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The butterfly ballot on the big screen

By Peter Crimmins Special to the Daily Planet
Friday November 01, 2002

If voters gearing up for the election Tuesday have forgotten problematic butterfly ballots and dimpled chads, then a new documentary screening Saturday, at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival, will bring it all back. 

Exhaustively investigated, “Unprecedented: the 2000 Presidential Election” is chock full of information about how the electoral process broke down in Florida two years ago when President Bush’s victory hinged on a few hundred hand-counted ballots. But, for better or worse, filmmakers Richard Ray Perez and Joan Sekler are clearly biased against Republicans, and their film stumbles over itself in laying out the gory details of underhanded election poll tactics. 

The film comes in the second half of the marathon festival produced by the East Bay Media Center, which assembled 45 videos and films (all screened via video projector) to be presented back-to-back for 12 hours at the Fine Arts Cinema beginning noon Saturday. Tickets allow in and out privileges, and the full half-day of movies includes narratives and documentaries as long as 94 minutes, and experimental works and shorts as brief as one minute. 

“Unprecedented” spends most of its 80 minutes scrutinizing Florida’s polling system with a magnifying glass. The contest it uncovers is not between Bush and then-candidate Al Gore, or even Republicans and Democrats. The 2000 election in Florida was a debate over the rules of election process versus the spirit of voter intention. 

The film begins well before the ballots were cast. The voter eligibility roles in Florida were purged of thousands of names via a little-known Florida law revoking the right of ex-cons to vote. As evidenced in the film, the private database company hired by the state of Florida to create the voter roles was instructed to match the names of voters with the names of felons using very general parameters.  

When the company protested that the database parameters would create “false positives,” meaning people would be improperly purged from the voter list, state election officials, overseen by Secretary of State Katherine Harris, instructed them to continue purging voters. When county officials in Tallahassee checked the 690 names purged from their voter lists, only 33 were confirmed ex-cons. 

After the ballots were cast and the recount began, the film passes indictments on Harris, who had earlier campaigned for President Bush in New Hampshire. During the recount, Harris established non-negotiable deadlines for the counties to present their results while Democrat and Republican observers lobbied for favors in determining the intention of each chad – the little square of punched paper on a voting card that determines a selection.  

The film dives headfirst into the battle of the wonks with accounts of very dense political and legal spinning. The final decision of the Supreme Court to favor the technical rules of polling over the intention of the voter is moved by quickly and is poorly described at the end of the film. However, it ends on a high note: the American people now have a deeper understanding of how our democracy is run, even if they might need to carefully watch this film two or three times in order to understand it fully. 

“Unprecedented” screens in the later half of the festival’s schedule, at 8 p.m., when the longer and better-produced films are clumped. The stylistic range of filmmaking is as broad as the difference of running times. Longtime festival entrant Hoku Uchiyama, former Albany High School student now attending film school in Los Angeles, created a handful of short, roughly produced videos of awkwardness and sadism, one featuring a homicidal teenage Santa Claus impersonator. 

At 9:30, during festival primetime, “Crazy Jones” will be played; a quirky, feature-length drama about a 40-year-old recluse with Tourette’s syndrome who tries to break out of his suicidal shell with the help of a perky 12-year-old girl. First time director Joe Aaron wore several hats – lead actor, writer, producer and director – and used the latest cinema technology to make this film.  

“Crazy Jones” is one of the first films to be shot on high-definition video; its 24P HD video system is the same technology George Lucas is using to shoot his Star Wars films, and with 1080 pixels per square inch it has a resolution comparable to celluloid. “Crazy Jones” is able to get a subtle lighting and visual depth that most video works can’t approach. 

Another visually arresting film in the festival is the documentary “Mighty Times; the Life of Rosa Parks” which tells the historical story of the infamous Alabama bus boycott that launched the Civil Rights Movement. Filmmakers Robert Hudson and Bobby Huston matched 1955 archives of police actions and demonstrations with dramatic re-enactments.  

Unlike Aaron’s crisp, high-tech HD video images in “Crazy Jones,” Hudson and Huston sought to make their film look 50 years old. Using vintage cameras and old film stock, they recreated the afternoon Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus with amazing fidelity to old cinema technology. The archival footage and the re-enactments are woven together seamlessly.