Creativity at the 47th Denver Film Festival

Reliably, Denver Film Fest screens bios and documentaries about artists. 2024 is no exception. My three favorites are: Swamp Dogg Gets his Pool Painted and Secret Mall Apartment and Two Artists Trying not to Kill Each Other – all different, all homages to the spirit of curiosity, insight, and collaboration. If you enjoy how creativity manifests in actions and relationships, these films will light you up! 

In brief, Swamp Dogg Gets his Pool Painted chronicles the life and musicality of Jerry Williams, Jr., an R&B singer and keyboardist who started performing in his teens and by the time he reached his early 20s, realized he needed a wilder name he could grow into for stage presence and edgy antics, and so became Swamp Dogg. Over the decades he toured, produced recordings for a wide range of artists, and wrote songs performed by blues, R&B, Southern rock and country singers. Meanwhile he was making his own records, and getting canned by one label after another. In his 70s he’s a widower, at home in The Valley – northeast LA – sharing his bachelor pad with Guitar Shorty and the young surprising multi-instrumentalist Moogstar, a man raised in the church who could play any instrument well and found healing from a harsh upbringing as a flamboyant and remarkable individual. And yes, the pool gets painted. 

Secret Mall Apartment is just what the title says: an empty space within the structure of the upscale Providence Mall in Providence, RI, discovered and inhabited by a group of artists displaced by development from the abandoned mill buildings across the river. RISD instructor Michael Townsend, who sparks ideas constantly, leads the group of artists who claim and transform this space. Along the way we learn about Townsend’s other projects, and who could not be moved by the transformational quality of his work? It’s a must-see! 

Two Artists Trying not to Kill Each Other is about the midlife marriage of Joel Meyerowitz, prolific and successful photographer, and Maggie Barrett, writer and artist who, while overshadowed by his fame, is his equal in their partnering of souls. We see some of their art, but what takes center stage is an honest mature relationship, in which both are able to say what they mean, criticize, and renew their deep affection. It’s a treatise in how to grow and maintain a loving adult relationship. 

And, it’s worth mentioning that in the toolbox of all these artists is a large portion of kindness. This is what we need these days, so you should see these films! Thank you for the opportunity to see them, DFF!

Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald

This 1979 Booker Prize-winning novel embeds us in a community living on barges on the Thames in London in the early 1970s. These watercraft lie at anchor, traveling only vertically, subject to tides and storms. Gangplanks connect them to each other and to shore. They are in varying states of disrepair, as are their residents, who live there for lack of money, love of being on the water, or both. 

Nenna, 32-year-old mother of twelve-year-old Martha and six-year-old Tilda, is as close to penniless as a person can get. Her girls scheme to make money: when the tide is low and the light is right, they visit century-old wrecks in the Thames mud, where one lucky day Tilda unearths not one but two beautiful tiles from a long-wrecked cargo. They haggle with an antique dealer who insists the tiles have no value. Martha quickly proves she knows their provenance, and they emerge from the shop with pound notes to buy records in Chelsea. 

Other residents include Maurice, a young man who sings, dances, and turns tricks in swinging London and allows a fence to stash stolen goods. Richard has the best-appointed barge – and the money to keep it shipshape – though his wife grows ever less tolerant of life afloat. Willis, a painter, has the leakiest barge; the whole community supports his efforts to sell it to finance his retirement, conniving to keep his real estate agent in the dark. 

Fitzgerald has a wonderful way with words – here are a couple of examples: 

“Each foot in turn felt the warmth of his hands, and relaxed like an animal who trusts the vet.” 

“As to the exact locality of the pain, it was difficult to convey that it had grown, and that instead of having a pain he was now contained inside it.” 

This delightful novel is a time-capsule of an era: London in the 1960s was The place to be. But while the cost of living was lower than today, it was still precarious for those at the fringe. Then as now, the best support system is one’s community. What a lovely book!

Manifesting Time - an art installation by NC Weil

For at least forty years (I’ve lost track), I’ve been collecting Grandpa’s Pine Tar Soap boxes. Originally, my notion was to build a house and use them to wallpaper the bathroom. Well, it’s become unlikely that I will build such a house (darn!) – but I have continued to collect these soap boxes, flattening, bagging, and stashing them deep in cupboards. 

Recently I took a pair of wool gloves off a shelf in my closet, and was alarmed to see that they had been mostly consumed by moths. Other wool garments in there have so far escaped being ravaged, but that discovery spurred a decision – time to put those soap boxes to use, lining the closet with them. The soap is strong-smelling (although the reason I’ve been using it exclusively all these decades is that it lathers up well, cleans effectively, then washes off completely, leaving no residue of scent or soap. I challenge you to find a soap comparable to that!) – so I figured the boxes would deter moths. 

Soap Boxes? 

Since my collection began, the Grandpa Soap Company (“since 1878”) has changed the box design twice, so I have bright green (1971), dark green/ black with a smiling Grandpa (2002), and the current mostly-black version, a Grandpa playing sidekick to his product: 

The last 2 versions have come in 2 sizes, 3.25 oz (per the older style), and 4.25 oz. The factory moved from Cincinnati, OH, across the Ohio River to Erlanger, KY, between versions 1 and 2. The oldest of my boxes recommends “Grandpa’s Wonder Pine Tar Toilet Soap for toilet, bath, and shampoo.” The next iteration touts being Cruelty Free. And now the boxes say it’s plant-based, cruelty free, and vegan, and “Recognized by the National Psoriasis Foundation” as well as being “The Original Wonder Soap.” 

I found it first in a family-owned drugstore; once they discontinued it I had to special-order a dozen at a time. Chain drugstores wouldn’t order it for me, so I requested it from natural foods stores, and at some magic moment in the last decade, they began to stock it. Pine tar soap achieved its pinnacle of visibility in 2021, in a Super Bowl ad(!), when Dr. Squatch put their product in front of a mass audience – such a thrill for a longtime fan! 

I’ve been accused of obsession – my son wrote “A Statistical Analysis of an Obsession” about the hundreds of Scrabble games mi esposo and I have played, whose scorepads I’ve kept. But art often revolves around obsession – Picasso drawing, painting and sculpting bulls; Cezanne repeatedly painting Mont Saint Victoire; Samuel Beckett writing about pointlessness – that compulsion to revisit an image, an idea, a place, is a way of situating ourselves in time. Here’s this subject/object: what’s new? what’s the same? And how have I changed over that same span? So I’m not apologizing for a collection of hundreds of soap boxes, acquired over four decades and saved from mold, rodents, and people who purge. 

The Project 

I was so happy the day I realized that though I wasn’t going to wallpaper a bathroom with them, I’d found another place they could live. I emptied that closet, cleaned out 14 years’ accumulation of dust, and yes, even filled several boxes with things to get rid of. I took off the closet doors, set up a lamp and a stepladder, and measured the space. 

I taped together vertical strips of boxes to fill the different spaces, then glued them onto the walls using regular white glue, nothing volatile or toxic. As I got further into the project I started to play with the variables: 3 Grandpas, 2 sizes, and how many of each I had. 

And, serendipity! For reasons unknown, I had a single 4.25 oz box featuring a Golden Grandpa! This smiling Grandpa style is also described in French or Spanish, tho not both. The apparent gold behind Grandpa’s face in many ovals is an optical trick of my cell phone camera – there’s only one Golden Grandpa; the background of the others is silvery, no matter what it looks like in this photo. 

But, Why? 

In a world overflowing with misery, loneliness, and destruction, I offer walls of Grandpas, lovingly collected and delightedly displayed, albeit in a closet. You bet it’s silly. And over time the boxes have lost their pine tar scent, so it’s unlikely they’ll keep moths at bay. But I don’t care. I have marveled at the printing variations – really bright green vs moderate; Golden Grandpa; and the price tags from places I bought them off the shelf: Lee’s Drugs, Cash Grocer, and the many that didn’t put their name on their price sticker. 

When enough years have rolled by, and you’re still doing something, you have created a through-line from an earlier version of yourself, to your current being. And this collection, this obsession, is an element of your evolution – think of it as your Control Group in the great experiment that is your life.

The Taste of Things, a film by Anh Hung Tran

What a beautiful film! Every frame is sumptuous, steeped in a different time. The background is not a musical score but ambient sounds: a woodpecker, a peacock screaming, birdsong, and naturally the sounds of cooking – searing, boiling, chopping, stirring, assembling. We see patience, timing, meticulous attention to every detail, creation of complex sauces and rich dishes. All this occurs in the kitchen of a country manor owned by Dodin (Benoit Magimel). He is a “Napoleon of cuisine” according to his friends, four men who join him to dine. But the love of his life, his cook, is Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), the genius behind the food, in yet another role in which she fairly glows with inspiration and joy. 

They have a bountiful kitchen garden, neighbors, open land where hunters provide the birds of different seasons – the dappled grace of the French countryside. It is an idyll unmarred by invented conflict. Because of the film’s calm demeanor, we see depth of love expressed through cooking, a shared breakfast, a stroll in a sunny meadow. The drama of creating remarkable food is all the thrill we need – we only wish we could take our places at the table when the friends gather to dine. 

The only thing that made no sense to me was – no bread? My introduction to French food was my husband working the oven at a French bakery, hauling over a thousand baguettes out every night. To me, these crackling-from-the-700-degree-oven loaves are the epitome of French food. But there was not a baguette in sight, nor a batard. The closest we get is a boule filled with vegetables in a dense sauce – but the boule is more packaging than a food in its own right. How is this possible? 

I wept at the end. Perhaps this was due to the beauty and richness of long-developing love – or maybe it was the evocation of my own long-term love, of a man with whom I share the pleasure of good food, especially French, and the creativity manifested in the making of marvelous soups, roasts, fish in cream sauce, the meticulous efforts going into the perfection of each flavor, coaxing its finest form from every ingredient.

Quantum Cowboys, a film by Geoff Marslett

This 2022 film, part rotoscope, part drawings, part live-action, all imagination, is an exploration of time; space; whether the universe has consistency or coincidence or is so overcrowded with multiverses that everything can happen all the time; and how the further we get from a memory/ history, the more we agree on what happened. The grand mystery with the most possible wrong answers is “what did you do yesterday?” 

If you’d rather watch things explode at high volume, then go see the new Mad Max or Godzilla. But if making you think, and wonder, and laugh, is more interesting, Quantum Cowboys is a good bet. 

In brief, Frank and Bruno are shoveling horse manure in a town about to be dedicated as Yuma, Arizona in 18-whatever. Frank becomes entangled in a shooting he doesn’t believe happened, and is so intent that after 3 years in prison he enlists Bruno to help him find the man who died, to prove he didn’t. It’s Schrodinger’s Cat all over again, and again, and again. Sometimes he’s dead, and other times he’s – not? Or only when you look?

Along the way we are treated to anachronism, odd moments that repeat under different circumstances, and slapstick. With the Western genre to play around in, where modern culture (worldwide) imagines the American West to be gunslingers, saguaros and Monument Valley with a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, Marslett gives us a version that brings events around until finally some different resolution emerges.

The Keep, by Jennifer Egan

This 2006 novel has multiple narratives – Parts 1 and 2, most of the book, work. But Part 3, the last 30 pages, deus ex machina*, broke it for me. I didn’t believe it, and the fact that Egan included it soured me on the whole tale. That’s too bad, because Parts 1 and 2 had me convinced. 

Without giving away too much, we have Danny who did something terrible to his cousin when they were kids. But now Howard is successful, made so much money that he’s bought a European castle with the intention of turning it into an introspection lens for people trapped in the grip of a reality that’s deadened them. Howard invites Danny to join the renovation team that will turn this crusty ancient place into the hotel of his dreams. Danny comes because he’s between gigs and failing in his life, and he’s curious how Howard survived his trauma. 

The Keep of the title is a tower still inhabited by an ancient Baroness who can’t stop Howard from buying the rest of the place, but will not relinquish her grip on its history, its lineage of which she is part and these interlopers are not. A parallel narrative accompanies Danny’s – a prisoner’s. Then, after we've come so far, a third narrator runs it off the rails. 

Meanwhile, Egan offers some truly creative ideas: an inmate’s prized possession is a shoebox full of odds and ends but mostly dust. Knobs pushed into the side like radio dials, tune in ghosts. I loved the dust radio – the inmate’s logic is unassailable: “But think about it, brother: new technology always looks like magic. When Tom Edison turned on that tin phonograph of his back in 1877, you think people believed that was for real? Hell no. Ventriloquism, they said. Voodoo. They thought no machine could do such a thing.” 

She also invents some apt words: “Danny was himself again, which meant not just knowing things but knowing more things than other people, seeing all the links when everybody else could see only a few. Information… [T]here was a power in just having it, in knowing where everyone stood. And Danny had a word that could say all that. One word: alto.” And she gives us another word: Worm. The eviscerating fear that devours you from the inside, that once it has you, never lets go. 

*“Deus ex machina” is Latin, meaning “God out of the machine” – stage machinery in Greek and Roman drama brought in a god to set everything right. It’s unearned resolution, inherently unsatisfactory. The writer boxed herself in, so she resorted to an extraneous element to tie up the loose ends.

The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka

This 2022 novel is told in first person plural, an unusual choice, but in this case effective. A group of people who swim laps at a public pool give voice to their collective need to be there, to move and to immerse. One of the swimmers, Alice, a woman with dementia, gradually takes center stage, and the story moves into second person singular, chronicling her descent from function to institutionalization, her patchwork memory all too familiar to those of us who have witnessed this decay close up. 

I almost didn’t finish the book – my mom didn’t sink that far before she died but she was headed into the abyss of not knowing anyone, losing language, losing speech. I wrote a short story about her descent, and that was plenty long for me. To channel more of her failing mind would have ultimately seemed cruel – to expose a person whose wit and talents evaporated, must serve some greater purpose. Otherwise, it lays bare a terrible loss – to tell a story? To make her the star of a vortex? 

When I want to say more, I feel her in my heart, angry and bitter that I am using her to make my own point.