Docs advice

Feeling a little wan and anxious, maybe suffering from a truth-deficiency? Not getting enough fact and truth in your media diet?  I’m here to affirm to you that documentaries worthy of the name enable an encounter with realities that would otherwise fall outside one’s ken.  Melding entertainment and education in the broadest sense of each term, nonfiction films are a vehicle for learning, but moreover a vehicle for seeing and feeling.  Here are a number of genuine examples of Grierson’s originating definition of “documentary film” – “the creative treatment of actuality.”

If Frederick Wiseman were not still around at the age of 90, having just brought out another acclaimed film (City Hall, specifically Boston’s), Steve James would be easy to cite as the greatest American documentarian working today.  His latest is City So Real (MC-93, Hulu), a five-part series that follows the 2019 election for mayor of Chicago, as 14 candidates make the ballot to vie for the Democratic nomination, after Rahm Emanuel declines to run for a third term.  The surprise winner (which will I will not spoil, in case you happen not to be up on Midwestern urban politics) is then confronted in the final episode by 2020’s overlapping crises of pandemic and racial unrest.  The variety of candidates offers entry into a wide range of situations and institutions, and Steve James, as a longtime Chicagoan, nods to its reputation as a city of neighborhoods by beginning each scene with a map of the city, highlighting the name and location of the neighborhood depicted.  So this is a vast yet intimate canvas(s) of the city.  I’m not going to describe any of the characters or twists of the story, but urge you to follow along as the pageant unfolds, through campaign events and church services, board room meetings and street actions, bars and barbershops, door-to-door encounters and penthouse salons.  Beyond astute sociological analysis (and humor!), this series offers a parable of democracy in action.  There is no better bard of Chicago than James, from his groundbreaking Hoop Dreams through The Interrupters and Life Itself to his previous outstanding tv series, America to Me, all of which I urgently recommend.  Even when he wanders away to NYC’s Chinatown for the postscript to the 2008 financial meltdown, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, you are guaranteed a viewing experience that will make you feel as well as learn.  Steve James is a filmmaker to watch.

Reviewing his filmography, I noticed one I had missed, done for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series.  No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson (2010) may be James’s most personal film (though Stevie is another example),  James uses the first-person approach to dig deep into the racial divides of his hometown, Hampton VA, where high school hoops star A.I. was thrown in jail after a bowling alley brawl with whites.  The case drew national attention and eventually led to clemency from the governor, and Iverson went on to stardom at Georgetown and in the NBA.  But two decades later, the divisive spectacle still rankles on both sides of Hampton’s color line.  James’ father was a big Iverson fan, but his mother supported the hoopster’s conviction and sentence (15 years! though eligible for parole in 10 months).  The story is old, but the resonance is oh-so-contemporary.

Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me (MC-87, AMZ) is not exactly a one-woman show or a documentary, but a Tony- and Pulitzer- nominated play that has been filmed by the suddenly ubiquitous Marielle Heller.  Whom I’m reminded of most, and this constitutes high praise, is Hannah Gadsby, as Schreck combines personal experience and energetic humor into an honest and trenchant lecture on political and social concerns.  As a 15-year-old Schreck had earned scholarship money by going around to American Legion halls and competing for speeches on the title topic.  Decades later, she jumps off from her teenage words into personal and constitutional history, and the interweavings thereof.  Discussing the 9^th and 14^th amendments in detail, she covers issues like citizenship and immigration, women’s rights and domestic abuse.  Near the end, she brings in other voices, a gay man and two teenage black girls, to debate whether the constitution should be retained and amended, or rewritten from scratch, a proposition on which the audience then votes.  The whole thing is educational, funny, and even moving.

Strictly for a special taste and history, which I confess to sharing, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (MC-68, AMZ) was a rare delicacy, like that Japanese fish that can kill you if you’re not careful.  A movie about a film critic, who’d-a thunk it?  But in her 24-year tenure in that role at The New Yorker, Kael was a cultural force to be reckoned with.  For me personally, most often adversarily.  I tended to stand with the Stanley Kauffmanns and John Simons of this small world.  Even Andrew Sarris made more sense.  But Pauline Kael was provocative, a sharp blade to parry with.  Living in NYC in the mid-70s, I’d rush home from a new movie, to pick up her review and argue with it into the night, pricked by her misguided but well-articulated views.  So Rob Garver’s documentary was for me a warm bath of cinephiliac nostalgia, with maybe a shard of broken wineglass in the tub.  I enjoyed seeing all the talking heads, familiar faces and those I could finally put to a byline, but especially I liked the constant stream of very short clips from films, which illustrated or commented upon the intervening dialogue, while providing a pop-quiz mini-history of cinema during Kael’s reign.  (It put me in mind of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a 24-hour compilation of film clips, in each of which a clock appears exactly matching the viewer’s time; as a museum installation, you’re free to wander in and out, take a soft seat, and watch time pass by, while also taking a trip down cinematic memory lane.)

 
Anyway, one of my pandemic lockdown projects was to go through my shelves of film books, and among those I set aside for future donation to the local library’s second-hand bookstore, was a shelf of critics’ compilations – Kael, Kauffmann, Simon, and all but a select few volumes.  I did keep two Library of America anthologies, American Movie Critics edited by Philip Lopate (he’s in the doc), and a Kael selection called The Age of Movies.  Too bad these old reviews are not searchable online, but it’s unfeasibly cumbersome to find the relevant volume, then look in the index, then flip to the review, after one has been spoiled by finding any wanted text with a few clicks.  And frankly, by now I’m mostly interested in formulating and expressing my own opinion about films rather than arguing with someone else’s.  I still enjoy the simulated conversation of checking Metacritic or MRQE reviews, but usually after I’ve written my own, having checked facts and credits on Wikipedia.

Lately I’ve developed a non-culinary fascination with mushrooms, finding and photographing striking examples.  I’m currently reading a highly entertaining and informative book called Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, so I was anxious enough to see Fantastic Fungi (MC-70, Vudu) to actually pay-per-view (only $5, or $1.67 each for three viewers), even though it will probably soon join the rest of Louie Schwartzberg’s “Moving Art” series on Netflix.  I loved the time-lapse sequences of growing mushrooms, and much of the animation was illuminating (though as frequently the case with nature documentaries, I wish they labeled the film speed or means of illustration).  But after the halfway point, the film takes a bit of a turn from the scientific (and pictorial) to woo-woo speculations about the anthropology of magic mushrooms and the resumption of psychedelic research as the war on drugs wanes.  Some nice kaleidoscopic mandala sequences to go with the white coats from Johns Hopkins.  But it’s hard not to come away with some belief in mushrooms as the salvation of earth and its humans, or at least partners in their survival.