TV REVIEW : Dreaming of Change in ‘States of Mind’

Think of PBS’ ambitious new series, “States of Mind,” as a sprawling collage encompassing contemporary U.S. cities and towns--places that become stages on which the American Dream careens head-on into the American Reality.

Do not think of “States of Mind” as another production of slick info-documents or journalistic investigations. The six parts of the seven-part series, airing on KCET Channel 28 in three two-hour segments tonight (at 9 and 10) through Wednesday (KCET will air part seven, “Moment of Sacrifice,” Aug. 9 at 10 p.m.), are made as personal impressions of a time and a place.

They may be on video, but the pieces of “States of Mind” have more in common with the poetic, expansive film documentaries of Stefan Jarl or Joris Ivens than the usual PBS hot-topic report.

Interestingly, the size of the place depicted has a notable effect on the segments this reviewer screened (the first four, plus part six, “Mill City”). While the opener, Russell English’s “Crisis in Philadelphia,” has real difficulty focusing on the large, pressurized city, John Barnes’ “Shoshone” fluidly moves through every level of life in tiny Shoshone, Ida. Barnes also finds a clear backdrop: He enters town at the start of the Gulf War and leaves as local boys come home from the front. This is the Heartland, and it’s hurting.

That’s the word for Part 4, directed by Penny Woolcock, on Christian rapturists in Misty Terrace, W.Va.--”The Hurting Church.” A pregnant woman remarks at one point that when she thinks of America, she thinks of poverty. What’s amazing isn’t her thought, but that her poor, struggling family members can’t understand why she’d think that way.

It reflects one of the most immediate connections between the various sections of “States of Mind”: A widespread cognitive dissonance between what is hoped for and what is lived, between wants and needs.

Nick Godwin’s “Mill City,” for example, skillfully shows the lean existences of loggers and their families as well as the desires of environmentalists to protect old-growth forest. The result is an inclusive picture of people who all need the forest and want to work--and yet cannot rise above their immediate disagreement. The rapturists of “The Hurting Church” are painful to watch, precisely because the gap between their vision of pie-in-the-sky heaven and lives of jobless desperation is so enormous.

But, as in Jarl’s best work decrying ecological destruction, sheer injustice seems to bring out the best in the makers of “States of Mind.” Director Carolyn Hales’ despair at the dire fate of a largely Latino neighborhood facing impeding developments and freeway expansion on Denver’s north side makes the third segment, “Stories of Elyria,” a tiny masterpiece of activist video-making. Hales may indulge in didactic effects (close-ups of rich white developers eating their lunch), but, with superb editing and Paul Conly’s music as an eerie supporting chorus, she creates something that sadly may last beyond the dying community itself.

She also shows means of survival and renewal: How Tony Garcia’s local El Centro Su Teatro brings people together for theater works that show heroes battling the devil, or how activist-mother Barbara Smith’s fights to clean her street of drug-dealers in “Crisis in Philadelphia.” When you put these various “States of Mind” together--especially when seen alongside the Democrats’ party in Madison Square Garden--they help explain how the current national fracturing can run alongside the current national insurgency for some kind, any kind, of change. People in pain keep dreaming.