Reviews of an Anthropological Nature:

Texas Tavola: A Taste of Sicily in the Lone Star State

I was able to attend a screening of this film at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in November 2008.

Texas Tavola immediately presents an interesting premise in the mix of Texan and Sicilian culture. The filmmakers present an appealing symbolic aesthetic in juxtaposing images of the empty ruins of the immigrant’s hometown in Sicily with the people populated celebratory gathering of three generations in their Texan town. The film chronicles the nine day process of Tavola di San Giuseppe, an important religious event at which a single Sicilian-American family hosts almost 1,000 guests in honor of St. Joseph, their Sicilian town’s patron saint.

This feast is rife with symbolism and references to the community’s own travels. There is an altar full of food, breads in the shape of hearts and crosses, fig cookies. Food is a large component of the celebration, including a traditional Texan barbeque where the priest jokes to the gathered community that the barbeque is “holy smoke”. This concentration on food is not only Italian in nature but also combats the legend of famine in their Italian town.

Another tradition of the feast is a reenactment of the Christ story where Maria and Giuseppe seek out a place to rest, a home. They are rejected and finally welcomed to the house of the host family. In their immigrant story, the Sicilian community has made a home in Texas.

As with many immigrant groups and the growing elderly population, they wonder if the young people will continue this tradition when they are gone. This feast, bringing together Texan and Sicilian cultures and religious fervency, is more so a gathering of people—a celebration of a shared life and history.

Reviews of an Anthropological Nature:

Chicago 10
I helped to promote a screening of Chicago 10 at the Jewish Cultural center in DC, and upon arriving discovered that I was the youngest attendee in the room. Chicago 10 had its East Coast Premiere at SILVERDOCS in 2007.

This film intrigued me in its use of animated scenes and archival footage from the Chicago protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The animated storytelling makes the story more accessible for youth while using the mechanism to work around casting and believability difficulties in reenactment scenes. Furthermore, an illustrated representation reflects how the public gains access to most closed court trials, pushing this aesthetic and making it all the more potent in the filmmaker’s use of the trial transcripts.

The most striking scene in the whole film was the revelations of the judge’s character and his demeaning attitude towards the defendants. In the personifications put forth of the judge one is given the antagonist of the film; however, at times the personalities of the activists are not fully heroic characters. All the characters in the film have their own flaws and heroisms presented. While a revealing film of the 1968 activist and alternative cultures, it fails to fulfill in a final climax, relying in some ways too much on the outcome of the trial rather than looking at the story more holistically.

For a young audience, Chicago 10 stimulates a renewed interest in the history of their elders, making it cool and appealing. The lack of female roles in the film, while understandable in that the characters involved in the Chicago 10 were all male, further highlighted that the audience for this film are male, and the leaders of the movement were male.