"Saving Ruben Salazar"It's Los Angeles. Everyone's a filmmaker. Tonight is no different but that critical edge is increased. It feels like the knife of history, come back to demand its consolation. But endings were not made for happiness, only for more and more incompleteness. The in-completion suited to a film preview becomes accentuated. This is no ordinary documentary, city, or audience.
This is nowhere more evident than in the filmmaker, Phillip Rodriguez of Los Angeles. Under the auspices of such patrons as the Annenberg, Broad, and Public Broadcasting Services, Rodriguez holds the center of attention. Journalism is the topic and Ruben Salazar, Chicano writer extraordinaire, is the subject. About his subject (Salazar), Rodriguez becomes cautiously whimsical. Had he no particular affinity for decentralizing the focus or attitude of his work (yet which he does) this would have been required. Salazar and his humanity, pined Rodriguez, in part disavowal and part mastery. The juxtaposition, he doubts, of truth with truth implies fallacy.
Fallacy plays a strong hand in the film. A need to address the insuitability or incommensurability of Salazar's public, the one he spoke for or the one who won't let him rest today, imply more longing for Salazar than would be considered healthy. Why does Salazar's death override his life? Rodriguez would like to know how best to convey this intrinsic fault. If only his subject would speak for himself rather than eluding his authors and troubling his mourners.
"Saving Ruben Salazar," begins a pilgrimage from Los Angeles to various venues including a PBS educational website and imminent nationwide distribution. The film features a fascinating set of documentary sources from personal and professional settings. Salazar is captured in photo, typography, film footage, oral histories, in the field as a war correspondent, at demonstrations throughout the Civil Rights era, and as a father of fresh-faced little children. Always he possesses an ethereal introspective poise. Inscrutable as a Mexican and idealistic as an American.
This is nowhere more evident than in the filmmaker, Phillip Rodriguez of Los Angeles. Under the auspices of such patrons as the Annenberg, Broad, and Public Broadcasting Services, Rodriguez holds the center of attention. Journalism is the topic and Ruben Salazar, Chicano writer extraordinaire, is the subject. About his subject (Salazar), Rodriguez becomes cautiously whimsical. Had he no particular affinity for decentralizing the focus or attitude of his work (yet which he does) this would have been required. Salazar and his humanity, pined Rodriguez, in part disavowal and part mastery. The juxtaposition, he doubts, of truth with truth implies fallacy.
Fallacy plays a strong hand in the film. A need to address the insuitability or incommensurability of Salazar's public, the one he spoke for or the one who won't let him rest today, imply more longing for Salazar than would be considered healthy. Why does Salazar's death override his life? Rodriguez would like to know how best to convey this intrinsic fault. If only his subject would speak for himself rather than eluding his authors and troubling his mourners.
"Saving Ruben Salazar," begins a pilgrimage from Los Angeles to various venues including a PBS educational website and imminent nationwide distribution. The film features a fascinating set of documentary sources from personal and professional settings. Salazar is captured in photo, typography, film footage, oral histories, in the field as a war correspondent, at demonstrations throughout the Civil Rights era, and as a father of fresh-faced little children. Always he possesses an ethereal introspective poise. Inscrutable as a Mexican and idealistic as an American.
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