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ARTS: The Grape War
By Katherine Stapp
NEW YORK, Aug 31, 2006 (IPS) - Two years ago, filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter shook up the arcane world of wine-making with a documentary portraying the struggles of small vineyards around the world to compete in an increasingly homogenised and cutthroat marketplace.
Since then, he has worked on several feature films and written a book on taste and power that will be published in French next February, and in English by the end of 2007.
IPS spoke with Nossiter by telephone in Rio de Janeiro, where he has just finished editing a 10-part serial version of the documentary "Mondovino" that will be available on digital video disk (DVD) and shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
IPS: You see yourself primarily as a feature filmmaker. Would you ever make another documentary?
J. NOSSITER: The distinction is unnecessary. It's not that I am a feature filmmaker at the expense of or in opposition to my being a documentary filmmaker. Those who decry documentaries and those who attacked "Mondovino" will say, "It's not a documentary because it's biased," which makes me laugh. I'm a filmmaker, I make fiction and documentaries. There's no distinction for me, not because I lie and make things up when I do a documentary, but because the film is fundamentally an expression of a point of view about the world and the same ethical standards should apply for fiction films that do for documentaries, which is to say that you make a distinction between yourself and other people, that you don't deny the self, you don't deny the other, you apply the critical judgment to yourself and the film that results from it is the expression of your view of the world and, if you're any good, other people's.
One of the great dangers in art and politics today is this suspicious idea that journalism and documentary filmmaking should be "balanced". You know, [U.S. President] George Bush tells us there are weapons of mass destruction and the reality is there aren't, but if you do a documentary about it, you'd better present both sides or it's not "balanced". Oh. [laughs] Well, I'm part of the reality-based community.
IPS: What attracts you to a subject?
JN: First of all, there needs to be a fundamental notion of pleasure - pleasure for me, and the notion that that pleasure can be passed on to other people. My notion of pleasure is pretty radically different from Steven Spielberg's. To me, joy and pleasure are also linked to being able to recognise what pisses you off about the world. And there is no such thing as a pleasure for me that is divorced from a larger reality, and the larger reality is always going to contain things that disturb or outrage me.
With "Mondovino", obviously, there was first the notion that wine is pleasure and wine is also the pleasure of civilisation. But I was also struck by two things: one is the appropriation of wine as not an expression of pleasure, love and innovation but as an expression of power and snobbery, and the ludicrous but repulsive insistence on wine as sort of an object as opposed to something related to human activity, to culture, to history.
So I was interested in addressing that. And the other thing that I was observing in the course of the 1980s and '90s was the standardisation of taste, eradication of difference, and wine is also one of the most potent expressions of both natural and cultural diversity.
What's so hard is these differences weren't only getting wiped out but were characteristic of the political culture of the entire world, in which we're being systematically lied to by all kinds of complicated forces. And alas, greater and greater segments of the population in countries all over the world were being willfully misled into believing they were getting greater quality and diversity, they were being led to believe they were having a singular experience, when in fact they were being led to the factory as conceived by Aldous Huxley in "Brave New World", a place where they're all getting fed "soma".
IPS: Do you see globalisation of the industry as an inexorable trend, or will there always be room for small producers like those in your film?
JN: I think we should separate the notion of globalisation from the notion of cartels and standardisation and oligopolies of production and distribution. It becomes a knee-jerk notion that it is destructive in all respects and that globalisation always means something bad. So I think the threat is not globalisation per se at all. We don't have to be Darwinian about it. We can simply say contact, exposure - these are fundamental notions of civilisation. Those who are horrified at the way things are going in the world can overreact and throw the baby out with the bathwater. The notion of international exchange and cooperation also provides competition, but not primarily or exclusively.
To answer the original question, I have no idea because I'm not a professional prognosticator. For cinema, as for wine, I think for people who care about not admitting to cloning, standardisation, the eradication of our individuality, as long as there are five people left in each field, something will survive. I think it's a daily fight, a fight to the bitter end.
You know, I'm horrified when I go back to the [United] States, especially when I go back to New York, where I lived for many years, and I see the extent to which people who declare themselves against Bush, who declare themselves horrified by the destruction of civil liberties in the U.S., by the criminal interference in world affairs, I'm horrified to the extent to which even these people go about their daily lives as if, 'Yes this is terrible, but let's go on with our lives and making money'. If people don't react politically, or they don't react in the wine world, or they don't react in the world of cinema, if they don't actually do something, then the worst will happen.
IPS: On the issue of preserving diversity, local flavour and traditional wine- (or anything else) making, many of those virtues are kept alive in Europe through state subsidies - about 1.3 billion euros a year. Are you advocating for this system?
JN: I don't think they should line the pockets of bureaucrats, but on the other hand, better that than nothing. I have mixed feelings about state subsidies of any kind. But on the other hand, we're seeing the effects of rampant, unchecked neo-liberalism and it's devastating.
Agricultural subsidies in the U.S. are by and large an outrage. On the other hand, agricultural subsidies in Europe, where they're cultural agricultural subsidies, have a distinct purpose and value, and in the film I discovered a wine I had never heard of called Malvasia di Bosa in Sardinia and although I'd grown up in Italy, it's not a wine that even gets to the continent very much - that's what they call the rest of Italy, the Sardinians.
And this wine was on the verge of absolute extinction and a European project called Vinest, which helps local wines and varietals survive, funneled some money into protecting Malvasia di Bosa. This project seems to have single-handedly saved Malvasia di Bosa and now the young wine-makers are coming in and they may be creating a legitimate market for it. In my experience of 30 years of drinking wine and more or less working in and around the wine business - I started when I was 15, in Paris - its one of the most beautiful, distinctive wines I've ever tasted in my life and it would be a tragedy if we lost that. So there's an example of European subsidies working.
IPS: What about the snobbery? Is there really such a thing as the best wine in the world?
JN: If you think that there is such a thing as the best human being in the world, that a human being should be graded on a 100-point scale, if you think this is a true valuation of a person's inherent worth, then by all means, let's give wine scores.
(END)
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