To me documentary is the essence of film art. Even with feature films, I appreciate as they aspire to the condition of documentary, and depreciate as they depart into fabulation, as I call the polar opposite -- Lumière vs. Méliès, actuality vs. theater, from the very beginning of film to this day. Here are some recent documentaries that support my case for aesthetic merit.
It’s safe to assert that you have never seen anything like The Arbor (2011, MC-88, NFX). Don’t be fooled by the pastoral title, this is tough stuff. The Arbor is a street in a council estate (public housing project) in the rough Yorkshire city of Bradford. Clio Barnard’s artful documentary follows the lives of Andrea Dunbar -- who won a playwriting contest at 15, had several plays produced in London, one adapted into a movie, and died in a pub restroom at the age of 29 – and her three children, by three different fathers, who each have a different response to a childhood of abuse and neglect. With levels of artifice and reality in constant flux, the film combines oddly effective lip-synching to actual audio recordings of the subjects by actors in stage-like environments, along with playing out scenes from Dunbar’s play, The Arbor, literally on the eponymous street, and even with footage from a 1989 television documentary about her. If like me you have no familiarity with Dunbar, it will take you a while to figure out what the story is about, until it settles on Dunbar’s grown-up half-Pakistani daughter, mesmerizingly portrayed by Manjinder Virk, who recapitulates her mother’s descent in a frightening collusion of flawed nature and nurture, familial substance abuse and hardscrabble environment. While highly aestheticized, this unflinching documentary is an eye-opener about the culture of poverty, to slot with Ken Loach or Mike Leigh at their grimmest.
Project Nim (2011, MC-83, NFX) investigates the strange habits of higher primates, especially the subspecies of academics and hippies. And oh yes, there’s a chimpanzee involved too. Like a slicker Errol Morris or Werner Herzog, director James Marsh (Oscar winner for Man on Wire) veers from his ostensible subject into the psyches of the strange characters who people his films. The film tells the life story of Nim Chimpsky, who was kidnapped from his mother back in the 70s and raised by an assortment of variously-motivated humans to learn sign language, and whose life takes on the ups and downs, twists and turns, changes of fortune of a Dickensian hero. The film plays as a human comedy but a simian tragedy, so each viewer will have his or her own particular mix of amusement and outrage. Re-enactments and insistent musical cues keep the story moving along, with an illuminating back and forth between archival footage and retrospective interviews, for a rich stew of a story.
Patricio Guzmán makes films that strive obsessively to combat Chile’s amnesia about its recent history, the American-sponsored 1973 coup against Allende that led to Pinochet’s military dictatorship. In Nostalgia for the Light (2011, MC-85, NFX), he goes to the Atacama Desert, the highest and driest place on earth, perfect for astronomical observatories, as well as preservation of corpses. Passages of this film are beautifully reminiscent of the cosmic raptures of Tree of Life, though it wasn’t clear to me which were genuine telescopic images and which were enhanced special effects. Astronomers and archaeologists wax philosophical on the meaning of time, of the signs of the past in the present. Then Guzmán pivots to the women who still search the desert for the bodies of their “disappeared” loved ones, since the Atacama was also the site of a Pinochet concentration camp. His narration is awfully insistent upon the parallels, but this is still an eye-opening film. The DVD includes a number of other short films that amplify and contextualize his impassioned argument about historical memory.
Among the few things I miss since canceling satellite tv service a few months ago are the documentaries on PBS and HBO, but I still manage to catch up with the important films one way or another. Two that I just checked off my watch list, but do not necessarily urge you to watch are Eames: The Architect and the Painter (2011, MC-63, NFX) and Paradise Lost 3 (2012, MC-85, NFX).
The former is a moderately interesting but gossipy look at the marriage and creative partnership between Charles and Ray Eames, which is emblematic of a number of aesthetic and gender issues, and crucial to the whole story of postwar American design, but you’d be better off watching their own films, such as Powers of Ten and The World of Franklin and Jefferson, preferably while sitting in one of their chairs.
The latter completes the story of the “West Memphis 3.” In two previous films, accomplished documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky detailed the process by which three heavy-metal Goth teens were convicted of the “satanic” murders of three young boys. Partly due to the exposure of questionable evidence and legal procedures in the first two films, the three were recently released after nearly two decades in prison, by the judicial face-saving bargain of pleading guilty (while still protesting their innocence) and being released after time served. If you’ve seen the first two films, then you’ll appreciate the closure. If you haven’t, and you can stand the grisly details of both the crime and the punishment, the trilogy is worth looking into.
No comments:
Post a Comment