Documendations

Under this heading I will from time to time offer brief recommendations of documentaries I have been watching that you would do well to watch, either via broadcast or on dvd.  Not only am I a fan of the documentary form in all its inexhaustible variety, I am a partisan of a documentary aesthetic in all films.  My one theoretical construct in cinema is that the divergent possibilities of film were there from the very beginning, with the Lumière brothers documenting, say, a train pulling into the station, and Meliès fabulating a trip to the moon, like a stage magician.  Documentary and fabulation remain the poles of filmmaking, and the more a film leans toward the former, the better I like it.  John Grierson coined the word “documentary” and gave it a definition that has yet to be surpassed, or contained: “creative treatment of actuality.”  Sometimes it is the actuality that grips the viewer, and sometimes it is the creative treatment, and when both are powerful, nothing could be better.

And sometimes a poverty of means yields the richest result.  After Forever (see “omnibus” review just below), I am into Heddy Honigmann, and the only other film of hers that Netflix had was O Amor Natural (1996), so I watched it with no advance idea of what it was about.  This remains filmmaking by personal encounter; whereas in Forever Honigmann approached people in a Parisian cemetery, in O Amor Natural she accosts people on the streets of Rio and asks if they know who Carlos Drummond de Andrade was, and if they do know the famous Brazilian poet, she asks them to read aloud from his posthumous volume of that title – a book of erotic, damn near pornographic poetry.  She concentrates on men and women in their 70s and 80s, and there is delicious mischief in seeing how they react to the steamy, smutty material.  Probably again due to Honigmann’s choices, most respond gleefully with their own erotic memories.  This film manages to be thoroughly charming and thought-provoking at the same time.

Ranking with the best films of this year or last, depending on release date, is Sweetgrass (2009, MRQE-72) by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaign-Taylor.  This documentary takes an utterly different approach, in the tradition of anthropological film or Frederick Wiseman’s patient direct cinema studies of institutions – no narration or narrative frame or explicit point of view, just selective observation and juxtaposition of sound and image to weave a story out of contemplation of the reality given to the camera eye and microphone ear.  Sweetgrass follows one of the last treks of a huge flock of sheep to summer grazing on public lands in the mountains of Montana.  The sheep themselves are a constant source of amusement and wonder, from their sheepish antics to the breathtaking sweep of their collective passage through the Big Sky landscape.  The cowboys fit the laconic stereotype and say virtually nothing intelligible, except when cooing at or cursing the flock, or their dogs and horses, or when the younger, less grizzled one whines to his mother on a cellphone how much he hates it all, while the camera does a slow pan of one of the world’s most magnificent landscapes.  This film is lovely and meditative, and entertaining if you are willing to give it your time and attention.

Spike Lee’s If God is Willin and Da Creek Don’t Rise (2010, now on HBO) will definitely test your time and attention.  In this follow-up to his indispensable Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke, Lee revisits many of the scenes and people, to good effect for the most part, but when the BP oil spill happened in the course of filming, he went off in search of that story and stretched the proceedings to four hours, by which time I had lost the thread of interest. Though you could say that new disaster belonged to New Orleans too, it tells a different set of stories from Katrina, so the film does seem to run on.

Another HBO documentary, which I do recommend, for its actuality if not its treatment, is Josh Fox’s Gasland (2010), which takes an extremely personal approach to an important issue that has gotten nothing like the notice it ought to.  While the oil spill in the Gulf has drawn all eyes, there is a slow motion environmental disaster in the making, which may one day dwarf it.  The exploitation of the vast Marcellus Shale deposits of natural gas (so-called “clean energy”) across wide swaths of the Eastern United States is quietly wreaking devastation on the water supply and public health in out of the way areas where the drilling goes on.  So what, you may say, if some hillbilly in a trailer can ignite the water coming out of his kitchen faucet, but then you realize that Marcellus Shale extends under the watershed that supplies most of the drinking water to the mid-Atlantic region.  What a surprise to find another area where Halliburton and Dick Cheney are the devil incarnate!