Two Passings
Commemorating Jim Gabriel, a cineaste you didn't know, and Pema Tseden, a filmmaker you should.
You never knew Jim Gabriel, but to tell you the truth, neither did I. I counted him a friend, but it was one of those friendships specific to the Internet era, where strangers are exposed to each other’s intimate thoughts without ever laying eyes on each other. Ghosts in our respective feeds. Jim was one of the more vocal members of the loose consortium derisively/defensively referred to as “Film Twitter” – to belong to the club, all you need is a Twitter account, an opinion, a paid or unpaid gig writing film criticism OR an academic post OR just a knowledgeable and not too Bro-ey passion for cinema in all its iterations. And a mouth. Jim was one of the good ones, though: open-hearted, rude, funny as hell, knew his film history and then some, kind to newcomers, brutally unforgiving of asshats and blowhards and Republicans and Elon, and, although you had to look elsewhere to find his long-form work, a dream of a critic, capable of writing erudite and intensely readable film analyses.
As far as I know, he never got paid to write the stuff, though, which is a failure of editorial acumen or maybe just bad luck. Maybe he never tried; like I said, I didn’t really know the man, and now he’s dead. Word went out on Twitter over the weekend that Jim passed away April 29, apparently of natural causes – no further details – and while I don’t know his age and little about survivors other than that he had a daughter, I do know that a collective sigh of sorrow went up from several hundreds of people who knew Jim through his Twitter avatar, @flipyourface, and who he befriended, consoled, encouraged, argued with, and generally bellied up to the digital bar where the movie geeks hang out. Anecdotes and tall tales were swapped by more of Jim’s online friends than I could ever have imagined, and the best were from those who spent analog time in his presence, confirming that he was, in fact, a mensch of mensches. I envy people like critic Glenn Kenny who crossed paths with him in person and I’m touched by the remembrances of people like Caden Mark Gardner, who never met Jim but were buoyed by him through their own travails; read Mark’s piece if you want to get a sense of Jim’s tastes in movies.
He and I weren’t that close, but we were friendly. I followed Jim, he followed me, we had a fair handful of DM chats over the space of a decade. I once sent him an MP3 playlist of obscure Arthur Russell B-sides, for which he was grateful; we had a lovely talk, and then, as was his wont, he hit me up for $50 to pay the rent, which I happily gave him. The other thing about Jim was that he was on disability and suffered from depression, struggled mightily to get from week to week, and relied on the kindness of Internet strangers to keep the lights on and put food on his table. I never knew the specifics of his situation; all I knew is that he was a good man in hard times. If Jim not being published was a pox upon “legitimate” media, his personal straits were one more indication that the society we live in is broken. An old Randy Newman lyric floated through my head as I was writing this piece:
Of all of the people that I used to know
Most never adjusted to the great big world
I see them lurking in bookstores
Working for the Public Radio
Carrying their babies around in a sack on their back
Moving careful and slow …
All of these people are much brighter than I
In any fair system they would flourish and thrive
But they barely survive
They eke out a living and they barely survive
That would be way too sentimental for Jim – this is a guy who named his Twitter account after a Contortions song. Better you should read his words on movies, where they’re available. He wrote for a Chicago movie newsletter called Cine-file.org in the mid-2010s; you can find his stuff with a Google search and then by searching the individual pages for “JG” (or read Twitter posts like this one). He also kept a movie and cultural blog about a decade ago, and one piece from there, a prying apart of the hard nut that is “Zero Dark Thirty,” was passed around a lot this weekend as evidence of his gifts. Allow me to quote in full Jim’s take on the Prince film “Sign O’ The Times,” from a 2016 issue of Cine-file:
Succumbing to the joys of SIGN O’ THE TIMES at a thirty year remove from a first viewing hardens my belief that films don’t change, but we do, or can; what once upon a time seemed slapdash and often didactic to eye and ear now feels spirited and downright charming. It’s a scrappy production, with interstitial footage, a bit of story, Skid Row set design, and restaged performances turned into a satisfying rhythmic whole miraculously pulled out of the fire of unusable arena concert shoots. Prince is as generous as can be, a leader who lets everyone play and cut loose; there’s a sweet interlude where the band plays a fat slab of Mingus leading into Sheila Escovedo ripping into a drum solo—everyone gets room to roam, especially the stunning dancer/singer Cat Glover, who on occasion seems like a strip club Cyd Charisse. The man himself is, of course, Himself. You experience Prince’s very body as cinema, his quicksilver bursts and twitches, the pop-and-lock, the clenched, deep-into-it eyes moving to high doe-eyed flirtatiousness in a millisecond, the hunch over the guitar moving into splits—his movements contain the paces of satisfying editing, with its intuitive variances, jaggedness butting up against slow flow. There’ll be no more displays of that munificent talent and giant heart, but screenings like this afford opportunities to commune with each other, and with that spirit and body equalized by pain, to love anew the will and wit and sexy, churchy funk of it all. And if that seems overly sentimental, I would submit that a life given over to art that doesn’t contain a measure of sentiment is worth less than nothing; you might as well take up solitaire. (1987, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Jim Gabriel]
So maybe Jim was a sentimentalist after all. I’m sorry I didn’t know him better and I’m sorry you didn’t know him at all. He’s a reminder of the millions of talented voices out there don’t get the stages and spotlights they deserve, and he will be missed.
Yesterday’s New York Times obituary for the Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden was for most readers, I’m guessing, both a farewell and an introduction. You’d be wise to take up the second part: Pema Tseden – like most Tibetans, he had no family name and went by his two given names – single-handedly created a cinema for his homeland that focused on average Tibetans speaking their own language and living their own lives. Which sounds awfully ethnographic until you see one of his films: They’re wise, funny/sad road movies of people travelling across an infinite but culturally and physically specific terrain, one that feels as ancient as the Buddha and as up to date as an iPhone. In their focus on Tibetan society and on themes of animism and karmic coincidence, the films stand as an inherently political rebuke to the Chinese government but are outwardly so apolitical as to have allowed Pema Tseden to guardedly flourish in China’s film industry while mentoring the generation of Tibetan filmmakers that survives him. In the words of one web article, he created “a cinema that has been shaped by the need to express itself as freely as possible within a restrictive context that seeks to crush that very freedom.”
Pema Tseden died May 8 of a heart attack at just 53; he was finishing up his ninth feature film, “Snow Leopard,” which hopefully will be completed and released. Few of his films are available in this country on demand, but “Old Dog” (2011), “Tharlo” (2015), and “Jinpa” (2018) can be rented for $3.99 on Amazon and Apple TV and are streaming on the arthouse VOD platform Ovid.TV. “Jinpa” ( ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) is probably the best place for newcomers to start, a tale of a truck driver seeking forgiveness for running over a sheep and a hitchhiker seeking vengeance for his father’s death. Slow going but marvelously so – there’s a roadhouse scene (above) I wouldn’t trade for anything – “Jinpa” is paced with the languorous rhythms of the top of the world and rich with a weary comedy that’s older than the land itself. Watching it, you know you’re in the hands of a moviemaker in absolute command of his art. Pema Tseden’s death is a loss not just for those who knew his movies but those who’ll never realize what they’ve missed.
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