Review by Pamela Zoslov
I ain't never been nowhere near
Angola, Louisiana.
Down in St. Charles Parish, where the sun won't go alone.
But injustice is not confined to Angola, Louisiana.
It can walk in your living room, as long as it surrounds your home.
Down in St. Charles Parish, where the sun won't go alone.
But injustice is not confined to Angola, Louisiana.
It can walk in your living room, as long as it surrounds your home.
— Gil Scott-Heron, “Angola, Louisiana”
Angad Bihalla's
documentary HERMAN'S HOUSE asks us to imagine what it's like
to live in a cage, a 6-by-9-foot cell where you can barely turn
around. Not for an hour, a day or a week, but for 40 years. What is
it like to be Herman Wallace, the man living in solitary confinement
since 1974 at Angola, the bleak plantation-turned-prison deep in the
remote hills of Louisiana? Wallace, a member of the Black Panthers,
was serving a sentence for bank robbery before being convicted, on
questionable evidence, of the murder of a prison guard. “I take
four steps forward before I touch the door,” says Herman,
describing his life in the straightforward narration that punctuates
the film. He was 25 when he went to prison. Now he is 71.
HERMAN'S HOUSE is
part of a double bill of documentaries showing Wednesday at the
Cleveland Museum of Art. Although both are about art, they couldn't
be more different. HERMAN'S HOUSE is
about social justice, hope and despair. BERT STERN, a portrait of the elite
advertising photographer known for revolutionizing advertising art in
the '60s and taking the last known photos of Marilyn Monroe, is, at least in part, a portrait
of a bored, narcissistic womanizer.
A
socially conscious Brooklyn artist named Jackie Sumell heard about
Herman Wallace at a lecture on the cruelty of solitary confinement
and began writing him letters, stuffed with snapshots of her daily
life. Wallace was confused by the young woman's letters, but realized
her intentions were good. “It was crazy,” he says, “but it was
crazily done for me.” Jackie had the idea to create a virtual
“dream house” for Herman. “The only way I could get him out of
prison was to get him to dream,” she explains. “What kind of
house do you dream of after 30 years in prison?”
A
lengthy exchange took place in which Herman described, in elaborate
detail, what his dream house would look like. It would have gardens
that would greet visitors with gardenias, carnations and tulips.
“This is of the utmost importance,” Herman wrote. There would be
African art, a swimming pool with a large black panther painted on
the bottom, and a room with a “Wall of Revolutionary Fame,”
featuring heroes who fought for equality and black liberation. A pair
of architects, analyzing the blueprints Jackie has drawn, remark that
the layout of Herman's house has an oppressive quality that echoes
solitary confinement. “I've spent the majority of my life in a
cage,” says Herman. “You're looking at my house, you're looking
at me.”
The
film juxtaposes the lives of the unlikely collaborators. We meet
Herman's beleaguered but loyal sister Vickie, who visits Herman
faithfully while struggling with overwhelming loss, including the
murder of her son. Jackie works tirelessly to construct an art
installation that includes a detailed model of Herman's house, along
with a full-sized replica of Herman's cell so visitors can experience
what his life is like. The exhibit has been shown in several countries around
the world.
Eventually
Jackie and Herman decide that Herman's house needs to be built in
reality. Herman wants it to serve as a community center for at-risk
youth, and to be located in his native New Orleans, a challenge to
his plans for an underground pool. He is insistent. Without the pool,
he declares, “then it isn't Herman's house.” Jackie hunts for
real estate in a bleak New Orleans neighborhood and decides to put
down roots there, going into debt to buy a cozy little house that she warmly opens to her overburdened neighbor's young children. Through her
journey to build a house for Herman, she seems to have found home.
She continues to look for land to realize Herman's dream.
The
film uses voices, music and montage in subtle and stirring ways. A
sequence that features Herman's voice talking about his childhood
years, with film and photographs from the era projected on the
replica of his prison cell, is especially moving. This is an advocacy
piece that describes the cruelty and injustice of Herman's fate –
alongside 80,000 others now being held in solitary confinement in the
U.S. But it is also a profoundly human story about home, family and
connections. Jackie becomes friends with Herman and his sister.
“Nothin' but family,” Vickie says, embracing the Jewish girl from
New York as they walk around the modest New Orleans neighborhood
where the Wallaces grew up.
Wallace
was one of three members of the so-called “Angola Three”
sentenced to decades of isolation for the murder of the prison guard,
Brent Miller. The case was re-investigated, and one man, Robert
Hillary King, was released, while Albert Woodfox and Wallace are
still working on getting released. The widow of the prison guard
believes the men are innocent. 4 out of 4 stars.
BERT STERN: ORIGINAL MADMAN is a curious documentary. The 2011 film is a warts-and-all portrait
directed by Shannah Laumeister, Stern's much younger longtime
companion. Stern died in June at age 83. His obituary stated that
Laumeister and Stern were “secretly married since 2009.”
The
film's title alludes, of course, to the popular TV show Mad
Men , which glamorizes the kind
of advertising art, and life, pioneered by Stern, Edward Steichen and
Richard Avedon. Stern was at the forefront of the sexy,
groundbreaking style of advertising that replaced the corny, literal
ads prevalent before 1955, when Stern created his influential
close-up of a martini glass of Smirnoff juxtaposed against the
Pyramids. (In the days before PhotoShop, shooting this required
actually traveling to Egypt.)
The
film shows Stern, a youngish octogenarian, reclining through most of
the film and talking languidly about his life – his drawing talent,
how he worked his way up from the mailroom at Look
magazine to becoming an art
director and photographer, eventually one of the most sought-after
photographers in the world. He created memorable portraits of stars
like Twiggy, Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Truman Capote and Elizabeth
Taylor, as well as evocative ads for a host of products. His works
are now part of several museum collections.
As his
fame grew, his life spun out of control. For a time, he was hooked on
injected amphetamines. He lost everything and had to crawl his way
back. He enjoyed renewed fame when the nude photographs he took of
Marilyn Monroe six weeks before she died resurfaced and became the center of a protracted lawsuit.
He
seems, in retrospect, bored by it all. He no longer wants to take
pictures. “There's enough pictures in the world,” he says.
The
main focus of Stern's recollections is women. The reason he took
pictures, he says, is women. “Making love and making photographs
were closely connected in my mind,” he says. “Women are the
goddesses, men are the slaves.” The first of the women he idealized
was his mother, who was beautiful, while his father was suicidal.
Stern embarked on a long career of taking pictures and seducing
women, marrying some of them and having affairs with others. A couple
of his ex-wives, including the ballerina Allegra Kent, talk about him
on camera in less than flattering ways. Shannah, the filmmaker, whom
he first photographed when she was a teenager, remains devoted, as do a couple of garrulous, aging female twins who have
been his playmates for years.
I once
heard a radio essay about a celebrated ad man who reflected on his
long career and found it devoid of meaning. He devoted the rest of his
life to working for environmental causes. Stern's photographs are
technically flawless, but his brand of art — glamour portraits of
models and movie stars and images made for selling booze, cigarettes
and other products — seems kind of empty. Although Stern said in
1959, “I like to put my feelings into my photographs,” commercial
photography isn't the best vehicle for feelings. Still, his work may
be a better spokesman for Stern than he is in the film's sour, late-life
interviews. His artistic sensitivity is well displayed in Jazz
on a Summer's Day, his
gleaming documentary film about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, considered by some to be the finest jazz film ever made. 2 1/2 out of 4 stars.
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