Tony Buba at The Pacific Film Archive

Braddock Revisited

(2014) This week, the Pacific Film Archive hosts filmmaker Tony Buba. I mention Buba and his work in my April, 2012 post in Where The Weather Suites My Clothes.  Buba was one of my first film teachers back in the 1980's when I was a teenager eager to get my hands on the "big guns," a clunky Frezzolini news camera, and an ARRI BL that claimed pedigree somewhere at the front lines of "National Geographic" production: Jakarta, maybe the Alps... A documentarian himself, Buba proved to be a hands-off instructor, endorsing a DIY, guerrilla-style of filmmaking that insisted that anything he could teach us was better learned in the field. Of course, we're talking about shooting film here ($$$), not recording on an iPhone.
  His own work hit a chord; his short, gritty black and white profiles were both humane and ripe with poetics, despite directness and transparency. Characters inhabiting these hometown streets are Buba's friends, family, and acquaintances, and yet they are as rich and sparkling with color as any method actor walking Scorsese's Mean Streets. Watching the Braddock Chronicles, mostly filmed in the mid to late seventies, is akin to listening to a lost Tom Waits album from his Rain Dogs era. At the heart of such lyrical narrative, in Buba or Waits, is the place itself..."In the neighborhood, in the neighborhood...," Waits sings. In both, context becomes character. Or, each entity refuse to distinguish itself from the other.

   In a dozen or so short films we're introduced to Braddock's inhabitants: The consummate optimist, the hopeful and tragic entrepreneur, Jay Roy, proprietor of Jay Roy's New and Used Furniture, coaching his sales staff on self-respect and the dangers of not making mistakes (a moving and tender scene, balked by his own grand dreams); Peabody, a young man who's claim to fame is a fall from a six story window as a boy, a tragedy that he can't shake, that forever characterizes and determines his fate; Buba's own grandmother, Mrs. G.; and Sweet Sal, the caustic, streetwise braggadocio who's screen-time of less than half an hour forever dooms any of Hollywood's iterations of like hustlers, to the thinnest cliche. Rich, funny, and moving portraits all.
  And though self-concious and performative, his subjects are in earnest. They are grounded, yet striving for something that will enable transcendence, economic or spiritual. These are relatable themes. In Buba's cinematic Braddock, the familiar becomes exotic. The cinematography is subtle, stylistic manipulations elegant in their subtly (choices made are motivated by content).  True to realism, the Ordinary is made Extraordinary.

   However, to reduce the work to a sort of interior travel-log of hip exotica, would be to ignore exactly what the filmmaker intends, which is (first and foremost) to hold on to people in his life, people that will eventually fade away as we all do, but also to witness to how these people fit into this larger socioeconomic system and how they respond to guaranteed failure. After the houselights came up, after a bout of good natured self-deprecation (a disposition I share: idiomatic to the region) Buba's rigorous, insightful critique followed: a scalding indictment of capitalism, measured and thorough, evidenced in stories from back then and now, regionally, nationally and internationally.

For a long time I've tried to track down a quote by, I believe, Grace Paley who said a story cannot ignore the economics under which its characters exist. My awkward paraphrase highlights the  Marxist lens through which Paley writes: Marxist in the sense that the reality all human beings share is a condition of material survival, and even in the most lyrical, obtuse and intimate entries to the Republic of Letters, its a constant an artists cannot ignore. She herself poo-pooed her writing, her art: it was insignificant in the grand scheme: she was an activist first.

In almost all fiction writing and literature classes I've taken, character trumps plot and setting. This is usually a trail head undertaken to dissuade students from aping cliches, or fetishizing novelty, but beyond the pedagogical is a deeply moral, classical humanist polemic. I too am comfortable with this ideology, but cannot ignore the relationship of context to character in quite the same way. The early practitioners of Naturalism, Zola and Huysman, configured narratives in which determinism, economic and otherwise, forecloses on character. Characters are at the mercy of systems (where God had previously held office): class, economics, nature, and, cannot possibly enjoy free will. Any exhibition of agency is an illusion. This is the lens through which Stanley Kubrick saw the world, the attitude of a distant, cold scientist looking at his subjects under a microscope. Buba started in the social sciences, and film was the tool, like many documentarians, he used to explore the limits and boundaries of free will, but he never lost sight of the human beings undergoing such a challenge. These are people he loves.

   Buba's subjects are inseparable from their setting and their concerns are usually about making a buck. To write about characters in a setting, and not have a notion of how they put food on the table, lacks verisimilitude and endangers my ability to hold the author of such work up to any standard of Ethos. An odd example to use here would be Carrie Bradshaw in Sex in The City, the newspaper columnist who collects Italian pumps, lives in a Manhattan apartment as big as a presidential suite, yet probably makes $40K. Bradshaw professes no limits or sacrifice, and enjoys voraciously expensive luxuries at every turn. Anyone I knew who watched the series, no matter how latent their politics, seemed to notice this disparity, a poetic license taken but not easily swallowed. And while their might have been many things to take offense at in such a sit-com, this odd lack of realism seemed to stand out and irritate like a hangnail. 

It's a good time to think over what's changed in the last couple of years, in Braddock and in my shallow assessment of what's going on there. The thesis of my essay from 2012 pivots on what it means to re-imagine landscape: aesthetics and phenomenology. I accomplished this using Braddock as a set piece in parallel with how advertisers and image makers create mythology, and how a viewer can re-purpose that mythology to their own, perhaps more ennobled, ends.

   But a difficulty arises here when we consider Braddock and the mythology Levi's imagined of the setting. It's a mythology distinguishing wilderness from civilization, and the heroic pioneer's adventure between. The same difficulty that poisons all colonial aspirations: We think of landscape and wilderness in contrast with civilization, visually represented as an absence of people, as if we, they, us, are (as spoilers--guilty) only good in respect to not being visible. The question of aesthetics, our understanding of landscape as a visual phenomena, adapts well to these conditions. Note that even our national parks, that paragon of what we think of as the best of American Progressive tendencies, were founded on the displacement (often violent) of native people.

Visibility is a quality worthy of deep meditation. The difference between what we mean by wasteland and wilderness, and their antecedents all presume what can be seen and not, text and subtext. What lies beneath a wasteland and who determines what waste is in the first place?

In this case, Levis with the mayor's approval, portrayed Braddock as an open space, a wilderness of sorts, in which to "homestead." The ironies here are compounded when we think of this seemingly virtuous, salt-of-the-earth idea of building a home. But Braddock wasn't an empty space, it was still full of people, just not as many as had been their fifty years ago. And, of course (as the familiar story follows), these were people of color. Braddock is mostly African American, with sprinkling of Whites here and there. And the overall population grew by about 20 people. 
   Perhaps this isn't negligible in a town of such a small population, but the "settlers" were mostly white, and now many have them have also abandoned Braddock. The people of Braddock still exits and struggle to raise families in the valley. They are visible, as photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier reminds us, and they are not ghosts, nor caricatures, dolls or manikins garnishing a landscape.

   I'm always excited to see the region I grew up in grow and bring in culture. Pittsburgh, a few miles down the road, I envision as a place where art, work, landscape, and life, can cohabitate. I lived to make this happen when I spent a portion of my life there, and as a emigre I still want it to happen. The recent media hype about restaurateur Kevin Sousa's Kickstarter campaign to open a high-end establishment, Superior Motors, in Braddock sparkled with the same magic that all of Fetterman's projects induce. Apparently, Sousa's fundraising surpassed any previous food related campaign in the history of Kickstarter. As Buba pointed out during a Q and A, most of the people who gave Sousa money were white, and white people tend to give money to other white people. The groundbreaking will be in a neighborhood where the majority of the local residents (more like, all the local residents) can't even afford the tomato salad. This seems almost a dull story, how predictable this route of gentrification becomes.

   Where will the Sousa's patrons park their hybrids, and will they be able to walk down the street with the blinders, avoiding the annoyed sneers of locals? Can one simply ignore the economic realities around them in favor of pleasure? Blindly we assume authorship, dictating what comes into our everything but our most peripheral of senses, like flimsy sit-com writing. Is there shame in eating a meal, (perhaps with ingredients locally procured, something they can rest their morals on), that the family living across the street will never be able to afford? A bit of disgust floats up at this point.

The worst thing in the world, perhaps, would be for the ambitions, the visionary quests, of people like Fetterman, Sousa, and the folks at Levis, to come to light and for a shitload of people to "homestead" Braddock by buying up and restoring turn of the century homes (if that's even possible in a town where the most notable landmark is a carcinogen huffing steel mill). Property values go up. Where will the people of Braddock go?

   And yet the tax money is leaving. USS pays a sickeningly small portion to the city. The property on which the Edgar Thompson (ET) Works are built is valued at something like 3 million. This is a mill produces something like 2.9 million net tons of steel a year, approximately twenty percent of the nation's current steel production. ET employs, however, only a few hundred people. Schools are underfunded and closing. The hospital closed. The streets are falling apart. This is a corporation folks, responsible to no one.

   Aching over Braddock (or Pittburgh, a city that kept its head above water and is now being courted by Google) isn't just provincialism: it takes little foresight to see the parallels all over the country, from Midtown Manhattan to San Francisco. The contempt for the poor and the middle class, the unceasing efforts of the rich and the powerful to dominate and push away. One doesn't have to even be a inhuman avatar of the plutocracy, or even a predatory, pinky-ringed Wall Street villain to play into these mechanisms. It might be that  John Fetterman and sensualists like Sousa, or any of the wide-eyed, have good intentions, but without bracing against capitalism measures of success, then failure is eminent. It's in the broth.

Rather than further the topic through my own lens, I offer an update by Sean Posey (who's also a photographer) in Rust Wire, "The Battle for Braddock, PA"