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‘Relative Obscurity’ pushes local filmmaker into the limelight
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BY: LILA HANFT Staff Reporter
Shaker Heights native Jeff Rosenberg’s first feature film debuts this weekend
Every adult remembers where they were or what they were doing when they heard about the events of September 11, 2001. But what if you had just arrived at college, a freshman, away from home for the first time and living among strangers? What impact would 9/11 have on your college experience and the kind of adult you became?
That interesting question is the premise of “Relative Obscurity,” the first feature-length film by Jeff Rosenberg and Par-T-Com, the “artistic collective” Rosenberg formed with friends while a student at Ohio University.
The film’s title comes from writer Franz Fanon, astute analyst of colonialism and its impact on the human psyche. “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it,” Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, his best-known work.
Rosenberg’s film opens with this seminal line, delivered with provocative energy by a charismatic African theater professor, played by real-life OU professor Esiaba Irobi, in whose class Rosenberg hatched the screenplay which became “Relative Obscurity.” Irobi threw the Fanon quote out as a challenge to his students, asking them to respond to the quote in writing.
“Most people wrote one or two pages, I wrote a 100 page screenplay,” Rosenberg told the CJN last year, just after filming was completed.
The screenplay evolved into a feature-length “ensemble film,” with seven main characters and “linking storylines, so I could hit on a lot of the issues people of my generation are grappling with,” says Rosenberg, son of Mary Rosenberg and Lester Rosenberg. “I wanted to make the definitive movie of my generation.”
Freshman year, Claire (Larisa Oleynick, “10 Things I Hate About You,” “The Secret World of Alex Mack”) returns to her dorm room too drunk to realize at first that she’s in the wrong room. After some flirtatious repartee with the room’s occupant, James (Jordan K. Kamp), Claire falls asleep, waking to the sound of James, his roommate Dylan (Eric Martig), and Dylan’s girlfriend Zoë (Danielle Puterbaugh) drawing tokes of marijuana through a huge bong.
“Where am I?” Claire asks, opening her eyes. “Heaven,” Dylan replies without missing a beat. There’s laughter. “This isn’t heaven,” Claire responds, frowning. “At least I don’t think it is.”
Then the phone rings, and they rush to the TV just in time to see the Twin Towers collapsing.
This dialogue repeats, in a very different context, four years later.
By senior year, these characters routinely dine on large servings of “I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up,” with side orders of apathy, fear and low self-esteem. (It’s a good thing these characters are likeable, or their complaints would be really irritating.)
The events and aftereffects of 9/11 seem to have rendered these seniors deaf, blind and mute in regard to the needs of others. They’re paralyzed by the certainty that there’s no way for them to make a positive impact in a post-9/11 world. When they do strike out, it is in all directions and with no real sense of what they’re doing.
The exception is Cofi, a beautiful, contemplative Ghanaian student who moves among the other characters like an angel among the damned. Perhaps because he’s not American, Cofi is the only character not paralyzed by apathy. Instead, he brings empathy and comfort to others.
Rosenberg says the character of Cofi was inspired by his freshman roommate, an African exchange student; he was created in response to a teacher’s challenge that “no white person has ever written a good African character.”
Owiso Odera (“Dirt,” “The Unit,” “Numb3rs”), the actor who plays Cofi, was one of three Rosenberg brought in from Hollywood (the others are Oylenik and character actor Jack Kelher as Bob). While the rest of the cast, all OU students or faculty, perform creditably (some show much promise), Odera is clearly a cut or two above. His Cofi steals the show even when silent and at rest.
Compensating for the performers’ inexperience is the professional quality of the photography and editing. Director of photography Devin Doyle and editor Spencer Houck, along with producer John Swartz and sound designer Jim Cartwright, are core members of Par-T-Com who have been working together since they were undergraduates. Honing their craft on short narrative films (including the seven-minute “Detonate,” which was awarded Best Film on Campus by judges Gus Van Sant, Allison Anders and Joel Schumacher) and commercial nonfiction films, the Par-T-Com group has won several awards at small film festivals.
Rosenberg is excited that “Obscurity” will debut at a film festival that is both so familiar and so prestigious. “Growing up, I used to be inspired every year by the talented artists who would descend on Northeast Ohio for the Film Festival,” he says. Now he hopes his film will inspire other would-be filmmakers.
“Relative Obscurity” is an ambitious movie that doesn’t quite deliver on all that it promises. I suspect that at age 25, Rosenberg simply hasn’t lived long enough to answer the film’s central question for these characters. But if the “Obscurity’s” ending isn’t as satisfying as one would hope, it doesn’t negate Rosenberg’s achievement. As was the case with Spike Lee’s debut film “She’s Got to Have It,” the film’s weaknesses never cast doubt on the filmmaker’s great potential.
Unlike the characters in “Relative Obscurity,” Rosenberg has a pretty good sense of his mission in life and how to fulfill it.
lhanft@cjn.org
“Relative Obscurity” is showing at the 31st Cleveland International Film Festival on Sat., March 24, at 7:15 p.m, and Sun., March 25, at 9:30 a.m. For more on the film festival, see p. 43 and visit www.cleveland film.org.
Every adult remembers where they were or what they were doing when they heard about the events of September 11, 2001. But what if you had just arrived at college, a freshman, away from home for the first time and living among strangers? What impact would 9/11 have on your college experience and the kind of adult you became?
That interesting question is the premise of “Relative Obscurity,” the first feature-length film by Jeff Rosenberg and Par-T-Com, the “artistic collective” Rosenberg formed with friends while a student at Ohio University.
The film’s title comes from writer Franz Fanon, astute analyst of colonialism and its impact on the human psyche. “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it,” Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, his best-known work.
Rosenberg’s film opens with this seminal line, delivered with provocative energy by a charismatic African theater professor, played by real-life OU professor Esiaba Irobi, in whose class Rosenberg hatched the screenplay which became “Relative Obscurity.” Irobi threw the Fanon quote out as a challenge to his students, asking them to respond to the quote in writing.
“Most people wrote one or two pages, I wrote a 100 page screenplay,” Rosenberg told the CJN last year, just after filming was completed.
The screenplay evolved into a feature-length “ensemble film,” with seven main characters and “linking storylines, so I could hit on a lot of the issues people of my generation are grappling with,” says Rosenberg, son of Mary Rosenberg and Lester Rosenberg. “I wanted to make the definitive movie of my generation.”
Freshman year, Claire (Larisa Oleynick, “10 Things I Hate About You,” “The Secret World of Alex Mack”) returns to her dorm room too drunk to realize at first that she’s in the wrong room. After some flirtatious repartee with the room’s occupant, James (Jordan K. Kamp), Claire falls asleep, waking to the sound of James, his roommate Dylan (Eric Martig), and Dylan’s girlfriend Zoë (Danielle Puterbaugh) drawing tokes of marijuana through a huge bong.
“Where am I?” Claire asks, opening her eyes. “Heaven,” Dylan replies without missing a beat. There’s laughter. “This isn’t heaven,” Claire responds, frowning. “At least I don’t think it is.”
Then the phone rings, and they rush to the TV just in time to see the Twin Towers collapsing.
This dialogue repeats, in a very different context, four years later.
By senior year, these characters routinely dine on large servings of “I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up,” with side orders of apathy, fear and low self-esteem. (It’s a good thing these characters are likeable, or their complaints would be really irritating.)
The events and aftereffects of 9/11 seem to have rendered these seniors deaf, blind and mute in regard to the needs of others. They’re paralyzed by the certainty that there’s no way for them to make a positive impact in a post-9/11 world. When they do strike out, it is in all directions and with no real sense of what they’re doing.
The exception is Cofi, a beautiful, contemplative Ghanaian student who moves among the other characters like an angel among the damned. Perhaps because he’s not American, Cofi is the only character not paralyzed by apathy. Instead, he brings empathy and comfort to others.
Rosenberg says the character of Cofi was inspired by his freshman roommate, an African exchange student; he was created in response to a teacher’s challenge that “no white person has ever written a good African character.”
Owiso Odera (“Dirt,” “The Unit,” “Numb3rs”), the actor who plays Cofi, was one of three Rosenberg brought in from Hollywood (the others are Oylenik and character actor Jack Kelher as Bob). While the rest of the cast, all OU students or faculty, perform creditably (some show much promise), Odera is clearly a cut or two above. His Cofi steals the show even when silent and at rest.
Compensating for the performers’ inexperience is the professional quality of the photography and editing. Director of photography Devin Doyle and editor Spencer Houck, along with producer John Swartz and sound designer Jim Cartwright, are core members of Par-T-Com who have been working together since they were undergraduates. Honing their craft on short narrative films (including the seven-minute “Detonate,” which was awarded Best Film on Campus by judges Gus Van Sant, Allison Anders and Joel Schumacher) and commercial nonfiction films, the Par-T-Com group has won several awards at small film festivals.
Rosenberg is excited that “Obscurity” will debut at a film festival that is both so familiar and so prestigious. “Growing up, I used to be inspired every year by the talented artists who would descend on Northeast Ohio for the Film Festival,” he says. Now he hopes his film will inspire other would-be filmmakers.
“Relative Obscurity” is an ambitious movie that doesn’t quite deliver on all that it promises. I suspect that at age 25, Rosenberg simply hasn’t lived long enough to answer the film’s central question for these characters. But if the “Obscurity’s” ending isn’t as satisfying as one would hope, it doesn’t negate Rosenberg’s achievement. As was the case with Spike Lee’s debut film “She’s Got to Have It,” the film’s weaknesses never cast doubt on the filmmaker’s great potential.
Unlike the characters in “Relative Obscurity,” Rosenberg has a pretty good sense of his mission in life and how to fulfill it.
lhanft@cjn.org
“Relative Obscurity” is showing at the 31st Cleveland International Film Festival on Sat., March 24, at 7:15 p.m, and Sun., March 25, at 9:30 a.m. For more on the film festival, see p. 43 and visit www.cleveland film.org.
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