What's up docs

Now I’ve got the prompt I need to write up another long composite post -- a jumping-up-and-down recommendation for a recent documentary.  I loved Finding Vivian Maier (MC-75, NFX), but perhaps I over-identified with the subject, by reason of class status, artistic endeavor, and lifelong obscurity.  Vivien Maier was a nanny and caregiver who was also an obsessive photographer, taking hundreds and hundreds of rolls of film, and never showing her pictures to anyone.  She was also a hoarder, and a crank verging on mental illness, but she certainly belongs in a pantheon of street photographers that includes Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Weegee, as well as Joel Meyerowitz and Mary Ellen Mark, who comment intimately on her work.  John Maloof is the young man who happened to buy at auction a random box of negatives and discovered the work of an unseen artist, just about at the time of her death, which allowed him to corner the market on Maier’s photographs.  He co-directs this movie in both celebration and exploitation of this cache of unsung work.  The question of whether this benefits or betrays the intention of the artist is one of many interesting themes this film touches upon.  You could take it as a slick piece of self-promotion, cashing in on someone who was the antithesis of self-promoter, or you could revel in the revelation of a powerful but unknown body of work.  The film follows the successful template of Searching for Sugar Man to tell a crowd-pleasing but troubling story of a lost artist redeemed, in this case posthumously and with many attendant questions of ethics, aesthetics, and value, as well as mysteries of personality and fate.  Plus, the photographs are truly great.  Find Vivian Maier! – that’s as close as I’ll ever come to an order.  Check out some of her work here, then see the movie, and then decide whether you agree it constitutes a genuine discovery.

First Cousin Once Removed (MC-94, NFX) is another great find.  I recommend all of Alan Berliner’s films but his latest is not a bad way to start.  Instead of focusing on himself or his immediate family, this film follows the progressive dementia of the eponymous relative.  That Edwin Honig had been a distinguished poet and translator makes the gradual extinguishing of his light even more poignant.  Filmmaking does not get more intimate and thoughtful than this.  As sad as the poor man’s decline may be, the film remains respectful, clever, and even witty, a Berliner trademark.

I’ve been planning this round-up of the best recent documentaries since the time of the Oscars, so I’ll start with what was named Best Documentary Feature, 20 Feet from Stardom (MC-83, NFX), which I really enjoyed, as the most ingratiating of the nominees, again following last year’s winner, Sugar Man.  This time the artists being rediscovered, celebrated, and given their due, were a number of female back-up singers, mostly from the Motown era.  Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer, and the others were (and are) powerful artists in their own right, but had the special knack of backing up some of the defining acts of the time.  Most of these ladies came out of gospel and put the soul in Soul music, but there was only room for one Aretha in the business, so for most of their careers they labored at the distance suggested by the title.  Morgan Neville’s film shines the limelight on them, and they more than fill the stage.  Might be enraging, if it weren’t so entertaining.

[click through to read commentary on a score of recent recommendable documentaries]

Two other pop music docs are worthy of note.  After fifty years, I thought I was all Beatled out, but darned if I wasn’t taken with Good Ol’ Freda (MC-60, NFX).  Freda Kelly was the Beatles’ personal secretary and fan club manager for virtually the whole time they were together; now she’s an amiable but slightly dowdy grandmother and still a secretary, and this is anything but a behind-the-scenes tell-all.  The combination of being so close to the red hot center of celebrity when so young, and now so modest and unassuming, makes for a character study more interesting than mere gossip would have been.  And the Beatles era is evoked in a way I could relate to.

I also found Muscle Shoals (MC-75, NFX) more engaging than I expected.  Just giving it a chance on streaming video, I wound up watching it all, for the unlikely story of a small music studio in backwoods Alabama, with an alarmingly-white back-up band that powered some great Soul music, behind the likes of Percy Sledge and Aretha Franklin, not to mention the Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd. 

Cutie & the Boxer (MC-82, NFX) was another Oscar nominee, for reasons lost on me, though I certainly didn’t mind spending some time with this pair of characters, Ushio and Noriko Shinohara, Japanese artists married and living in NYC for forty years.   Zachary Heinzerling’s well-made film shifts cannily from the “Boxer,” who makes large expressionist action paintings by punching the canvas in a frenzy, with sponges full of paint on his gloves, to “Cutie” -- her graphic novel depiction of a life spent serving a drunken egomaniacal artist being animated, to focus on the feminine situation in any artistic couple.  It’s funny but also provocative, certainly something I could show at the Clark, if ever there’s a slot for it.

 Even more so, Tim’s Vermeer (MC-76, NFX), which is entertaining, informative, and intriguing.  Made by the comic magic duo Penn and Teller, the documentary follows a mad inventor, Tim Jenison, on a marvelous quest to duplicate a Vermeer painting, despite not being a painter at all.  The meticulous step-by-step process forms the thread of the story, but it’s embroidered delightfully with interviews and commentary, by the likes of David Hockney, whose ideas inform the project.  The film vindicates, if not proves, the theory that Vermeer used optical tools to create the remarkably life-like qualities of light that make his paintings astounding to this day.  It’s a ramifying reflection on artistic vision and technique, both authentic and fake.

Back to the rest of the Oscar nominees:  Jehane Noujaim’s The Square (MC-84, NFX) reviews recent Egyptian history from various perspectives that converge on Tahrir Square in Cairo, about which I felt informed but not especially enlightened.  She introduces us to a diverse and engaging group of revolutionaries, and takes a ground-level, in-the-moment view of developments from the fall of Mubarak to the overthrow of Morsi.  But of necessity the film lacks resolution, as history plays out.  It’s enough just to have a window on political change, without knowing how it will all end.

I applaud Dirty Wars (MC-76, NFX) for bringing essential -- if unwanted -- news about the endless and ever-ramifying “war on terror,” including Special Forces night raids and drone strikes against Muslims.  With a policy that is counter-productive in essence, creating more terrorists than it kills, with awful “collateral damage” to civilians, and to our standing in the world – it would be nice to think that Obama is doing what he can to rein this strategy in, but this film makes the opposite case.  The argument would be cleaner if Richard Rowley’s documentary eschewed thriller tropes, and did not come across as so much a vanity project for investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill.

It took a long while to steel myself for viewing the final “Best Documentary” nominee, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (MC-89, NFX), in which aging “gangsters” – self-defined as “free men” -- re-live and re-enact the mass extermination of “Communists” in Indonesia after 1965, when young gang members and paramilitaries went on officially-sanctioned and U.S.-supported killing sprees that left up to a million people dead.  No truth and reconciliation process here, but the unrepentant and still government-supported killers making a movie about their exploits, based on the American films that inspired them in the first place, campy and violent at the same time.  The whole process is jaw-dropping and beyond creepy, profoundly disturbing and yet strangely compelling.

Of course, one doesn’t need to look abroad for horrifying stories that need to be told.  Two that speak volumes about the African-American experience, and the persistent stain of racism, are Central Park Five (MC-79, NFX) and Let the Fire Burn (MC-86, NFX).  The former is a horror story with a relatively happy ending, as Ken Burns (without his signature style, but with his daughter Sarah and her husband David McMahon) follows the story of five black youths railroaded for the brutal rape of a young female investment banker who was jogging in Central Park, feeding into the fearful white fantasy of “wilding” black gangs, and the age-old terror of interracial sex.  The teenagers were convicted in 1989 on the basis of coerced confessions, released in 2002, and last year finally awarded compensation for those years of wrongful incarceration.  This film makes that sequence of events eminently understandable, but no less outrageous.

The same may be said of Let the Fire Burn, directed by Jason Osder, which revisits the infamous fire set by Philadelphia police in 1985.  Designed to smoke out a presumed nest of radical blacks called MOVE, it burned down a whole middle-class neighborhood, killing five children and six adults.  Entirely composed of artfully and intelligently edited archival footage, newsreels, and post-disaster commission hearings, this film is devastating and convincing, and totally relevant to this day, when “Let the fire burn” might well be the motto of the nation’s dominant political party.

Two recent films offer an alternative view from the Left.  Martin Scorsese co-directed the HBO documentary The 50 Year Argument (MC-80, NFX), which looks at the history of the New York Review of Books.  My favorite parts were the interviews with people whose faces were unfamiliar, though I had been reading their words for decades.  The whole was less than the sum of its parts.  More pungent, and more focused, while covering some of the same ground was Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia (MC-72, NFX), especially the storied feud between Vidal and Norman Mailer, or between Vidal and William Buckley, or between Vidal and nearly everybody.  He’s a guy who set out to be provocative, but in a rational manner that is persuasive more often than not.  This film is a fitting obituary to an outsized literary talent and incisive contrarian intellect.

Of two aquatic themed documentaries, I appreciated one more than expected and the other much less.  I found Blackfish (MC-83, NFX) a reasonable piece of cetacean advocacy, unlike 2009 Oscar winner The Cove, which struck me as quite dubious.  Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s compelling case against the abuse of orcas by Sea World is convincing without being coercive, horrific without laying it on too thick.  Is a killer whale aptly named, or is it driven insane by captivity?   This film offers the forensics to make up your own mind.

On the other hand, I found Leviathan (MC-81, NFX) quite unwatchable on several tries, despite critical raves -- and unlike Sweetgrass, a previous film out of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab.  The earlier film observed without comment a sheep drive in Montana; this one observes a fishing trawler out of New Bedford, but here the prolonged and inexplicably-framed observations smack of the phantasmagorical, more sensory overload than contemplative exercise.

Here are two films in which good documentarians are repeating themselves to lesser effect.  Doug Block’s superb 51 Birch Street delved deep into his parents’ marriage, while 112 Weddings (MC-74, HBO) revisits that number of nuptials, which he has filmed over the years, and interviews some selected couples years after the event, to see the relation between the hopes of the wedding day and the reality of married life.  It’s all well-done and interesting enough, but not nearly as profound as his earlier work. 

The same may be said of Errol Morris’s profile of Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known (MC-69, NFX), which cannot match his portrait of Robert McNamara in The Fog of War.  Where McNamara was reflective and repentant, Rumsfeld remains totally pleased with himself, in his would-be wit and horrible decisions as Secretary of Defense.  Whether you see Rumsfeld as successfully defending his actions, or unconsciously revealing the roots of his disastrous decision-making and complete obliviousness to the results, will depend on your views going in, since his façade is unruffled as Morris allows him to have his own say, with a minimum of editorial interpretation.  

Peter Nicks’s The Waiting Room (MC-84, NFX) takes us into the emergency room of an Oakland hospital in the fly-on-the-wall style of Frederick Wiseman, for an unpolemical look at the realities of American healthcare. 

But for me, the exciting news is that some of Wiseman’s own films are finally becoming readily available on DVD.  Each of his more than forty films is a well-rounded and meticulously-compiled portrait of an institution.  At Berkeley (2013, MC-81, NFX, 244 min) deals exhaustively but not exhaustingly with all the facets of a major public university.  La Danse (2009, MRQE-80, NFX, 158 min.) looks at the Paris Opera Ballet from every angle imaginable, and Crazy Horse (2012, MC-72, NFX, 134 min.) does the same for a different sort of dance, the arty nude ecdysiasts at the eponymous Parisian nightclub, with a lot more visual pizzazz than is common in Wiseman’s films.  Domestic Violence (2002, MC-82, NFX, 196 min.) takes us inside a Tampa shelter for abused women and children, where in group sessions the women are remarkably able to articulate their dilemmas in dealing with abuse.  As Wiseman approaches his 85^th birthday, he’s still going strong, having just released National Gallery (MC-90, NFX, 180 min.), which I long to see and would love to show at the Clark sometime.