Restrepo and other docs

Among the hardest to watch but most essential films of the past year was the you-are-there Afghan war documentary Restrepo (2010, MC-85).  Sebastian Junger (who also wrote the companion book, War) and Tim Hetherington accompany a small band of soldiers on a 14-month deployment on a remote mountain top in Afghanistan, the furthest tip of the spear of American power.  The troops build Outpost Restrepo, named for the devil-may-care medic who was among the first casualties of their unit, and then go out into the surrounding valleys, ancient and alien, to win hearts and minds, while being continuously shot at by rarely-seen attackers.  The viewer shares the hard duty intimately, and puts a human face on the abstraction of boots on the ground.  You participate in the boredom of prolonged isolation, mixed with the insane adrenaline rush of being under fire and letting loose with 900 rounds from your M-50.  The small cameras go into battle alongside the soldiers, and also show the daily life of young men together, in a way that verges on the homoerotic and recalls Claire Denis’ Beau Travail.  The film doesn’t tell you how to think about the American presence in Afghanistan, but gives you plenty of grist for the mill of your own thinking.  And the deleted scenes and extended interviews on the DVD supply plenty more, and should not be missed.

I expected more than I got from Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010, MC-85), the “prankumentary” by and/or about the famous British street artist Banksy.  Frankly I didn’t get the joke.  The collateral presence of Shepard Fairey makes for an obvious comparison with Beautiful Losers, another film about the graffiti aesthetic, which I found more satisfying.  Controversy still rages over whether this Banksy film is a doc or a con, a setup or a brilliantly witty reversal, in which the filmmaker becomes the subject and vice versa.  To me it’s all much ado about nothing.

On the other hand, I had no expectations for Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (2010, MC-73) and did not bother to record its “American Masters” presentation on PBS, but I happened to turn on the TV in the middle of its broadcast and was soon engrossed, so I recorded a rerun and watched it from the beginning.  Peter Raymond and Michele Hozer’s documentary takes a more traditional approach to the piano prodigy than 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (which I will now have to watch again), but with plenty of archival footage and subsequent interviews, it offers a compelling portrait of a strange but engaging genius.

So pleased with Every Little Step, I was moved to watch other terpsichorean documentaries.  The Last Dance (2002, MC-66) is about a collaboration between Pilobolus Dance Theater and Maurice Sendak, an unlikely combination that follows a fascinating joint process of creation.  Sendak is of course a compelling character in his own right (see Tell Them Anything You Want – no, I mean it, you really should see the documentary portrait made by Spike Jonze at the same time he directed the feature adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are), and Pilobolus is an eye-opening improvisational dance group that lasted for more than thirty years as the original dancers became directors and recruited a new troupe of exceptionally lithe and inventive dancers.  Sometime tense, sometimes ecstatic, the collaboration is enthralling to watch, though the concluding passages from the finished piece seemed draggy by comparison.  Sendak is determined to make a piece about the experience of children in the Holocaust, while at least one of the Pilobolus directors wants to make the dance simply about movement.  But through the raw material of the astounding flexibility of the dancers’ bodies, they reach some sort of accord in Mirra Bank’s effective film.