April 29, 2008 03:00PM EDT

Film Junkie Reports: Something Old, Something New

The hot ticket on Sunday was for the 40th anniversary screening of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, held at Pace University by City Hall. This was a must-see for me because while I’ve seen the film three or four times, it has always been on video, never on film, and for people who care about the difference between emulsion and pixels, seeing a movie like this on celluloid can make all the difference. And it did. The print was in extremely good condition given its age, and Pace University’s auditorium was more than adequate to display the widescreen aspect ratio. The biggest surprise was in the soundtrack, as the simple fact of being surrounded by speakers brought out the aural genius of a film famous for its lack of dialogue. I was specially pleased early in the film by the stereo work done with the grunts and growls of primitive man, giving me new appreciation for Kubrick’s use of sound design (his work with Jack Foley himself on Spartacus has achieved something of the status of legend). After the screening, Ira Flatow moderated a panel discussion on the film, artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial life, and other related topics with Buzz Aldrin and other luminaries. It was a wonderful event and wonderful tribute to a film that remains gripping seven years after the year of its title.

With that said about 2001, which remains one of the great films in the history of cinema, it was the film I saw just before that that truly engaged me today. Going on 13 is a new vérité documentary (observational footage with a great deal of interview material) co-directed by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Dawn Valadez. It is a longitudinal record of four girls—two Hispanic, one African American, and one Indian—in the Oakland area, following them from age nine to 13, the transition from childhood to adolescence. The girls’ lives bring up issues of race, economics, family and parenting, sexual education and identity, and the quality of American public education, usually accompanied by a good dollop of humor and requisite silliness. Three hundred hours of footage were culled down to the 86-minute result (for those keeping track, that’s a 209:1 shooting ratio), and while I’m sure this process was quite judicious, it felt like the film could have stood being slightly longer—at least the material was engaging enough to merit it, if the filmmakers had so desired (which is meant as a compliment, not a detraction).

I greatly appreciated the longitudinal aspect of the film. Long-range productions are some of the most difficult to achieve but yield the greatest dividends; I truly believe that duration (as opposed to concision) is one of the founding principles of documentary—letting us see the process unfold in all its unedited complexity—and longitudinal studies are arguably the best way to achieve that, particularly in coming-of-age stories. Think of Going on 13 as the girls’ response to Hoop Dreams: an important piece of entertainment and a potent sociological study at the same time. Hopefully the evolving digitization of our media culture will allow ever more venues for this film and others like it in our homes, our theaters, and our schools.