I harbor a slight resentment of Ken Burns and his ilk for narrowing the popular perception of the documentary form to the archival visuals/talking-head format of the schoolmarm. (Nothing like the profound distaste I have for Michael Moore and his ilk, for reducing documentary to egomaniacal agitprop.) To me the documentary aesthetic (“creative treatment of actuality” in Grierson’s seminal formulation) is the essence of the art of film, and not just for lengthy lessons in arcana. And yet, in subject and style Burns’ films are irresistable. I’ve just finished watching his Unforgivable Blackness (2004, dvd, n.), and if you think four hours is too long to spend in the company of a black boxer from a century ago, or that James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope told you all you need to know about Jack Johnson -- well then, you’d be wrong. This film is both informative and moving, a strong and fitting subject for the oh-so-smooth Ken Burns treatment. Johnson emerges as an emblematic figure of the Jim Crow era (I first mistyped “error” but that’s correct after all.) He’s hardly a hero of civil rights, and yet is a telling example of civil wrongs. To me boxing is a deplorable sport, but it’s hard to deny its elemental symbolism has made for a long string of significant films, both documentary and dramatic.
In the same vein, if not at the same level, I was satisfied by two other PBS docs. The 4-dvd set of Chicago: City of the Century filled in a lot of the backstory of the city I would live in, if I lived in a city. It traced the 60 years between its origins as a swampland outpost and the Columbian Expostion of 1892, beginning with idea of a canal between Lake Michigan and a tributary of the Mississippi, through the city’s development as a rail hub with attendant industries (“wheat stacker, hog butcher” etc.), the conflicts between merchant princes and immigrant labor, and the eventual supremacy of machine politics. A supplement on “Chicago by ‘L’: Touring the Neighborhoods” took me out of the Loop where most of my own visits to the city remain. Various re-enactments were sketchy but well-visualized, and yet still supported my general argument against such in historical documentaries.
For Marie Antoinette, the visual record was much richer, and kept me watching when I channel-surfed past it. She was a precursor to Princess Di as media celebrity, and from official portraits to scurrilous caricatures her story offered plenty of visual interest, to go with the inherent drama of revolution. With this and several books coming out in anticipation of Sofia Coppola’s film, Marie Antoinette is a media icon all over again.
While each of these documentaries are worth watching if you have an interest in the subject, I have two to recommend whether you think you’re interested or not. HBO just broadcast Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater, which turned out to be a timely and surprisingly moving retrospect on the man I once loved to hate, but now view wistfully as an honorable public figure, since the conservative movement he spearheaded has gone so far wrong, in ways he never did and never would countenance. Goldwater’s granddaughter is not an apologist for his politics, but shows how they were rooted in an integrity one has to be nostalgic for. She has lots of great family footage to go with public media coverage, and interviews a wide range of folks, from family to Hillary, about the man’s personality and importance. Libertarian yet collegial, with an honest and coherent point of view, Barry Goldwater is a politician one can only wish were on the scene today.
Like you, I have absolutely no taste for heavy metal music, but I am interested in the documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (Paradise Lost I & II, etc.), so I took the trouble to sit through Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. (2004, dvd, n.) (MC-74.) I’m no proponent of direct cinema based on celebrity access, and lament for example Barbara Kopple’s devolution from Harlan County USA to Wild Man Blues, but Berlinger and Sinofsky got themselves on to something when they were asked by Metallica -- whose music was an important aspect of their earlier films about some teenage headbangers accused of child murder -- to do the Let It Be thing with their attempt to regroup for a new album after two decades as the top metal band in the world. Along with the filmmakers, the band hired a group dynamics coach who had been psychological consultant to sports teams. Still, they made for a highly disfunctional family and it took more than two years of sturm und drang for the “St. Anger” album to be produced, and the film follows the process with rather astounding intimacy. This is more psychodrama than concert film, you see more conflict and tantrums than musical composition in the recording studio, but the whole brew is quite intriguing. Two and a half hours is a little long to spend in the company of these guys, but I found it interesting the whole way, though I wasn’t tempted to go on to the second disk’s worth of deleted scenes.
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