Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

American Blackout (Fri., Oct. 13, 7 p.m., $5, Scribe Video Center, 4212 Chestnut St.) Unleashing a fresh torrent of outrage just in time for the election season, Ian Inaba's muckraking documentary rips open the barely healed wounds of 2004. With simple, apparently incontrovertible figures, Inaba shows how largely black and Democratic districts in Ohio were categorically underserved and understaffed. Although one election official says that voting machines were apportioned according to the number of registered voters, districts whose registration jumped as much as 28 percent actually ended up with fewer machines, resulting in long and inevitably discouraging lines and as much as a four-hour wait. This in a state where — as in Florida in 2000 — the chief election official doubled as Bush's state campaign chairman, and had promised "to deliver the state" to him.

The accusations in American Blackout aren't new, and Inaba doesn't always choose the best people to put them forward. Self-styled gumshoe Greg Palast, for one, can always be counted on for an inflammatory quote; it's one thing for a disenfranchised black voter to testify that he felt like he had been "slingshotted into slavery," another for Palast to authoritatively tag the 2004 contest as "an apartheid election." Inaba, who directed Eminem's anti-Bush video "Mosh," clearly wants to gets his audience's blood boiling, but he should realize that the facts are outrage enough.

Blackout particularly backs the wrong horse when it comes to former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who last made headlines when she was charged with assaulting a Capitol Hill police officer. Blackout valiantly tries to paint McKinney as the victim of a racist conspiracy, including a wave of negative media coverage that the ever-temperate Palast calls "an electronic lynching." But the best the film can come up with is an incident where McKinney's words are taken out of context by Fox News, which hardly qualifies her for martyrdom. More troubling is the Republican effort to get voters to cross party lines in the Democratic primary in her district, which cost McKinney her seat in 2002 and again in 2006. This is dirty pool, to be sure, but no dirtier than Tom DeLay's hammer-fisted Texas redistricting. Certainly, black Americans should be appalled by the Republicans' attempt to meddle with the inner workings of their rival party. But then, so should all of us. The most damning evidence that the anti-McKinney sentiment in her home district is tinged with racism comes from an unnamed prospective voter who refers to her as "a troublemaker." It's just a hop, skip and a jump to "uppity" from there.

Unlike many of the recent wave of agit-docs, American Blackout has the goods to back up its anger. But by forcing emotions rather than letting them develop naturally, the movie speaks to a much narrower audience than the one it urgently ought to reach.

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Thu., Oct. 12, 8 p.m., free, The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St.) The last movie Pier Paolo Pasolini made before he was murdered in 1975, Salò is often called the most obscene movie ever made. It's not clear the director would have taken offense. Ostensibly set in fascist Italy, Pasolini's loose adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom is as purposefully offensive as any movie this side of Pink Flamingos (and a good deal less amusing). The setting is an isolated chateau where a group of four dignitaries, who address themselves only by their titles (President, Excellency, etc.) inflict elaborate degradations on a group of young innocents. Rape and sodomy are quickly dispensed with, and more baroque humiliations quickly take their place, climaxing in a giant feast of freshly produced excrement.

In the Italy of the mid-1970s, Pasolini's exhumation of fascism's corpse was deliberate provocation, one that in some accounts was enough to get him killed. (At the time, the story was that Pasolini had been killed by a man he attempted to pick up, but recent evidence has suggested the murder was politically motivated.) But although Salò's obscenities are truly stomach-turning, the constant parade of sickness quickly numbs the brain. Although Pasolini doesn't permit us to identify with the victims, we don't identify with the torturers either; we just watch, stunned and eventually deadened. Certain acts, which may be different for each viewer, break through the fog (for me, it's a woman forced to eat an omelet laced with nails), but the overall effect is less one of protest than of defeat.

Salò is screened second, after Nick Palumbo's gore-choked Murder-Set-Pieces. Both films are shown on video.

(sam_citypaper.net)