Outsider’s inner city

One of the most startling things about the United States for many Europeans is the penury and squalor that is the underreported dark side of the American Dream.

When London-based documentary filmmaker Sophie Fiennes traveled to Los Angeles for the first time, it was to visit her brother Ralph on the set of “Strange Days.” She had friends in Los Feliz and a boyfriend in Topanga Canyon. But her curiosity led her to Chinatown and Little Tokyo, Koreatown and South-Central., where she was so transfixed by Bishop Noel Jones’ (brother of Grace) Greater Bethany Community Church that she decided to make a film about it.

“Hoover Street Revival” is a thoughtful, non-journalistic documentary about gospel in an American ghetto and the search for meaning in a modern world. In it, Fiennes intersperses Jones’ charismatic sermons and his choir’s extraordinary performances with scenes from the lives of church community members. The film was scheduled to open July 4 in Britain and will have its Los Angeles premiere at American Cinematheque on Tuesday in the presence of the church community. “I was so shocked in L.A. about how absolutely divided that city is,” Fiennes says over lunch in Paris, where she had come to screen the movie last November. “For me the least interesting thing is Beverly Hills. L.A., like New York -- these huge, massive urban sprawls in America -- they fill you with paradoxical feelings of wonder and total forlornness, and the sort of tragedy of the human species.”

In 1999, Fiennes met with Jones, telling him she was an independent filmmaker with no money but a dream to make a film that would capture the physical energy and spirit of the church -- not a personality profile of Jones but a way for audiences to know what it felt like to be a member of the congregation. “I didn’t want to do that thing of ‘We’re the media, so we’ll get special access!’ ” she says. (There is only one behind-the-scenes glimpse of Jones’ pre-ceremony, gearing himself up for a service and having his blood pressure checked.) “I didn’t say, ‘I want to film you at your house and interview Grace.’ It was something different. He was like ‘Wow, that’s very ambitious. I’m pretty curious to see what you can do.’ And he never tried to control it.”

Fiennes left school at 16. “My mother said, ‘If you want to do anything creative, don’t go to university, because it will make you a critic,’ ” she says. “I knew I wanted to make films, but my sister Martha was doing a film course and she told me that I couldn’t copy her,” she says, laughing, “and I said ‘OK, I’ll go the other way, I’ll start sweeping the floor, I’ll do that route.’ ”

She landed a job with director Peter Greenaway at age 19 and over the next 4 1/2years worked as everything from a runner to researcher to assistant director. “We got on very well, and I was fascinated by what he did,” she says. “When I started making my own work, it was very different from his, but I learned a huge amount practically. Having a very strong background when there was no money is a great bonus in making my own stuff.”

Next, she worked as a producer for avant-garde, formerly drug-addicted dancer-choreographer Michael Clark. Working with live performance, Fiennes says, “was thrilling, because you could change it as you performed it. I found that even if I didn’t know about choreography, I could totally read the language and engage in it.”

Clark recovered from his drug problem and Fiennes directed her first film -- a performance-heavy documentary she called “The Late Michael Clark” -- for the BBC in 1999. She then made a short film on Danish director Lars von Trier that went to Sundance. Fiennes says that rather than trying to pin down Clark, she used “huge chunks of dance” to talk about him, a technique she employs in “Hoover Street Revival,” in which she does not interview Jones, letting his sermons do the talking instead. “He would never let you in, but what you could find out about him was really in his dance,” she says of Clark. “But the relationship between the performance and his life, that was something.

“I thought, ‘That church in L.A. -- what will happen if I take the performance of the sermons in church and I make a kind of bigger, broader picture of that community -- but use something that is overtly spoken and verbal, whereas dance is mute?’ So it was a progression.”

Guileless in L.A.

Fiennes shot the movie on DVD in a five-month period that included three six-week visits to L.A. between spring 2000 and winter 2001. She shot the sermons and church music, people talking in their bedrooms, the view from the ice cream man’s truck and a homeless woman proudly showing off the contents of her handbag. The guileless, bright-eyed Fiennes went on two LAPD ride-alongs and a helicopter ride where she captured a God’s-eye view of the city. And she shot an elderly woman in her easy chair asking, “Why the blacks got a curse on them? That’s one answer I want to know.” “People would say to me, ‘You’re going down there?’ ” she says, “like I was going into some kind of war zone. People really think of South-Central like it’s a war zone. The thing about L.A. is, it’s not like I saw hostility on the street -- there aren’t obvious signals. I mean I’ve been mugged at knifepoint in London. I never felt that I would ever be attacked in L.A.”

On her first day of shooting, a striking and assertive woman from the congregation named Jessie Tarayan approached her and quickly became both her unofficial bodyguard and a liaison with the community, as well as appearing on camera. “She drove me everywhere,” Fiennes says. “She would say to me, ‘Sophie, don’t think that it’s not dangerous just because you can’t see it. I can see things that you can’t see.’ ”

Most people left her alone, she says: “In L.A. it was like they just thought I was the police because I was white, or I was drug squad, or I was maybe a social worker or something.” The only trouble they almost got into was when a couple of guys tried to finagle a look at her video camera, claiming they wanted to make movies too. “I said ‘Actually it doesn’t work here in America, it’s European -- it’s actually a different system.’ ” Which, in her charming British accent, appears to have fooled them. Then Jessie asked them to open her Snapple bottle, giving the women time to scramble into the car and drive off.

Fiennes says that the real tension came from listening to people’s stories. “When you hear that their mother was shot in front of them when they were 17 or they were raped by their stepfather and they had a baby that they’ve never seen,” she says, “so many people’s lives were so frightening, scarred -- and how do you recover emotionally from that? I could drive away literally back up the 110 to wherever I was staying. But how could you not be absorbing for a minute how desperate some of those lives are?”

The movie begins with one of those difficult lives -- a grandmother bringing up her crack addict daughter’s five children in a one-bedroom house. “She shares a bed, she’s all of 70, she’s already raised a whole family herself,” Fiennes says. “She’s got custody, why does she not have a bigger room? But she’s making sure they have a great Christmas. I mean, where is the support for Mother Wilder? I don’t see it.”

Fiennes says she has a European’s skepticism of religion, but getting to know the community opened her eyes to the role of the church. “You do think, ‘Well, what’s being provided by the secular world for this community?’ ” she says. “You know, people black and white in London were really quite shocked by the life that people in L.A. were living. I’ve worked selling clothes and shoes and been a nanny, because I knew it was just a moment for me to get somewhere else. But in that community, there’s no sense of a further horizon for a lot of people. We can buy a kind of temporary buffer when we have money, but I think if people who do not consider themselves religious were suddenly stripped of this protection, they would be stamping their feet in the church too.”

She screened an early version of the film in May 2002 to about 60 members of the church congregation and Jones.

“They recognized how true it is to that community,” she says of the reaction. “I think it’s gonna be fantastic when we screen it for the whole church.”

Questions without answers

There are no happy endings in “Hoover Street Revival,” which raises plenty of questions -- and does not attempt to answer them.

“These are questions that don’t have answers,” Fiennes says. “How do we construe meaning to our lives when anything in life can happen, when life is quite brutal actually? You can’t necessarily shake it all down to some convenient meaning. If you feel strong in one area, you feel crippled in another.”

The film has been shown at the London, Edinburgh and Locarno film festivals. But if audiences have been moved by the film, reviewers have been more critical. London’s Guardian wrote: “As a mosaic of a community in crisis, the film is forceful and revelatory. It is complemented by some superb aerial footage illustrating the nature of the sprawl.” It continued: “The film does have a major weakness, however: Its reluctance to explore any individual in detail means that it never really gets beneath the surface of things.”

Variety called “Hoover Street Revival” “a rambling, overlong portrait” of the church, saying it was “lacking any point of view.”

“I always feel like I have to kind of explain that actually I want to make something that’s an experience, this place as I’ve perceived it, as I’ve responded to it, as well as what comes my way in terms of material,” Fiennes says. “The thing that’s interesting about ‘Hoover Street Revival’ for Americans is that it’s a language which is very European -- the way it’s made, the way it’s seen. It’s not an American language, but it’s a very American subject.” This is perplexing, she says, to Americans “who think that documentaries should have a certain language. I think Noel Jones is an artist as well as a priest. It’s a brilliant performance, but it has amazing content.”

In one of Jones’ sermons, he says that to get what it is you really want, you have to be willing not to have anything -- a message that knows no socioeconomic boundaries. “I made the film on that basis!” Fiennes says. “Everyone’s been kind of hijacked by global consumerism, by the power of money. Because actually, it becomes so expensive to live in this first world, that everyone can’t afford to be free anymore. Because if you’re really going to be free, you’re going to already change your lifestyle.

“When I bought the flat for 57,000 pounds [about $90,000] in London, I thought, ‘Well, this will do for three years.’ And now I realize I’m gonna stay here as long as it gives me the freedom, because if I start buying a bigger place, having a mortgage, I’m already in the web, I’m already trapped.

“I’ve got a whole theory about coffee and why there’s Starbucks everywhere -- because we all have to be on drugs all the time to work so hard, to prop up this economy. We don’t have any time to think. I’m lucky because I’m not in a job -- I’m a free person and I take risks, so I can actually lie in bed and read all morning if I want to. When people say, ‘Were you scared in South-Central?’ I say, ‘No, I was scared when I had to deal with MTV and Viacom.’ ”

*

‘Hoover Street Revival’

When: Tuesday, 7:30 p.m.

Where: American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles

Price: $6 (Cinematheque members), $9 nonmembers.

Contact: (323) 466-3456