Nina Paley has announced another Kickstarter Project, a film about the Exodus story using the multiple narrators technique she explored in the shadow puppet commentators in Sita Sings the Blues. I’m supporting it (#50, half way to 100) and I’m asking you to do so as well. As the project only has five days left to reach its funding goal of $3600, and is $247 short as of this posting, I urge you to go to Kickstarter now and sign up.
I should say, however, that my decision to support this project came hard, and I need to tell you why. As you know, I gave Sita Sings the Blues an enthusiastic review in 2009 and have since written a series of articles about it and published an extensive review I conducted with Paley. I think she’s a major artist.
Thus I was delighted when she first explained the project to me and Gordon Fitch, who’s known her for some time, at one of the weekly Frunches (Free Culture Lunch) Paley’s organized in New York City. The idea was simple: record a bunch of Seders, start to finish, and then use those recordings as the basis for a retelling of the Exodus story.
Brilliant, says I to myself, freakin’ brilliant.
So, when she sent around an email (or maybe it was a Facebook post, I forget which) announcing the project I high-tailed it over to Kickstarter and . . . . CRASH! THUD! SPLAT! went my heart as soon as I saw the title: Seder Masochism: A Self-Hating Haggadah. My heart fell to the ground and rolled under the desk. It took me a tense moment or two to find it and put it back in my chest.
It’s like an Anti-Paley had come up with that title. This Anti-Paley lives in another universe where she made a film very much like Sita Sings the Blues. It tells pretty much the same story; uses four animation, styles, etc. But its tone and dialog are somewhat different. As is the title: Suicide Sita, the Loser Who Buried Herself Alive to Spite her Dickhead Husband. The film that fits with THAT title would be a very different film from Sita Sings the Blues; flashy perhaps, some laughs here and there, but no heart.
And there’s this: The Ramayana is central to Hinduism, but pretty much unknown otherwise. Paley took that story an universalized it, opening up to all.
Her title for the Exodus project suggests the opposite move. That story moved beyond Judaism when Christianity emerged and thrived. The early European Christians who settled North America used the Exodus story as a model, with the New World as Canaan and Europe as Egypt. Enslaved Africans saw the journey to freedom in the North and Canada on the model of Exodus. Bob Marley sings of Exodus on behalf of the Rastafarians, and the story's important to the Mormons as well. In 1958 Leon Uris wrote a novel about the founding of Israel and called it Exodus. The novel became a bestseller, was translated into over fifty languages, became a hit movie, and the theme song from the movie was covered by everyone in pop music.
This story has already been universalized. Paley’s title suggests that she’s going to take it back, to parochialize it. Well, OK, but . . . that doesn’t strike me as a way to advance and deepen her art.
So, who’s going to make these Seder recordings into a film about Exodus? Nina Paley, or Nina Anti-Paley? Both obviously. What matters is who’ll win the struggle, how they’ll adjudicate it. I don’t think there’s any way to figure that one out but to let Paley and Anti-Paley have at it.
THAT’S why I’ve decided to support Paley/Anti-Paley’s Kickstarter project. I want the struggle to happen. The result could be a magnificent film, or it could be a colorful series of heartless gags. Hollywood knows how to do the latter, but no one has a formula for the former. Paley’s done it once. I’m betting that they’ll do it again.
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