The Punk Floor in the San Francisco Jail Ray Hill interviews "revolutionary" filmmaker Saul Landau for a social justice film festival sponsored by Rothko Chapel.

The Rothko Chapel has taken on the ambitious project of organizing a film festival of the work of leftist documentary-maker Saul Landau at the Rice Media Center, in a program designed to "honor Mickey Leland's social justice legacy." With a list of sponsoring organizations (including OutSmart, the Houston Lesbian & Gay Community Center, and PFLAG) that looks like a who's-who of left and community Houston groups, the screenings and panel discussions promise a meaty, enlightening experience.

In particular, the chapel has sought out the lesbian and gay community for the Saturday night 6 p.m. screening of The Jail, a 1972 film in which Landau goes into the San Francisco jail (inspired by his own stay there after a drug arrest) and films what he finds, including a fair deal of time spent on the floor devoted to gays. "The best treatment of hell I've ever seen" was how my father described the film after we watched it together. It doesn't show brutality so much as an amazing zombie atmosphere, intercut with Aretha Franklin's "Do-Right Man," sung by one of the amazing "queens." The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Saul Landau, Ray Hill, Lynne Huffer (professor of Women & Gender Studies at Rice University), and Debra Osterman, M.D. (forensic and addiction psychiatry), moderated by Maria Minicucci (president of the Houston Lesbian & Gay Community Center).

An author, filmmaker, scholar, and frequent lecturer at colleges and universities, Saul Landau is currently serving as Fellow of "Interdisciplinary Applied Knowledge"-an intriguing role-at California State Polytechnic University. His latest book, Red Hot Radio, is a collection of his commentaries featured on the Pacifica Radio Network News. In Landau's films, he's done extensive interviews with Fidel Castro in Cuba and Zapatista leader Comandante Marcos in Chiapas. He's exposed the tragedy of the U.S. government's testing of atomic weapons and the zealous agenda of the religious right.

Why is the Rothko Chapel getting involved in such political activity? For those who didn't know, as wonderful as the space of the Rothko Chapel is for meditation, art and contemplation are not their only functions. The second part of the mission of this 30-year-old, nonprofit institution is: "Action in which programming is dedicated and designed to promote inter-communal (racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious) understanding and harmony based upon respect for the individual and the protection of human rights."

In articulating their vision for the festival, they write: "Remembering Mickey Leland's good works while celebrating Saul Landau's continued cinematic accomplishments provide Houstonians with an aesthetic experience which focuses on continued concerns of the human conscience. Rothko Chapel founder, Mrs. Dominique de Menil, stated, 'What should move us to action is human dignity, the inalienable dignity of the oppressed, but also the dignity of each. We lose dignity if we tolerate the intolerable.'"

Who better to interview Saul Landau than fellow Pacifican Ray Hill, whose Friday night institution "The Prison Show" just celebrated its 20th anniversary? -Ann Walton Sieber

Ray Hill: What do you think about filmmaking as a medium of...revolution?
Saul Landau: I think making films is a craft and an art. I mean it depends upon having a good idea and having the art and skill to carry out that idea successfully so that it conveys to a public a meaning that is much larger than the pasted pictures and sound.

And if it doesn't, you've paid your money and gotten your thrills and chills or enjoyed vicarious sex and adventure or whatever it is you pay for whenever you go into the moviehouse. And you leave your credibility at the box office along with your six or seven dollars.

But we're in the age now where images prevail. Images are crucial to the central value of our culture. Can you try to imagine shopping without images to provoke shopping? I mean if I were to write the philosophical statement of our times, I guess it would be, "I shopped, therefore I am." And images, of course, are part of this.

But these are commercial images that are designed to illicit desire; they're part of the desire production machinery. And if you want to make films that transcend this, one has to both accept the conditioning that the commercial culture has given to people, and at the same time try to transcend it. So that's what we try to do.

You made The Jail in 1972, and those images still work. Do you have any comment about the power of the durability of those images?
Well, first of all, we made The Jail in black and white. We did that for two reasons. One, because it was cheap, and we didn't have any money, and my friend Jack Willis had all these cans of black-and-white negative stashed in his closet from some film he'd made in 1966. But secondly, we decided that you could better portray the cruelty and the savagery of such an institution in black and white than you could in color, which tends to prettify things. Somebody said black-and-white photography is like painting with light-you can show the starkness of an institution like the jail. That's what we tried to do, present the images of incredible loneliness and despair, brutality, anger. And not just in the prison-I mean the guards are part and parcel of that world, as I think the film shows.

While you were filming that in a San Francisco jail in the punk wing (the punk wing being the venacular here in Texas for the gay wing), I was living in a punk wing in a Texas prison.... Why did you begin and end this film in the punk wing, as well as spend a lot of time there?
Well, first of all, we were fascinated. And we thought this would make the best picture. And it also showed, I think, some of the realities. Because some of the guys that came in there were like elephant males. They were just so heavily scented with testosterone. These were like the most male of the animals that I could imagine. And as soon as they got into jail they found themselves what they called a queen. Which I mean showed how strong the drive is, not just for sex, but to have that kind of close human contact. So these queens played a real function inside the jail and that was one of the things we were trying to show. And the second thing is that they made good pictures. They did little plays in their cells....

And they could sing.... Did you anticipate what you found, or was that as much a surprise to you as it is to the viewer?
Well, let me back up a little. The way I got really motivated to make that film was by spending a night in jail.... I got busted for drugs and was thrown into...well, first they put you in this holding cell with about 35, 40 other people and you find out the myth of the phone call. You don't get a phone call. I mean I was in there five hours before I could get near a phone. And then, just luckily, I happened to have the change, because no one would have given it to me, and it was a pay phone. And if I didn't have a couple of bucks to slip to the guard, I wouldn't have gotten to the phone at all. So you learn all these myths.

And everybody is on-the-job training, so to speak.
And there is incredible cruelty-people are thrown naked into the cell, some kid having a bad acid trip. People who were sick, along with drunks and people who were slightly overdosed on drugs...God only knows what they did. And then you're thrown into the cell and given that incredible slop which they call breakfast. And I said, Jeez, people ought to know about this. And luckily the sheriff at the time was a friend of mine. And so I said, Hey, don't you think you could get a bigger budget if we made a film and showed what the system needed and he said that was a great idea. He was disappointed because he didn't get a bigger role in the film, though.

Saul Landau: Looking Back to the Future will be presented: Fri., Sept. 22, 7 p.m.: Maquila: A Tale of Two Mexicos (NAFTA export economy along the U.S. border) and Losing Just the Same (a black family in Oakland). Panel discussion follows. --9:45 p.m.: Fidel (Fidel Castro and Cuba in the 1960s). Sat., Sept. 23, 6 p.m.: The Jail. Panel discussion follows. --8:30 p.m.: Quest for Power (the rise and agenda of the U.S. far right); and Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang (implications of U.S. government's nuclear policy and testing of atomic weapons). Panel discussion follows. Sun., Sept. 24, 5 p.m.: Uncompromising Revolution (Fidel Castro and Cuba in the 1980s) Q & A with Saul Landau follows.--7 p.m.: Brazil (firsthand accounts about the human rights record of Brazil's military dictatorship) and The Sixth Sun (the Maya in Chiapas). For more info call the Rice Media Center film line 713/348-4853, or Rothko Chapel at 713/524-9839.