My latest documendations

At 86, Frederick Wiseman is still going strong, turning out his lengthy documentaries at a regular pace, each one figuring among the best of the year (case in point, In Jackson Heights, which I am super-eager to see, ranks FC#13 of all 2015 features).  His latest on DVD, National Gallery (2014, MC-89, NFX), certainly appealed directly to my interests, bringing his usual panoptic viewpoint to every facet of the London museum.  He’s the most intelligent and all-seeing fly-on-the-wall in the history of film, who fashions his very personal storytelling about institutions without narration or other editorial intervention, aside from his own feel for pace, insight, and connection.  Recording sound in a two-man crew with brilliant cinematographer John Davey for almost thirty years, Wiseman gets close to his subjects and studies them from many angles, and delivers his reports with impressive objectivity, flavored by his own distinctive craft.  The more attention you bring, the more you will get out of his films. 

The behind-the-scenes operation of a world-class museum is bound to engage my interest, but for a test of Wiseman’s magic, take a look at Boxing Gym (2010, MC-83, NFX), which I was surprised to find quite riveting for its 91-minute running time, a mere short subject by Wiseman standards.  The time is spent just hanging around a gym in Austin TX, getting to know a range of characters and their reasons for embracing the “sweet science” of boxing.  Would make an intriguing double feature with Andrew Bujalski’s Results.

Two other European museums have recently received Wiseman-like (or Wiseman-lite) treatment, highlighting the differences in Dutch and Austrian national cultures.  The New Rijksmuseum (2013, MC-66, NFX) demonstrates the democratic culture of Amsterdam, construction being held up for years by public arguments over a bikepath, and hearings on every other issue imaginable.  The available DVD cuts almost two hours from the theatrical release, but still takes its time and gets into many corners of the museum, and portrays the many characters who must come together to allow the outstanding national museum to open again, after a decade of renovation and construction.  The Great Museum (2015, MC-66, NFX) refers to Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, also dealing with a major renovation, the installation of a gallery of Hapsburg family treasures.  It’s interesting to see how old imperial culture lingers in Austrian politics, especially in contrast to Amsterdam’s liberal democracy.  Other than that, this shorter film shares the style but does not have the dimensions of the other two.

Here are two more documentaries I vetted for possible showing at the Clark, once the auditorium reopens after renovation, probably next January.  Art and Craft (MC-68, NFX) would certainly get a discussion going.  It’s the true story of Mark Landis, a not-for-profit art forger who paints copies of second-tier artists and gives them to second-tier museums, impersonating a priest and saying the works were inherited from recently deceased relatives.  He’s a Southern Gothic sort of character – schizophrenic? autistic? – who has managed to get his work into sixty different museums.  One registrar he duped goes on a crusade to reveal the con.  Except Landis broke no laws, not even taking a tax deduction for his gifts.  There’s the mystery of his character and motivations, but also a wider inquiry into questions of authenticity and value within the art world.

No problems of provenance in Very Semi-Serious (MC-74, NFX, HBO), in which all the works are signed, sealed, and delivered to the New Yorker art department, where cartoon editor Robert Mankoff makes the weekly selection of trademark panels.  This is a sharp and funny look behind the scenes at the irregular characters behind our regular weekly comics, including Roz Chast and others, and what it takes to make a living by drawing.

Here’s one strong documentary recommendation that might be a tough sell.  Racing Dreams (2010, MC-78, NFX) is an examination of NASCAR culture, through the prism of its corresponding “little league,” where middle-schoolers travel around the country to race go-carts at speeds up to 70 MPH.  Following the template of Hoop Dreams and every kids’ competition film from Spellbound on, Marshall Curry deploys his curiosity and canny filmmaking skills to tell a tale of pre-adolescence that is both universal and tied to a very specific sociology, brilliantly edited to turn 500 hours of footage into a swift, compelling 90-minute narrative.  Following two young boys and a girl as they compete on the Karting circuit for a national title, we come to know them and their families well, and the unfamiliar milieu they inhabit, in a manner that makes me almost willing to think of auto racing as a genuine sport.  I’d put this in a category with Red Army, as a doc that uses a sport in which I have no interest as a window onto much more than a game.  It’s endearing, informative, and even stirring.  You should see it to believe it.

That documentary was so surprisingly accomplished that I felt impelled to look deeper into its director, Marshall Curry.  Turns out his first was Street Fight, an excellent film that first brought Cory Booker to my attention.  Since Curry seems like a documentarian who qualifies as an auteur, I made a point of catching up with his other films.  Unfortunately, in nonfiction the characters are chosen and not created, so unless you’re a genius like Fred Wiseman, real authorship is elusive.  I didn’t mind watching Curry’s other two films, but the subjects portrayed were not as engaging. 

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (2011, MC-65, NFX) follows a tree-hugging “ecoterrorist” years after he was arrested by the FBI and jailed for acts of arson against logging companies and other supposed environmental villains.  The question of violence in the service of a good cause is looked at from many angles, through news footage and interviews, but the central character is not interesting enough to carry the film.  Same deal with Point and Shoot (2014, MC-65, NFX), where a pipsqueak Lawrence of Arabia wannabe takes a motorcycle trek through the Middle East for a “crash course in manhood,” filming himself obsessively along the way, and winding up with anti-Qaddafi fighters in Libya.  Both the location footage and the subsequent interviews are queasy with the subject’s self-regard, which Curry views all too dispassionately. 

Before surveying the Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature, I want to offer three further personal recommendations:

How to Dance in Ohio (MRQE, NFX, HBO) is something I never learned growing up there, but something a group of autistic young adults undertake to do, in a program designed to prepare the high-functioning for independent living.  You may not feel the degree of identification I did with these unusual young people trying to find their way in the neurotypical world, but Alexandra Shiva’s film will make you empathize with the effort they put it, and the delight they take in such against-the-grain sociability.  The film follows three girls in particular as they prepare for a spring formal, and the problems they face in doing so, with a winning blend of insight and uplift.

I was rather surprised to wind up adding Little White Lie (MC-80, NFX) to my list of outstanding first-person documentaries.  I’d suspected a vanity project but discovered something much more profound.  Lacey Schwartz grew up in a Jewish family in Woodstock, where her unusual looks were ignored or explained away, in a conspiracy of silence about her actual parentage.  Only when she went away to college was the obvious observation made, as she was invited to join the Black Students Union.  She then confronts her family over long-buried secrets, and embraces a black identity.  Through family photos and interviews, she puts the story together in a brisk and moving 65 minutes, with implications well beyond the narrowly personal.

I also suspected Ethan Hawke of a vanity project in directing Seymour: An Introduction (MC-83, NFX), but found an honestly searching portrait of a mentor he’d met at a party, where they discussed the problem of stage fright.  Octogenarian Seymour Bernstein has plenty to say on that subject and many others.  He was an acclaimed concert pianist who gave up the stage suddenly at the age of fifty, and has since devoted himself to teaching and composing.  Despite my frightful ignorance of music, his passion and precision gave sense to everything he said, about the practice of music, and the vicissitudes of performance.  Talking with Hawke, and other interlocutors like ex-student Michael Kimmelman, he reveals understanding not just of his art and craft, but of life.  This film makes a nice match with Albert Maysles’ Iris, in introducing us to a deeply vital elder with a lot of life wisdom to pass along.

(Click through for reviews of the five Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature, and others.) 

   

The Academy has a predilection for films about musicians, so no surprise the award went to Amy (MC-85, FC #31, MC #29, NFX), which was certainly a standout, even though heretofore I only knew Amy Winehouse through tabloid headlines, garish pictures, or stand-up punchlines.  How did a nice Jewish girl from North London, with a guitar and great voice, morph into a personal trainwreck on a global scale?  Like Marilyn or Janis, she was a first-named female icon sacrificed on the altar of celebrity.  What I didn’t know before Asif Kapadia’s film was how she sang, in a voice saturated with the blues, and how sweet she was underneath it all.  Working from an amplitude of archival footage, Kapadia fashions a compelling story, more surprising in its development than in its foreordained conclusion.  With plenty of full songs, accompanied by printed lyrics on screen, this is a great introduction to Amy’s music, but works on many other levels too.  Showing her character and wit, the sophistication of her musical sense, the bad company and good she fell in with, the substances she abused, the scrutiny she suffered, the exploitation by family and media -- this film gives a familiar story a tragic depth.

Similar in many ways, What Happened, Miss Simone? (MC-75, NFX) differs by not including as many full performances, so it’s better as a supplement to concert footage than as an introduction to Nina Simone.  Fascinating background, but not the full flavor.  Added wrinkle is racism, which kept the young Nina from her chosen career as a concert pianist, involved her in black activism in the 60s, and led to her flight to Africa and Europe, and away from performing.  Liz Garbus is an accomplished documentarian, who obviously had close cooperation with Ms. Simone’s daughter, so this is definitely worth seeing, if not as much a must-see as Nina's concert films.

The Look of Silence (MC-92, FC #10, MC #19, NFX) is not as hard to watch as Joshua Oppenheimer’s earlier film, The Act of Killing, to which this makes a sequel.  Both films deal with massacres attendant to Indonesia’s military coup and counter-coup in 1965, which led to the slaughter of more than a million “communists” by army-sanctioned death squads.  The earlier film takes a retrospective look at the killers, and their prideful emulation of movie gangsters, as they re-enact their murders for the camera.  The new film takes the point of view of the victims, mainly through the brother of one of the murdered, who patiently confronts those who had bragged about the killing in the first film.  This is grim stuff, but so artfully and feelingly done that it transcends the horrors recounted, with a deep meditation on memory and forgetting, guilt and forgiveness.  The Look of Silence is both in the eyes of the optometrist brother who watches clips from the earlier film, and in the faces of the killers and their families when confronted by truths they’d rather not be reminded of.  An undeniably powerful film, this is nobody’s idea of entertainment – watch it if you can.

Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom (MC-79, NFX) plunges a viewer into its subject with a minimum of historical or political context, giving a street-level view of events as they unfold in the Maidan, as Independence Square in Kiev is generically known, from November 2013 to the ouster of Yanukovych in February 2014.  The comparisons and contrasts to events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square reveal a template for popular insurrection that goes straight back to the French Revolution, if not further.  The confrontation of masses versus armed interdiction; barricades in the streets; the escalating government violence to beat back the protesters, from plastic batons to metal, from rubber bullets to snipers with live ammo; the increasing resistance that unites the people in opposition.  In the ’68 police riots in Chicago, the protesters chanted, “The whole world is watching” – and that has never been truer than these days when cellphone video is ubiquitous.  Nearly every statement made in after-the-fact on-camera interviews receives visual confirmation.  My main takeaway from this film was how little I was aware of these events while they were unfolding, though the subsequent Russian incursion into Crimea and elsewhere did get Cold War Redux coverage.

Cartel Land (MC-76, NFX) looks at militia activities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, ostensibly to combat the drug cartels, but with many mixed motives, which the film gradually unfolds through intimate character portraits.  The level of access to shootouts and such verges on the insane, for filmmaker Matthew Heineman, but this film puts you inside an impossible situation, and gives it impact and meaning.  The opening scene plays like an outtake from Breaking Bad, with a bunch of guys cooking meth outdoors at night, and explaining what they learned from a gringo chemist and his son.  For real.  This film takes a nuanced and up-close view of vigilante mentality, showing that anarchy becomes just as corrupt as power, and actual governance seems a fruitless hope.  Rough stuff, but definitely something to see.

Well worth inclusion with these nominees is The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (MC-79, NFX).  Stanley Nelson’s film is both a cultural time machine and an urgent contemporary statement.  It takes us back fifty years to the founding of the Panthers as an African-American self-defense movement, as well as casting light on recent developments in Ferguson and elsewhere, and the enduring need to remind white America that Black Lives Matter.  Mixing news footage and relevant music with retrospective interviews, mostly with women who tried to hold the social service ethic of the organization together, in the face of the media’s preoccupation with the street theater and raging egos of male leaders like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and the odious Eldridge Cleaver.  It also details the obsession of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI with subverting the Panthers through the COINTELPRO program of surveillance and provocation, as well as the political assassination of Fred Hampton and others.  Plus ça change …

In the vein of political documentaries, here are a couple that I watched with appreciation, but not enough to recommend outright, except to those with antecedent interest in the subjects.  The revelation of COINTELPRO, through the break-in by white antiwar activists to an FBI office in Media PA, is recounted in 1971 (MC-73, NFX).  Director Johanna Hamilton edits retrospective interviews with the now-revealed participants with so-so recreations of the caper, and for folks of my generation it’s fascinating to recall the time from the perspectives of age, to register what has changed and what has stayed the same.

I felt a similar vibe for Best of Enemies (MC-77, NFX), which refers to William Buckley and Gore Vidal, more particularly their dueling commentary during ABC’s coverage of the political conventions of 1968.  From a know-your-enemy perspective, I used to watch Buckley’s Firing Line regularly, for his snake-tongued polysyllabic eloquence and wit, as well as the intelligence of his interlocutors.  I’ve always admired Vidal for similar reasons, though generally in agreement with his positions (better represented in Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia).  What Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s film reveals is less intellectual debate than gladiatorial combat, though it is graphic in its demonstration of the nation’s divide in the Sixties, which is still being played out today.  As much as anything, it’s a media story, about these scandalously entertaining confrontations, which pointed the way toward the coarse political divisions of our own day.

I like Jim Holt’s description in New York Magazine enough to quote at length, “Vidal and Buckley were both patrician in manner, glamorous in aura, irregularly handsome, self-besottedly narcissistic, ornate in vocabulary, casually erudite, irrepressibly witty, highly telegenic, and by all accounts great fun to be around. They were powerfully connected, both politically and socially...  Each spoke in a theatrical accent of his own invention: They did not merely have opinions, they pronounced them.  Also, they warmly hated each other.”

In the interests of total coverage, I next mention three more Netflix-available docs, of some merit but not essential viewing.  The best of them, Finders Keepers (MC-80, NFX), has an unlikely subject, a redneck tussle in the media over ownership of an amputated leg, but finds unexpected dimensions in it, along with wild humor.  I’ve never watched any so-called “reality tv,” have only hearsay knowledge of Duck Dynasty or Honey Boo-Boo or their ilk, but this film by Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel deconstructs, in non-condescending but still hilarious fashion, the impulses of those who ardently aspire to have their existence certified by appearing on television.  A North Carolina junk trader with the blow-hard impulses of a very minor-league Donald Trump or P.T. Barnum finds said leg in an old meat smoker he bought at auction, and seeks to turn the find into a media sensation as his ticket to fame and fortune, until the man who lost that leg in a plane crash, which also killed his father, turns up to claim it, with his own memorial motivations.  It’s a case that gets adjudicated on television, to quite different effects on the two counter-suing plaintiffs.  Most of these characters seem to come from two categories in the news -- middle-aged white folks who are dying younger, and likely Trump voters -- but not without empathy.

Another person eager to have his story told on film is profiled in The Green Prince (MC-67, NFX).  He’s a Hamas insider who was recruited by Shin Bet as an informer and double agent in this real-life spy story.  After-the-fact interviews with the Palestinian turned American citizen, and his Israeli handler, combine with news footage and dubious reenactments to tell the decade-long tale of the unlikely bond they formed, in a manner that I did not find very convincing.

Particle Fever (MC-87, NFX) details what seems to me another dubious enterprise.  Given its collective critical ranking, maybe that’s more my problem than the film’s.  Anyway, Mark Levinson’s film is a visually spectacular look at the Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most expensive scientific experiment ever undertaken, in search of the Higgs Boson, the so-called “God particle,” which will vindicate one of the main theoretical constructs of physics or instigate a revolution in the subject.  The look is sci-fi deluxe, the science is artfully presented gobbledygook, but it’s all these people who have staked their whole careers on this experiment that make the film accessible, if not quite understandable.

I don’t watch every episode of American Masters on PBS, but of those artists who interest me, I’ve never been disappointed in the treatment.  Recent profiles of Mike Nichols and Carole King stood out in particular.  In the same vein, over on HBO, I definitely recommend Everything is Copy (MC-85, HBO, NFX), a funny, incisive, and moving profile of writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron.  Of less universal interest, but definitely worth seeing for interested viewers is the underrated A Ballerina’s Tale (MC-55, NFX), about the breakthrough African-American dancer Misty Copeland.

So much for the past half-year in nonfiction film.  My brother recently muttered an accusation at me, “Nobody watches as many documentaries as you.”  Maybe it’s true.  Mea culpa.  But maybe you should watch more.  This here is a start on readily available titles.