Forbidden City (1997)

“Well for our purposes we define gated communities as any residential are where normally public places are privatized by restricted access.”

The Forbidden City was the name of the Chinese Imperial Palace–an impressive compound of 100s of buildings located in the centre of Beijing, and the term forbidden referred to the fact that no one could enter without the Emperor’s permission. Surrounded by walls, guarded by towers and accessed only by a number of fortified gates, the Forbidden City was a city within a city–exclusive, protected and segregated from the riff raff.

How appropriate that Matt Ehling’s short documentary film examining the phenomenon of gated communities in America has the title Forbidden City, and it doesn’t require a great stretch of the imagination to connect the implications of the ancient Forbidden City to the gated communities popping up all over the country.

The film, made in 1997 is just under 30 minutes long, and that’s not much time to pack in all of the aspects & history of gated communities, but in spite of the film’s brevity, there’s a lot of information here, and a great deal to mull over long after the film concludes.

Concentrating on a handful of gated communities in Las Vegas and Southern California, the film explores the features that draw people to buy these homes–the buzz words used in the sale catalogues, and the idea that there’s a “type” that lives there. The film was made over 10 years ago, and of course, we’ve since had the real estate bubble (and are now experiencing the subsequent collapse of the market), but the film mentions in several places that homes within these communities begin at 300,000 and soar to over a million. No doubt that seemed like chicken feed during the gluttonous housing boom.

Using the comments of salespeople, gated community homeowners, employees and experts, the film offers a fascinating look at this growing housing trend. As the film points out, gated communities are nothing new, but they are sprouting up at an alarming rate all over the country.

If you think safety is the only argument for gated communities, then think again. Funnily enough, and this was something that gave me a good laugh, there are gated communities within gated communities. So if you own a multi million dollar mansion, not only are you assured that the street riff raff can’t riffle through your dustbins, but you can also feel extra exclusive knowing that the yahoos whose homes cost a mere fraction of yours are locked out of your more exclusive zone.

Gates within gates is perhaps one of the most fascinating ideas within this documentary. After all, this throws the raison d’etre of the security aspect of gated communities into question. All the houses are already walled off, and people can’t enter without permission, so why do you need even more gates from your less-well off, but let’s remember, still exclusive neighbours? Of course, the answer is the notion of hierarchy. The gates within gates reinforce the notion of hierarchy.

I don’t live in a gated community–I probably wouldn’t last a week before a resident called security to haul me off, but I could certainly see that if someone has been the victim of violent crime, they would be drawn to live somewhere with added security. Of course, this idea leads to even more questions–what’s our society like if we have to take refuge inside vetted communities so we can sleep at night? What about us peasants who live outside the walls? Has the state malfunctioned to such a point that it’s necessary for the affluent to pay for private security compounds? The residents of these gated communities have, in essence pooled their collective resources to buy protection–what does that say about life on the other side of the walls? Are these communities a good thing? They emphasize the fact that the rest of the outside world is an undesirable, unsafe place, and these walled compounds certainly create segregation.

One of the interviewees, Mary Gael Snyder, the coauthor of Fortress America, funded by the Brookings Institute notes that gated communities are a symptom and a sign of the “increasing polarization” between rich and poor. Synder, who interviews very well, explains the attractions of gated communities and the underlying message of lifestyle, prestige and image.

The film also draws analogies between gated communities and military bases, and I think the filmmaker has a point. I’d never thought about comparisons between the two before, but after watching the footage, I could see the similarities.

After the film concluded, curious, I did an internet search and looked at homes for sale in Lake Las Vegas “resort.” I picked this ‘community’ simply because it seems somewhat absurd with its golf courses and 320 acre lake slap bang in the middle of the desert. There are currently 19 neighbourhoods with a range of prices–at the low end, houses range these days from just under 500,000, a mere bagatelle for a modest little abode to 14 million for an ostentatious mansion in the posher section that might very well belong on the Vegas strip. But it looks as though, in spite of the walls and extra security, a flood of foreclosures have breached the walls here too.

Forbidden City is available at www.prolefeedstudios.com

Hop (2002)

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to blow anything up.”

Apparently the salient characteristic of an anarchist is the irrepressible desire to blow things up. Well at least that’s the case in the film Hop from director Dominque Standaert. The story revolves around Justin (Kalomba Mboyi) a twelve-year-old illegal immigrant from Burundi who lives with his father Dieudonne (Ansou Diedhiou) in Belgium. After a minor fracas with the law stemming from a dispute with a neighbour over his cable television line, Dieudonne is arrested, questioned and subsequently deported by police to the Congo. Meanwhile Justin goes on the lam and takes refuge with anarchist Frans Misonne (Jan Decleir).

Frans at first plans to hand the boy right back to the police, but then when his female acquaintance Gerda (Antje de Boeck) objects, Frans allows the boy to stay. When Frans learns that Justin’s father has been deported, he comes up with a plan to negotiate for the father’s return to Belgium. Dreaming up the name, the Anarchistic Pygmy Revolutionary Front, Frans’s plan is to leave a dummy explosive on a monument, threatening to use the real thing if their demands aren’t met.

As the film develops, it’s revealed that Frans served time for an explosion in which three people were killed. Frans, who was the bomb expert in the Pressure Cooker Group, set the bomb and then called in a warning to police. The police however, failed to evacuate the building, and three people were killed. Frans subsequently served time–a remarkably short period of time as it turns out, and this is explained by the skill of Frans’s lawyer.

Frans and Gerda are the only Belgiums willing to help Justin, and while their comradeship is touching, the portrayal of anarchist Frans is problematic. On the one hand, he could have been any old hippie or any old radical, but the necessity of placing dynamite in the plot evidently and preposterously called for the creation of an anarchist. As one of the Pressure Cooker Group, he’s seen as someone who’s responsible for the deaths of three innocent bystanders. He keeps a secret stash of dynamite in his remote home and refuses to clean out his cesspit (an outhouse that serves as a toilet). Furthermore in its portrayal of Frans, the film doesn’t bother to explain any anarchist principles–even though Frans’s house is loaded with piles of books, pamphlets etc. Nor do we ever discover why Frans was running around Belgium with pressure cookers loaded with dynamite in the first place. Also, at the beginning of the film, in spite of the fact that he’s supposed to be an anarchist, his first reaction is to hand over Justin to the “authorities” and it’s only later in the film that he refuses to cooperate with the police–and this is a bit late since he’s already told the police where the boy can be found. Perhaps he cooperates because Justin is running around with a stash of dynamite–although the film doesn’t make the motive behind Frans’s cooperation clear. So we are left with a stereotype complete with the obligatory tendency to violent irresponsible action created for the purposes of the film.

Hop really has some interesting ideas, but the plot is extremely fanciful. The police who arrest Dieudonne are portrayed as rather cruel and deceptive, but later in the film, the Belgium equivalent of a SWAT team, at first rather sinister and threatening, are buffoons when pitted against the savvy 12 year old. Hop is visually a beautiful film, shot digitally in black and white. The plot addresses some serious, timely questions–the morality of allowing immigrants to sneak into the country in order to provide cheap labour, and the ethics of separating a child from a parent. The film’s title refers to a strategic shift of power between various groups, and the plot provides a few stories of how the Hop may be conducted, and then shows by example. Interestingly, it’s Justin’s fellow countrymen who manage to pull a Hop on the Belgium power structure, and this is accomplished in a very sly, slick manner–without explosives. However, the film stoops to the typical obligatory perpetuation of anarchist stereotypes–in this case–heavy on dynamite and out-of-control cesspits.

In Dutch and French with subtitles.

Cocalero (2007)

“The worst enemy of humanity is capitalism. That is what provokes uprisings like our own, a rebellion against the system, against a neo-liberal model, which is the representation of a savage capitalism.” Evo Morales

Political campaigns in America are gloriously, gushing spectacles of gluttony, waste and consumerism. I’ve lost count of just how many millions the current American candidates are blithely flushing down the toilet in their orgiastic bids for the grab fest known as the presidential election. I’ve never understood what all the excitement is about, but there you go….

It was in this mood of watching the millions roll all the way down to the ballot box that I came across the excellent documentary Cocalero. This film explores the humble and frequently painstaking campaign of Evo Morales’s successful bid for the Bolivian presidency in 2005. Morales, leader of the Movimiento al Socialismo party, an Aymara Indian, and the former president of the Chapare Coca Grower’s Union, became the first indigenous president of Bolivia.

In its War on Drugs (this war has probably taken second place now to the War on Terror), the U.S. government funneled millions down to Bolivia to squash the Coca crop. Since this is the indigenous and poverty-stricken Indians’ way of making a living, the situation rapidly became ugly. Death squads, tortures and disappearances paved the way to Coca eradication, but the Indians didn’t give up easily–they organized and fought back. Morales as President of the Coordinating Committee of the Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba became a fierce opponent of the government’s anti-coca production position, and he began running for political offices.

Cocalero follows Morales’s successful bid for the presidency–from his haircuts, his use of the internet, all the way to the union organizers who patiently teach roomfuls of largely illiterate Indians how to vote and how to interpret the entire election process. Other interviewees wax about the benefits of the Coca leaf, and one Indian argues that Coca Cola still contains elements of the leaf. We see union meetings that end with a collective yell, “Death to the Yankees,” and the sort of overwhelming grassroots support from the unions who help get Morales elected. But lest we imagine that all is bright and sunny in this election process, one scene shows the tree to which delinquent union members are tied and left to the ants if they fall short in their union participation.

One of the best aspects of the film is that it shows the vast gap between the Indian population and rest of Bolivia and the inherent racism against the native population. Some scenes follow Morales on his election trail, and the camera captures the horrified reactions of many Bolivians as it becomes clear that Morales may win. One of the film’s best scenes takes place when Morales makes a speech to the country’s military leaders. Sitting in their uniforms with those characteristic dark glasses, some look uncomfortable and some look down right pissed-off, but Morales is unperturbed, and he’s certainly not intimidated when faced with the bastion of right-wing authority.

Cocalero really should be watched as a companion piece to another documentary, Our Brand is Crisis. This latter film follows the 2002 campaign in Bolivia that pitted Goni against (amongst others) Morales. Millionaire Goni employed GCS, an American consulting firm to help repackage his tarnished image (he was President from 1993-1997) and to get him reelected. Like most multimillionaires, Goni is amazingly out-of-touch with the native population, and yet like all politicians he tries to manipulate his campaign to convince the voters that he’s the country’s saviour. Directed by Alejandro Landes, Cocalero is in Spanish with subtitles.