discovery of a natural talent, the exhibitions in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Maier’s spectacular photographs she took with her Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera—Maloof has that too—or opinions that she was eccentric, Finding Vivian Maier is a story about privacy and the extreme lengths a woman will go to keep it.

Maier photographed the world around her, but declined to let anyone see the product from her efforts, except for one family with whom she was employed. She refused to satisfy the curiosity of her employers by declining to answer any questions about her life nor did she offer any information about same. Those interviewed, then, could only offer to the public their observations of her.

The documentary, however, goes a step further. What seeps out is a tale about a woman who felt her business—her life–belonged only to her, and she kept that business in boxes and boxes of things in the attic or in the basement. Perhaps, in such a rapidly changing world, the rolls of film and negatives in her boxes let her know she existed, and she did not seek the world out to affirm that for her.

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The Large Hadron Collider

Mark Levinson’s new documentary Particle Fever is about relationships … relationships between scientists who practice theory and those who put theory into practice. It is about particle physics, or those parts that are observed, examined, and scrutinized in an effort to come to some understanding of a whole. Pieces of things. Particles of things.

In the plunge ahead, Particle Fever highlights the search for the Higgs Boson, or “the God particle”. Scientist Peter Higgs talked about its existence, but there was no proof that this particle had or does exist. How do we prove it? We build a machine to find it!

Levinson’s documentary highlights the Large Hadron Collider, man’s latest scientific feat in building machines. It is gargantuan, and seeing it onscreen, I very well can imagine Henry Adams’s wonder at the 40 ft Dynamos he observed at the World Columbian Exposition in 1893. The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Lucerne Switzerland. It will be used to prove Peter Higgs’s theory of the existence of “the God particle”.

The careers are riding on this discovery, and if one jot or tittle of a particle is left out, it could mean failure! It could mean disaster! It could mean humiliation! Oh, the catastrophe! But, Levinson so ably orchestrates a cadre of belief—no—faith among colleagues that is so compelling, you will want to put on your hard hat and overalls and see that project through!

Particle Fever plays through May 8 at The Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

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Donald Rumsfeld

Reports that say there’s — that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Clever huh? That is former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fielding questions about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction at a US Department of Defense News Briefing in February 2002. There are some things you just cannot curry any interest in, and that statement is one of those things. I want to go so far as to say Rumsfeld makes no sense but I won’t. Well, you have to take it apart, examine its pieces, and by the time you unravel the thing, you’re just as befuddled as when you attempted to understand it in the first place. Well, my dear listeners, there is another chance at Rumsfeld’s linguistic jumble thanks to Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris in his interview (or is it a conversation?) with Donald Rumsfeld in his newest documentary The Unknown Known. This documentary is to stand as a companion to The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara, for which Morris won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2003. McNamara is Rumsfeld’s predecessor.

You know, Rumsfeld has a sense of humor. He’s a likable guy. His former staff may disagree, however. He inundated them when in office with millions of snowflakes or memorandums as he calls them. He kind of reminds you of a distant uncle who promises quarters if you can answer his questions; except, he never pays up.

His personality puts you at ease; he’s even charming in some instances. No matter the questions thrown to him off camera by Morris, Rumsfeld smiles and tosses answers that he believes will suffice; and, he expects you to take him at his word. After all, the subjects are delicate; they cut to the psychological quick of the nation: Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, waterboarding used to torture prisoners, Guantanomo Bay, Iraq, Osama Bin Laden, are just a few. Rumsfeld talks about them as matter of fact consequences of war. Before you know it, the impulse to question or critique Rumsfeld’s views on war and politics and his ruthless approach to same, is crushed and quickly.

The Infamous Rumsfeld Snowflake

But the documentary is not that seamless. Some things slip, and Morris does nothing to catch them in the fall. Instead, he lets Rumsfeld talk … and … talk … and … talk, and if you listen … just listen … what spills onto the screen like marbles onto a hardwood floor is a man skilled in evasion and manipulation with no depth or groove; he’s like alcohol rubbed on skin but the nurse never returns to give you the needle to cure the problem. It’s just there; it evaporates.

At the end of the day, however, Morris tells a satisfying story AND gives a history lesson about Donald Rumsfeld and his rise to power; but they’re “just the facts ma’am” because Rumsfeld never lets you into his head. Clever, huh? Donald Rumsfeld is the unknown known.

The Unknown Known plays through April 24 at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

Also playing at The Ross through April 24 is The Grand Budapest Hotel.

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Elise (Veerle Baetens) and Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) share a tender moment.

Melodrama with Blue Grass music and Tattoos to boot! In Belgium! The Broken Circle Breakdown, directed by Felix Van Groeningen, will call for every tear you can shed. Groeningen mixes a pish-posh of narrative elements to tell the story of the beautiful free-spirited tattoo artist Elise (Veerle Baetens) and Didier, a banjo player (Johan Heldenbergh). Elise joins Didier’s band, and what follows is a life of joy and fun blanketed by the American twang of Bluegrass music. It is the music that binds these two likeable characters together. They are a sensual couple who are in love—really in love–with not only each other but with life, and Elise and Didier partake of it with abandon.

Heldenbergh carefully portrays Didier as a talented troubadour who, once in love, tries to do everything necessary to make Elise happy. Baetens’s Elise is settled and confident in her new found love because in this bluegrass world with Didier, she has a safe place to land. In that place, she engages all of her sensuality and rolls it up on the music.

The family & Maybelle (Nell Cattrysse)

But not one coordinated fret on the banjo can prevent life from intervening on their happiness and, like everyone who lives to tell it, Elise and Didier must search for ways to shelter their marriage from disaster, and are hard-pressed to do so. It is a passionate journey that moves the emotions to the edge. Van Groeningen showcases how this couple manages the severe differences between them. Elise is a believer; Didier is an atheist. When tragedy strikes their 6-year-old daughter Maybelle (played by Nell Cattrysse), Didier grows angry with the world and his inability to control this illness that has been thrown at him with no notice. Elise takes a different approach: she calls on her faith to lift her out of her quagmire of emotions. In all, Elise and Didier experience a marital identity crisis, and we hope and pray they see their way through it. Why? Because we like Elise and Didier; we really do.

The Broken Circle Breakdown, however, is over-the-top melodrama, and the flashbacks border on annoyance. The strong acting and the story itself, nevertheless, will have you reaching for the Kleenex.

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