Ever since I returned from my orgiastic-ly exciting film-viewing vacation wherein I went to the Nashville Film Festival last spring, I've been talking everyone's ears right off about Monteith McCollum and Ariana Gerstein's spooky and spot-on documentary, Milk in the Land. If you don't believe me, please take a li'l jaunt back into my archives. And also, please refer to all the conversations that you've had with me in the last four months. Undoubtedly, I will have mentioned that film no less than twice in your average five minutes.
In hopes of finding more of the same, I rented McCollum's earlier documentary, Hybrid-- maybe it would be another beautifully presented cautionary tale about the American food pipeline. But that's not at all what Hybrid is about.
Instead, Hybrid is artful near-biography of Milford Beeghly. Milford Beeghly is one of the pioneers of practical corn hybridization. He's also a quaint--and ancient--Iowa farmer, a singer of old Irish brogues, a champion hog-caller (endowed with an elusive quality he and his son call "hog-appeal"), a stoic father, and a dude who likes to bicker with his second wife, Alice.
It seems that McCollum fell so hopelessly in love with his subject matter-- the man, not the corn-- that I really learned very little beyond the most basic of rudiments of corn hybridization. I mean, I was all geared up to be freaked out by the ways humans have figured out how to fool nature into doing crap nature shouldn't be doing... but I arose from my sofa without much framework for forming an opinion about how we grow corn, one way or the other. And it's not like corn is the LEAST controversial food item on the market-- not by a long shot! So, I was thinking that this was fertile ground for some good ol' eco-agricultural rabble-rousing! Instead, I sat through 93 minutes of a love poem to an old guy.
So, once I got over not getting that for which I had bargained, it became pretty clear that many of the cinematographic techniques that lent a polished, yet otherworldly sense of menace to Milk in the Land were experiments in Hybrid. McCollum squanders long sequences on time-lapse shots of the Beeghlys' farmstead, of farm cats drinking milk, of corn stalks in silhouette against the sun, the barn, the silo, a tractor... The thing is, I would have expected such sequences to have an air of piquant nostalgia for the small-scale American farms of yesteryear. Once again, however, McCollum defies my expectations. The whole thing is shot in black and white and so, lush, sunlit scenes of farm life become acrid, slightly over-exposed and a little to harsh for comfort. Or maybe it's just that the light/dark contrast and McCullum's own emotive viola-playing is keyed up so as to create an atmosphere of barren-ness in a landscape that is so often idealized. Clever, eh?
McCollum is also in possession of one decidedly understated sense of humor. And he doesn't really let us forget that the hybridization of corn is, as is everything else, really all about sex. The film is primarily narrated by Mr. Beeghly himself, but every once in a while, his son Weyland offers a comment or two. And Weyland's description of normal corn reproduction-- that without any human intervention--involves the concept of corn masturbation. Basically, an unbothered corn stalk is pretty likely to fertilize itself-- the tassel on top is the male, pollen-producing part. And the pollen seeps down into the undeveloped ear-- the female part-- and fertilizes each ovary, and then each ovary becomes a kernel. Next time you eat a cob of corn, will you remember that you have a mouthful of ovaries? I dunno... but Weyland's description of corn "playing with itself" was pretty cute in and of itself.
McCollum's particular artistic sensibility may have given rise to an entirely new genre of filmmaking--corn porn! Honestly, I never knew you could eroticize an ear of corn, but he managed to create some stop-action animation sequences that, well, make corn sexy. In one of them, a couple of ears dance and flirt and, finally, rub up against each other. In another, a single ear upended on a stool performs a luscious striptease, ever so seductively slipping out of her-- uh, its--husk. By the end of it, I wouldn't have been at all surprised to have found little nipples on each kernel of that damn corncob!
Much of this film reads, not so much as an informative documentary, but more like an experimental art-house film. While Milk in the Land demonstrated the ways in which McCollum is able to employ his virtuosic visual techniques towards imparting a distinct and moving message, Hybrid shows less of his investment in reportage and more of his remarkable ability as a film stylist. While I quite like the idea of there being plenty of room for cinematographic risk-taking within the genre of non-fiction films, I suppose I must admit that I really liked all there was to learn in Milk in the Land. And so, while I really do heartily approve of this director's idiosyncratic style, I still want more than mooning over a geriatric Iowan for my 93 minutes, thank you.
Will someone please teach me something about corn now?
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