Cambios en los atributos sensoriales de los análogos de carne

Year

Population Variation Population Variation Population Variation

1960 741,324 196,940 12,337

1970 717,099 –3,3% 193,317 –1,8% 8,682 –29,6%

1980 636,212 –11,3% 159,611 –17,4% 5,634 –35,1%

1990 628,088 –1,3% 140,761 –11,8% 4,682 –16,9%

2000 596,974 –5% 124,943 –11,2% 2,912 –37,8%

2010 594,833 –0,4% 102,434 –18% 2,159 –25,9%

The previous graphic shows that the worst population decline occurred in the 1970s, when Benning shot One Way Boogie Woogie. In the 1980s, the percentages eased, but the same negative trend remained, creating a feeling of irreversible deadlock when Moore and Buba made their films. With the sole exception of Milwaukee, the situation does not seem to have improved in the 1990s and 2000s, especially in the case of Braddock, which lost even more population in percentage terms in the 1990s than in the

1970s. In order to present the particular case of Braddock within a national context, Buba sometimes echoes macroeconomic figures in his film, as when he comments that

“90% of the baby-boom generation has a lower standard of living than their parents” or when he films the following statistics in a local bulletin board:

For every 1000 manufacturing jobs lost, we lose: 1000 service jobs, 17 doctors, 17 eating places, 13 food stores, (…) 11 gas stations, 6 clothing stores, 5 dentists, (…) 3 auto dealerships, 2 hardware stores, 2 drug stores, (…) 2 auto accessory stores, 1 jewellery store, 1 sports store [and] unknown number of teachers and government workers. These statistics are from the US Department of Commerce and the Federal Office of Budget and Management.

All this information awakes the nostalgic desire to return to better times, whether in terms of quality of life or social commitment. As the 1970s were not precisely a time to remember, Braddock residents had to go back to previous decades to find something to be proud of: towards the end of Lightning over Braddock, an old man recalls the successes of the workers’ struggle in the 1930s and encourages young people to “take to the streets” again. This discourse is assumed by Buba himself, who ironically pretends to be a modern political filmmaker instead of a post-modern one:

“with statistics like this”, he says over images of the Saint Patrick’s Day parade,

“you’ll think there’ll be mass demonstrations: people taking to the streets. But there didn’t seem to be much interest in saving manufacturing jobs. I thought this is a perfect time for a political filmmaker. I can make the film that will raise consciousness! People will take to the streets”.

There is a good deal of political rallies and demonstrations in the film, but even so Buba is far from fulfilling his stated intentions: before raising the consciousness of the audience, Lightning over Braddock awakes his own one, compelling him to face his feeling of guilt for taking advantage of the situation. “The ironic thing”, he admits in the commentary, “is [that] as Braddock and the Monongahela Valley declined, my fortune increased”. This confession, according to Lane, questions those filmmakers “who use the plight of others to promote their own careers”, that is, anyone who crosses the boundary between social documentary and porno-misery (2002: 142). Thus, when it is assumed that the film should go deeper into Braddock’s case, it instead exposes the contradictions of the filmmaker by including the footage of one of Buba’s appearances on television: a television portrait within a film self-portrait.

Considering that Buba was –then and now– a complete unknown, this footage allowed him to summarise his film career, from his first short documentary, J. Roy: New and Used Furniture (Tony Buba, 1974), to his modest success, Sweet Sal (Tony Buba, 1979), both included in the collection The Braddock Chronicles (Tony Buba, 1972-1985).²⁸ His commentary, however, does not sound as proud as it could: “My exposure on TV was directly proportional to the number of layoffs” he says, “The one question I was always asked was ‘do you ever think about moving?’. Of course, the one answer I never give is that ‘no, I like being a big fish in a little city’”. This is Buba’s drama: he would like to be famous around the world, but he is actually satisfied with being famous in Braddock. Therefore, what seemed a shameless act of self-promotion turns into a sample of the possibilities that first-person filmmaking opens for a secondary revision of our memories (see Renov 2004: 114). Indeed, Buba’s critical remarks on his media persona are a prime example of post-modernity’s narcissistic humour, as Lipovetsky has described by talking about Woody Allen’s films:

The self becomes the prime target of humour, an object of derision and self-predation. The comedy character no longer uses the burlesque, as Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin or the Marx Brothers did. Its humour does not come from the failure to adapt to the logic nor from its subversion, but from self-reflection: a narcissistic, libidinal and corporeal hyper-awareness [of its own self]. The burlesque character was unaware of the image that it offered to the others, it made people laugh despite itself, without observing itself or seeing its performance.

The absurd situations that it caused triggered the comedy according to an irremediable mechanism. On the contrary, Woody Allen makes people laugh by means of narcissistic humour, endlessly analysing himself, dissecting his own ridicule, introducing his devalued self mirror to himself and the audience (1986: 144-145, my translation).

In this quotation, where Lipovetsky wrote Woody Allen it is possible to read many other names, such as Tony Buba, Ross McElwee, Nanni Moretti or Guy Maddin, to name but first-person filmmakers. Through this narcissistic humour, Buba sabotaged his position of power as a way of remaining close to his neighbours, admitting one sin after another in a recurrent joke about his Catholic background: “I started to feel guilty”, he

28 The Braddock Chronicles includes the following short films: To My Family (1972), J. Roy: New and Used Furniture (1974), Shutdown (1975), Betty’s Corner Café (1976), Sweet Sal (1979), Washing Walls with Mrs G. (1980), Home Movies (1980), Homage to a Mill Town (1980), Mill Hunk Herald (1981), Peabody 7 Friends (1983), Braddock Food Bank (1985) and Birthday Party (1985). In addition to these works, Buba had filmed another short documentary entitled Voices from a Steeltown (1983) before undertaking the project of Lightning over Braddock. A complete list of his works, including the most recent ones, is available at www.braddockfilms.com.

says right after his televisual incarnation states the opposite, because “my success seemed dependent on the failure of others”. Those ‘others’ are basically his own friends and actors: Jimmy Roy, Stephen Pellegrino, Natalka Voslakov, Ernie Spisak and especially Sal Caru, the local street hustler who starred in Sweet Sal [Image 7.8].²⁹ Lightning Over Braddock should have been another film about Sal, but apparently his unstable personality spoiled this possibility. In another example of the aesthetics of failure, the documentary focuses instead on the troubled relationship between Tony and Sal, who respectively embodied the friend who succeeds and the friend who fails to succeed, as well as the filmmaker and his star. In these sequences, it is never clear what was real and what was staged because their characters replace their real identities, leading the film towards the field of self-fiction.

Image 7.8 (left): Sweet Sal, Sal Caru

Image 7.9 (right): Mill Hunk Herald, Stephen Pellegrino playing ‘Jumping Jack Flash’

Sal’s failure to become an actor is just one of the many personal stories that symbolise Braddock’s decline. According to Buba, the local entrepreneur Jimmy Roy also failed in business twelve times despite his blind faith in the American Dream: “You are born to succeed”, he states in a sequence of J. Roy: New and Used Furniture, “and if you don’t succeed it’s your own fault because you didn’t take control on what you think. What you think is gonna decide what you do, and what you do is gonna decide what you get”. Such a speech somehow echoes business theories about self-confidence, but Roy’s failure in achieving his purpose turns him into a Don Quixote, the opposite myth from the self-made man. Buba, meanwhile, also fails in his project –to make “the film that will raise

29 Sal Caru is the screen name that identifies Sal in Lightning Over Braddock, but his real family name is Carollo. The multiple spellings of this surname, which sometimes appears as Carulli or Carullo, suggest Sal’s changing personality.

consciousness”– and becomes another Don Quixote: as the grant money was running out,³⁰ his doubts about how to make the film apparently prevented him from finishing it, or at least from making it as he would have like. For instance, he could not even show his old short films as they really were, as happened with Stephen Pellegrino’s musical performance in Mill Hunk Herald [Image 7.9], a sequence in which Buba replaced the original soundtrack with an explanation about why he had to remove it:

In this part of the film, Steve Pellegrino plays ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ on the accordion ... but you won’t get to hear him play. I called about acquiring the rights to the song, but they wanted $15,000 for it. I told them, “I don’t want Mick Jagger to come to Braddock to sing it.

I have a friend who plays it on the accordion”. They still wanted $15,000. $15,000 is three times the per capita income of a Braddock resident. I didn’t think it would be a politically correct move to pay that kind of money for a song. In fact, it’s crazy. This isn’t the Hollywood feature we’re making here. I know some of you are going to think this sounds real Catholic, but when I die and get to heaven, what if instead of St. Peter being at the gate, it’s Sacco and Vanzetti, and they say to me, “You paid $15,000 for a song instead of spending that money for political organizing?” I wouldn't get in. So talk to the person sitting next to you and try to remember how the song goes, and then sing along with Steve.

Arthur considers that this aesthetics of failure is the film counterpart of all those stories about frustration and defeat embodied by Buba’s friends. The filmmaker, his project, his friends and his hometown are thereby bound in “a concordance of nonfulfillment” that ultimately guarantees “authenticity and documentary truth” (1993:

132). By means of a mise en abyme similar to that used by Federico Fellini in 8 ½ (1963), the account of the impossibility of making a film finally becomes that film, although the final reunion of the characters in Lightning over Braddock is not a happy party but a campy sequence in which Jimmy Roy sings a theme song entitled ‘Braddock City of Magic’, the one that had already opened the film [Image 7.10]. Despite the intentional excess of Buba’s mise-en-scène and Roy’s performance –described as “Las Vegas nightclub-style” by Pat Aufderheide (1989)–, the sequence is a sincere wail for a dying place of memory that uses ironic detachment to express primary emotions. The song’s chorus leaves no doubt about Buba’s feelings: “Braddock… city of magic.

Braddock… city of light. Braddock… where have you gone?”.

30 Lightning over Braddock was financed by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the John Siman Guggenheim Foundation.

Image 7.10: Lightning over Braddock: Jimmy Roy singing ‘Braddock City of Magic’

This kind of staged sequence depicts the aforementioned tendency of Braddock residents to daydream. Throughout the film, Buba unleashes his fantasy and parodies Hollywood popular genres such as the musical, the gangster film or the action film.

Thanks to his troupe of amateur actors, he shoots his own versions of the film icons of the time, reflecting on and also criticising “the seduction of mainstream cinema” (Lane 2002: 139). Thus, along with the opening and closing sequence, Lightning over Braddock includes up to four fictional set pieces that freely combine genres and characters: a local staging of Gandhi’s assassination that rather resembles John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s [Image 7.11]; an ‘ethnic detective story’ filled with Italian stereotypes and inspired by The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) [Image 7.12];

an action sequence in which Sal, characterised as Rambo, takes revenge on Buba’s snubs and shoots him to death [Image 7.13], and a techno-pop musical composed by Steve Pellegrino and entitled ‘Death of the Iron Age Café’, in which the dancers are industrial workers whose choreography bears a reasonable likeness to the movements of the living dead –whether because it is a metaphor for industrial decline or perhaps because the dancers’ only previous acting experience was in a horror movie directed by George A. Romero, another Pittsburgh-based filmmaker [Image 7.14].

Image 7.11 (left): Lightning over Braddock, local staging of Gandhi’s assassination –Sal plays Gandhi Image 7.12 (right): Lightning over Braddock, ‘ethnic detective story’ –Sal plays ‘the godfather’

Image 7.13 (left): Lightning over Braddock, action sequence –Sal shoots Buba

Image 7.14 (right): Lightning over Braddock, musical sequence –Stephen sings ‘Death of the Iron Café’

All these daydreams are also part of the historical world, given that they documented the filmmaker’s imaginary, which is itself a reflection of his time and place. Officially, Buba mixed fiction and documentary because “I wanted the viewers to be in doubt about what was real and what wasn’t, instead of just sitting there and being a good consumer” (in Aufderheide 1989), although that combination can also be interpreted as a cover letter to Hollywood, an “advertisement” of the filmmaker’s skills, as Arthur has pointed out (1993: 132). Hollywood escapism is the exact reverse of what a social documentary should be, but the temptation of selling out to mainstream cinema is so strong that the filmmaker apparently surrendered to it: “Father, I no longer want to make social documentaries”, he says to a priest, in a parody of his own confession, “I want to make a Hollywood musical!”.³¹ In this sense, the images of Buba visiting the

31 The desire to make a musical film also appears in Nanni Moretti’s urban self-portrait, ‘In Vespa’, the first section of Caro Diario (Dear Diary, 1993): in that film, in order to enter those houses that he likes,