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.

Docs around the clock

One reason I’ve been reviewing fewer fiction films lately is that I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries, and here I’m going to sort through a range of recommendations. Titles in bold are available on DVD from Netflix (or soon will be) and recommended by me. The others are worth looking for if you have a particular interest -- they may be found on the linked-to network schedules, or possibly On Demand..

First off is the recent documentary outing by feature director James Toback: Tyson (2009, MC-83). Like you, probably, I did not think I was all that interested in Mike Tyson, but I found this film almost hypnotizing in its formally inventive approach to film portraiture. Much of the film is Tyson himself speaking to the camera, in that incongruously high-pitched lisp, as if in self-reflection before an unseen therapist, but broken up into overlapping pictures and sound, which suggest the multiple facets of a divided self. He seems utterly believable in all his contradictions. There is enough footage recapitulating his career to establish that he might have been one of most powerful, if not the greatest, boxers of all time, and also to delineate his public disgrace in a rape conviction and prison term, plus the ignominious career-ending bout in which he bit the ear of his opponent. Tyson never goes quite so far as to plead, “I am not the animal you think I am,” but the film makes that case eloquently, and perhaps convincingly.

There are several stations worth monitoring for outstanding documentaries. Sundance Channel features Monday as Doc Day. I have been engrossed recently in the five-part (and perhaps continuing) series, Brick City, which portrays the city of Newark in much the same way that The Wire does Baltimore, though with more uplift and less crushing despair. In one of its aspects, this series from Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin picks up where the excellent documentary Street Fight leaves off, with the story of mayor Cory Booker, the media-savvy Obama avatar who is bringing hope to a city that is a byword for bleakness. Other threads include the story of a police commissioner brought in to lower the murder rate, and a gang girl gone good who is developing a mentoring program for other gang girls. If 90% of success is showing up, then the filmmakers are pretty much there, finding themselves in the middle of one amazing scene after another. One of the joys of documentary is deep-felt access into other people's lives, and this series has that in ... um, I want to say spades, but there are some honkies too.

“Real Sex” and “Taxicab Confessions” aside, HBO demonstrates a real commitment to quality documentaries, frequently featured on Mondays as well. From this link, you can get more information on these films, listed in order of the urgency of my recommendation. In Boy Interrupted, a filmmaking couple try to come to terms with the suicide of their teenage son, in a wrenching but not exploitive manner that is edifying to the viewer as well as cathartic for them. The Yes Men Save the World with media stunts like going on tv masquerading as a corporate spokesman to apologize and offer reparation for the health disaster of Bhopal -- they are inventive and funny and jaw-droppingly revealing of the ethos of big business. The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant watches the last vehicle come off a massive assembly line in Ohio, and reveals the mixed feelings of the laid-off workers who have devoted most of their lives to the disappearing workplace. Prom Night in Mississippi is a bit of a stunt but turns out to be revealing, as Morgan Freeman offers to pay for the first integrated prom in his small hometown, which catalyzes debate over the lingering legacy of racism but also suggests the hope of a new generation free of the hatreds of the past. The Nine Lives of Marion Barry is like Tyson in going some way toward rehabilitating a black man who has become notorious for bad behavior. The Recruiter is just as much about the recruited, as we follow a variety of Texas youth into the military and through basic training, in a film that could be taken as a prequel to Stop-Loss. (Not a documentary but a spinoff from a great one, HBO's Grey Gardens, with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange as the Bouvier daughter and mother, was not as superfluous as I imagined -- while some scenes were duplicated from the Maysles brothers' classic, the backstory is filled in and the actresses illuminate their characters -- and deserved the slew of Emmy nominations it picked up.)

PBS has long been a mainstay for documentaries, and they are a number of series I check regularly, foremost among them Independent Lens. Among the recent highlights are Herb & Dorothy, an absolutely delightful and fascinating look at the Vogels, a postal worker and librarian, who amassed an astounding collection of art from the Sixties on in their tiny Manhattan apartment, before three moving vans carted it away to the National Gallery -- I will look for the first opportunity to show this at the Clark. Butte, America mines fascinating archival footage and retrospective interviews to tell of the highly emblematic rise and fall of the "richest hill on earth," whose deposits of copper made the city boom, but whose mining companies went bust and left a legacy of environmental devastation.

Frontline is frequently worth checking out for extended treatment of important issues of the day, and Wide Angle is the same with an international perspective. Particularly notable from the latter is Time for School 3, which like the 7 Up series tracks a diverse group of children through time, ranging from an Afghan girl to a Brazilian boy, from a Romanian girl to a Kenyan boy. Initiated when an international accord promised a free education to every child in the world by 2015, this very well-done and affecting series periodically checks in on how that promise is being met or not in a variety of countries.

Two other venerable PBS series worth tuning into are American Experience and American Masters. Two episodes I've enjoyed lately are an old one of the former, A Midwife’s Tale, which uses an old diary and effectively minimal historical reenactments to offer a window on everyday life in colonial New England, and a recent broadcast on the latter, Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, which I didn't expect to watch, but caught while channelsurfing and remained caught by through its length -- I tend to think of Baez as a pretty voice covering other people's songs, but this film makes a case for her as a social activist who used singing as her most effective tool.

I've recently watched two other documentary dvds from Netflix that I commend to your attention. Kestrel’s Eye is a delight for birdbrains, offering a genuine bird's eye view of the lives of a family of hawks living in a cranny of an old Swedish church -- a spare but astonishing nature film, without narration or music, but with incredible camera angles and uncanny intimacy with the subject.

Many years ago I saw a memorable short film called Organism, a film about New York City which uses time-lapse photography to portray the city as a huge living organism. When I started to think about doing a film series of "city symphonies" at the Clark, I went looking for it and found it on a dvd called The Films of Hilary Harris -- it was every bit as good as I remembered, and as a bonus included 9 Variations, which is as good a dance documentary as I have ever seen, utterly simple but visually stunning and extremely sensual.

There's a world of great documentaries out there, and if you're not looking for them, you're missing a great part of the art of film.