Documenting documentaries

I’m spinning this off my film awards season survey (with update soon to follow now that Oscars have been awarded), in order to cover well-received documentary features from the past year.  Navalny took the Academy Award, more for political than aesthetic reasons, and I endorsed its importance here.  But I start this survey with two other HBO documentaries that were also nominated.
 
Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (MC-90, HBO) is several films in one, and only one aspect of it is weak.  The review of photographer Nan Goldin’s career holds up nicely, and her family story (especially the suicide of her beloved older sister) is telling, and so is her ACT-UP activism during the AIDS era, which decimated her artistic community.  But the frame of the story is her post-addiction campaign against the Sackler family’s art-washing of their predatory Oxycontin manipulations, which strikes me as more performative than provocative, enacted for the camera rather than for real-world results. The Oxy subject is better handled in another HBO doc, Alex Gibney’s The Crime of the Century.
 
All that Breathes (MC-87, HBO) is another film that goes in many directions at once, mostly effective but raising more questions that it can answer.  It’s about brothers who run a hospital for injured birds, mostly kites, in Delhi, and the environmental disasters they encounter on a daily basis, compounded by Modi’s Hindu nationalist attacks on Indian Muslims.  The elements of elegant nature photography are present, but they are more about kites scavenging in the world’s largest landfill, or rats overrunning their derelict neighborhood.  The brothers go about their business, inspired by the totemic role of kites in their religion, as the whole world seems to be falling apart around them, while they earnestly discuss the possibility of banishment, or nuclear war between Pakistan and India.  Despite the many layers of interest, I found this meditative and impressionistic film a bit snoozy.
 
Now that PBS documentary series other than Ken Burns have been cut way back, HBO is clearly the premiere venue for docs, and here are some others of note:  Master of Light (MC-81) is the engaging story of George Anthony Morton, a Black man from Kansas City who spent his 20s in prison, after taking the rap for his drug-dealing mother.  While incarcerated he took up painting, and when he got out studied classical painting at the Florence Academy of Art.  Director Rosa Ruth Boesten follows him back to KC where he paints portraits of his family that are both aesthetically appealing and psychologically healing.  Though I would have been happy to see more about Morton’s career in art, it’s edifying to spend time in company with him and his family.
 
The subject is Speaker Nancy, as portrayed by documentarian daughter Alexandra, in Pelosi in the House (MC-66), and this intimate profile just locked in my admiration.  Nancy Pelosi has always seemed an effective political leader but (or maybe, because) somewhat robotic.  This film puts flesh and feeling on the public figure.
 

Also new to HBO is the 2019 profile Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (MC-77), a fond and fine look back at a heartthrob with one of the memorable voices of my generation, from the Stone Poneys onward, as she followed the beat of a different drum through a varied and highly distinguished career.

Moonage Daydream (MC-83) was quite a different sort of music biopic for HBO.  I never paid any attention to David Bowie in his heyday, but in retrospect I can see his cultural significance.  Brett Morgen’s documentary is not a standard-issue primer on Bowie’s career, but a full-on 140-minute crash-course (with the emphasis on crash).  I don’t know when I’ve seen such a frenetically-edited film, with clips from dozens of classic films as well as Bowie’s artwork, animations, dancing, and acting, in addition to music videos.  Bowie’s own selective and ruminative narration brings some order to the kaleidoscopic chaos of the visuals, and grounds the whirlwind of his widespread artmaking.  When he performs one of his songs live, Morgen intercuts visuals from different eras and different Bowie personas, to highlight his continuous fervid re-invention.  It’s a lot, and could induce epileptic fits, but adds up to an admirable Cubist portrait. 

Fire of Love (MC-83, Disney+) was another Oscar nominee.  It’s the story of an intrepid French couple who annealed their love in flaming volcanoes all over the world, flirting with danger to get spectacular up-close footage of eruptions, until the one that killed them in 1991.  Though the impressive intimacy of their 16mm films has long been superseded by hi-def drone footage, they represent a remarkable feat and legacy, and the story of their relationship adds another dimension to Sara Dosa’s film.
 
Descendant (MC-87, NFX) is a good film about the last ship that illegally brought slaves from Africa to Alabama in 1860.  A rich man in Mobile bet another he could smuggle in slaves despite the long-time ban on international slave trade.  He succeeded, and then burned and sunk the ship Clotilda to avoid detection.  Though he and his family remained the dominant landowners in the area, after emancipation the Black people settled in an enclave known as Africatown, where their origin story became folklore until the recent discovery and raising of the ship, which led to community discussions of how the find might be memorialized and history rewritten.

The most interesting part of the previous film was the work of Zora Neale Hurston as anthropologist and filmmaker around 1930, when she was able to record and transcribe the account of last living survivor of the Clotilda (finally published as a book in 2018).  That led me to the recent “American Experience” documentary on PBS, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space, which included much of her original footage, but moreover the whole inspiring and infuriating story of her life.  Highly recommended.

As is another recent “American Experience” offering, Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History.  Did you know that the ubiquitous board game Monopoly was created as an anti-capitalist exercise by a Quaker woman?  Nor did I, but found out that and many other fascinating facts in this lively and twisty tale.