When Berkeleyside—The Oaklandside’s sister publication—first went live in 2009, the decline of local newspaper journalism was already well underway. That year alone saw the curtain come down on such print papers as the Tucson Citizen, Maryland’s Cumberland Times-News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News, which shuttered only months short of its 150th anniversary.
The fate of the Rocky Mountain News is one of the cautionary tales related in Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink, a muckraking documentary from Berkeley’s twice Oscar-nominated Rick Goldsmith (I’m particularly fond of his 1996 feature Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press). The film screens at 6 p.m. and 8:45 p.m. at Oakland’s New Parkway Theater next Tuesday, Jan. 30, and will be followed by a conversation with Goldsmith. (The 6 p.m. screening is sold out.)
In Stripped for Parts, Goldsmith trains his sights on the hedge funds that have purchased hundreds of newspapers over the last few decades, sold off whatever was of value (primarily real estate — many newspapers are or were based in pricy downtown locations), and shut them down. Chief among the villains is Alden Global Capital, a vulture fund that’s purchased, among many other papers, the Bay Area News Group, parent company of the East Bay Times (formerly the Oakland Tribune).
East Bay Times reporter Nate Gartrell and former reporter Thomas Peele feature in the documentary. “Alden has no care about the importance and the civic involvement of a newspaper,” Peele says. “There’s absolutely no indication that they care about the quality of the journalism at all.”
Alden was founded by Randall D. Smith, a reclusive graduate of Donald Trump’s alma mater The Wharton School (they graduated one year apart), and an ambitious youngster named Heath Freeman, best known for playing football at Duke University. Neither of them made themselves available to Goldsmith, and once you’ve seen this film you’ll understand why.
Stripped for Parts makes the compelling case that there’s no market solution for the newspaper crisis, and that public funding will be required to keep journalism alive. As radical as that may sound, it’s become an increasingly mainstream idea, and Goldsmith implies that it may be the only way to save journalism — and perhaps democracy.
The “golden age” of Mexican cinema lasted roughly 20 years, beginning in the mid-1930s and petering out by the mid-1950s. The films made during this period aren’t well known to Anglophone audiences, but the best of them are at least as good (and often better) than what Hollywood was producing at the time.
1951’s Victimas del pecado (Victims of Sin, screening at Pacific Film Archive at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 24) brought together three of the golden age’s most talented filmmakers to tell its hothouse tale of love, lust and revenge. Directed by Emilio Fernández (Enamorada, La perla), shot by Oscar-nominated Gabriel Figueroa (who worked regularly with Fernández and Luis Buñuel), and edited by Gloria Schoemann (who cut two dozen Fernández features), it’s a rarely seen film well worth discovering.
The film stars famed character actor Rodolfo Acosta (who would appear in countless American westerns in the 1960s) as Rodolfo, a zoot-suited pimp who manages his stable of women from the confines of the trendy, neon-resplendent Changoo nightclub. Among his employees are hyperkinetic night club dancer Violeta (Ninón Sevilla) and the more demure Rosa (Margarita Cebellas), who has just given birth to Rodolfo’s illegitimate child.
When the cruel Rodolfo refuses to take an interest in his offspring, the desperate Rosa abandons the baby in a trash can. Violeta rescues the child, adopts him as her own, and moves her act to the competing Maquina Loca club run by kindly Don Santiago (Tito Junco from Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel). Melodrama ensues.
Figueroa’s gorgeous monochrome photography may be the film’s highlight, but Schoemann’s quick cuts and Fernández’s audacious screenplay (Victims of Sin would never have been approved by the Breen Office) add up to classic Golden Age moviemaking. And by all means, check out the Berkeley Public Library’s copy of La Perla — it’s even better!
