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"Everyday create your history/
The emphasis on the "his" in "history makes clear within the context of the album how this song represents a cumulative revelation for the artist. That feat establishes the standard of amazement felt by 25-years-young David Gordon Green's debut masterpiece George Washington. He not only shares the hard-won wisdom expressed by Jackson, but also has the gifts to find new methods of expressing it with film. During the credits, Green introduces George Washington as "A Filmed Challenge." The film opens by introducing the four main dramatic characters: three Black boys and one white girl around 13-years-old. Slow-motion reverie of their playing together creates a meditative mood before Green presents them individually in a montage set within the industrial ruins of the New South. Here, also, begins the voice-over narration provided by Nasia (Candace Evanofski), who has a crush on George (Donald Holden). She describes their activities: "They tried to find clues to all the mistakes and the mysteries God had made." Vernon (Damian Jewan Lee) writes in his journal, recording and making sense of his world and feelings. Sonya (Rachel Handy) examines an abandoned doll. Nasia's narration transforms these seemingly unexceptional moments into myth; their everyday play creates history that runs counter to the history that has sacrificed them. Green uses Tim Orr's Cinemascope photography to impress his awe. His compositions find human worth within an environment of waste. He captures streams of light through splintered wood that illuminate and clarify his subjects. Their faces and bodies seem sculpted--pop-ups in children's books. Buddy (Curtis Cotton III) enters his house out of focus on the left half of the 'scope screen. He walks into the field of focus dominated by the corner of a painting in the foreground right. This throwaway moment defines Green's visual and philosophical approach--the way he sees the world--in creating a mosaic of truth. Sharing his characters' quests for understanding, Green discovers it through them. The idiosyncratic combination of shots unfolds a poetic near-documentary style as sensual as F.W. Murnau's in Tabu or Jean Vigo's in The Swimmer.It's also as rhetorically, philosophically rigorous as Jean-Luc Godard's parallel discourses of a housewife-prostitute and the building of an apartment complex in Two or Three Things I Know About Her. What seems ineffable to his characters about our modern spiritual and socio-economic conditions--history's children--Green makes indelible and undeniable. A film poet, Green organizes the story through his curious sensibility. While establishing the four main characters and the narrator, Green also presents parents, uncles and aunts, other kids and teenagers, and young men working on the railroad. This sets up the social and personal dynamics that give weight to the film's central, catalyzing event. Some roughhousing--scarily played out as the kids' deformed sense of judgement--leads to the accidental death of Buddy. The three other kids are thrown into a moral dilemma--an awakening--that extends to their relationship with their world.
This conclusion may take viewers off-guard, if they haven't noticed the way Green makes cinematic poetry out of this story. If Sergei Eisenstein was right that the meaning of a film is created in-between shots, then Green imbues that space with love. Tracing the tracks of that love is the primary excitement of the film. As if answering David Wingo's request in the final credits song, "Take me by the hand across this broken land," Green lights the path. The major structural elements of George Washington consist of scenes shared by characters and those of characters alone or of the town. Such sequences are organized in a variety of manners for intense emotional effect. The characters discuss love--in romance, in families, in friendships-- and then find that love challenged after Buddy's death. (Sonya: "Vernon, I ain't no good." Vernon to Sonya: "I wish I could be born again.") Nasia expresses another kind of love in her narration that heroicizes George. Green avoids pretentiousness with whimsy as Nasia ends her list of George's prophetic powers with ". and stuff like that." This revolutionary confluence of point of views transcends barriers of race, gender, and age. Green demonstrates his love--his sense of moral beauty--with his choice to shoot in Cinemascope, which by all accounts required the kind of ass-kissing and toil that spoiled brats handed a digital video camera wouldn't understand. So Eisenstein wasn't totally correct, as Green's love plays out not only in the space between shots, but between performers, performers and the camera, and the projected film and its audience.
It's due to the shock of recognition. Francois Truffaut once wrote concerning films about children: "They send us back. to our beginnings." That's true even when the film concerns an economic class of people who probably aren't in the audience for the film; even when the director is white and the majority of the young cast is Black. When we see them playacting, we may feel a pang of embarrassment not only because that's how we were, but because we're still playacting in our social roles. (How do I reconcile private moonwalking in my boxerbriefs while listening to "HIStory" with my personal and political relationships?) Green uses these common experiences to send us back to our beginnings as a country, and to make intimate the consequences of that history. Green conveys his own shock of recognition when he pays testament to his/our cinematic heritage after George's to his father. The image of a hat burning in a field references Charles Burnett's To Sleep With Anger. The hat is the same one Buddy was wearing when George asks him in church: "Have you ever been baptized?" In interviews, Green has mentioned Burnett's Killer of Sheep, Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool and Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line as obvious antecedents. Those filmmakers found their beginnings amidst the American Film Renaissance of the 1970s; today, Green is a one-man Renaissance. Truffaut and the filmmakers of The French New Wave established an oft-neglected standard that influenced our appreciation of film history ever since. George Washington cultivates the tradition of Truffaut's masterpiece about youth, The 400 Blows, and the movies it honored: Vigo's Zero for Conduct and Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine. Dominique Paini explained the New Wave's criteria: "It promoted lucidity, truth, and beauty." Green understands that those aren't just great aesthetic tenants, but also moral and political ones. You can't deny the connection between a film culture that has failed to nurture the popular acceptance of George Washington and a society that neglects the film's subjects in its political structures. Like Patrice Chereau's notably Cinemascope Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, George Washington re-imagines our relationship to film as a communal ritual resulting in a revelatory catharsis--new ways of perceiving the world. Green baptizes us in his vision of our national and cinematic history--torn by conquest and liberty. It's the rebirth of a nation. You don't have to have such knowledge of film history to gain access to "George Washington". Knowledge of jazz, blues, and gospel or of George Bush (Sr.) or of Superman is enough. Just being born puts you within Green's Cinemascope embrace! Like George, whose skull is mortally sensitive to water, your head swells during George Washington. I remember the circumstances of my baptism: seeing Steven Spielberg's Amistad and then reading Armond White's essay on the film in Film Comment. That started my ongoing political, aesthetic, and moral rebirth. To describe the profundity of George Washington, I'd say it accomplishes what the combination of Spielberg and White's testaments did for me. The process of being born again doesn't end. Green challenges the artform and its audience to keep moving. |
Buddy and Vernon in George Washington 
Sonya, George and Vernon (right) move the body of Buddy 
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