A heterogeneous assortment of documentaries continues to pass in review before my eyes, each of which I can recommend if you’re interested, and one I urge upon you even if you think you’re not.
If, for example, you’re interested in avant-garde favorite Guy Maddin, his quasi-documentary My Winnipeg (2007, dvd, MC-84) is a good place to start. His style is in place – fragmented, fantastical, in blurry black & white – but well suited to rendering a whimsical and wistful portrait of the city he has never been able to escape, where sleepwalking is a way of life and the winter never ends. The film comprises archival footage of Manitoban history and campy dramatic recreations of Maddin’s life with an overpowering mother, along with repeated scenes of “Maddin” sleeping on a train that is supposed to be taking him out of town at last. One suspects that much of the history is made up, fact melding into fantasy, but it seems a true portrait of this on-the-frontier, north-of-the-border city where radicalism meets somnambulism. And the lament for lost landmarks of the filmmaker’s youth, whether downtown department store or hockey arena, is poignant and true. I’m a fan of first-person documentaries -- “Self-Portraits in Cinema” as I called them in a series at the Clark some years ago -- and My Winnipeg offers a novel twist, an excellent companion piece to the recent Of Time and the City by Terence Davies.
One respectfully-received self-portrait that I do not recommend is The Windmill Movie, which noted Harvard documentarian Richard P. Rogers (The Midwife’s Tale, among many others) worked on for 25 years and left unfinished (or barely started) when he died of brain cancer. At the request of his wife, the celebrated photographer Susan Meiselas, protégé Alexander Olch reviewed all the footage and put together this homage. Though I personally tend to be tolerant toward cinematic navel-gazing, this film does not, despite some striking moments, break out of the self-referential into any wider significance.
Of the widest significance is Food, Inc. (2009, dvd, MC-80), which does an excellent job of aggregating the findings of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) into a thorough unmasking of megacorporate agriculture, which has turned farms into horrific factories, based on monocultures sustained by cheap oil, pesticides, government subsidies, and genetic copyright enforcement, disastrous in every facet of how and what they produce. This information is out there, though thoroughly obscured by corporate lobbying and advertising, but is here put together in a concise and striking manner. The film would be entertaining if it weren’t so scary, with indelible images of just what food production has become in this country. More like the lively King Corn than the meditative Our Daily Bread, Robert Kenner’s Food Inc. offers an indictment that has to be seen to be believed, in a latter day reprise of The Jungle of Upton Sinclair. It does not just diagnose the disease, but outlines the cure, through a profile of an enthusiastic and articulate sustainably organic farmer in Virginia. Warning: this film will haunt every trip to the grocery store after you see it.
I confess that I came at The Cove (2009, dvd, MC-82), a well-reviewed plea to save the dolphins, from a slant angle. Somehow I had formed the impression that it was a faux-documentary and I kept waiting for the twist that would reveal that it was all made up. I guess I’d read that it was a documentary that turns into a thriller, and that remains the problem I have with it. Director Louie Psihoyos brings an Ocean’s Eleven caper quality to his team’s effort to film the regular, but resolutely covered-up, slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese fishing village, a by-product of the capture of performers for marine parks around the world. The dolphins that don’t have the star quality to earn big bucks in aquatic entertainment are herded into a secret cove, where they are slaughtered to be sold as whale meat, in a primitive process that turns the entire cove red with blood. If the story hadn’t been told in such a self-congratulatory way, then the tragedy would have emerged in much starker terms, through the character of Richard O’Barry, who was the original trainer for the tv series Flipper and now holds himself responsible for the fate of dolphins worldwide, freeing them from captivity wherever and however he can. So admittedly I approached this film as a hoax (like a Holocaust or global warming denier), but I blame it for failing to convince me otherwise, for seeming more like a stunt than an exposé, though the truest thing in it is the haunted look on the face of Ric O’Barry.
In Ballets Russes (2005, dvd, MC-81), Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller craft a documentary with appeal well beyond its ostensible subject. Apart from the cogently presented dance history of the competing companies that vied for the mantle of Diaghilev from the Thirties through the Fifties, the hook here is the juxtaposition of supremely agile young bodies, shown vividly in archival footage, with their octogenarian incarnations, jumping off from a 2000 reunion of two groups that danced under the Ballet Russe banner. So we see Balanchine’s “Baby Ballerinas” in pre-adolescent exuberance and as white-haired old ladies, and it’s intrinsically fascinating and moving. Two troupes, mostly of émigré Russians, spread the gospel of dance through nonstop tours around the world, seeding local ballet companies across the globe, from Australia to Uruguay. Both the memories and the recorded performances are stirring.
If you think a film about origami would be cute at best, or at worst a deep snooze, then you have the same surprise in store that I did with the PBS “Independent Lens” presentation of Between the Folds (2008, now on dvd as well). Vanessa Gould’s film is intriguing and exhilarating, going way beyond the familiar craft of folded paper to jaw-dropping art and mind-blowing science. It comes at the subject from a variety of angles in profiling ten different people and their respective approaches to paper engineering, design, portraiture, even genetic modeling. I defy you to come away from this film without a newfound appreciation of origami -- it unfolds a whole new world.
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