Robert Flaherty (1884-1951) was a surveyor and
prospector when he decided to start filming the Inuit Eskimos he visited
in the Hudson Bay region of Northeastern Canada in 1913. The first
batch of film he brought back to Toronto for editing was destroyed,
but not before completing a single work print. Disheartened with those
results, he decided to scrap the film and start over again.
When he returned in 1920, he hired an Inuit named Alakarialak, dubbed
him "Nanook," put together a supporting cast of women and
children, and set out with two hand-cranked cameras and an Eskimo
crew to record the day-to-day seal hunts and igloo-building rituals
of a typical family. Modern-day Inuits are said to roar with laughter
when they watch Nanook of the North, citing the numerous staged sequences
and incongruities. In the classic scene in which Nanook engages in
a comic tug-of-war with a submerged seal flopping around like Chaplin
in mukluks Flaherty's crew is just out-of-frame, yanking on the other
end of the rope. The igloo that Nanook and his brood conveniently
discover as a storm is breaking was especially constructed for the
cameras, with a breakaway roof to allow in more light. Flaherty defended
these ruses, saying that in order to capture the reality of the Eskimo
way of life he had to manipulate it. He even paid Alakarialak, telling
him that he may have to interrupt one of his life-sustaining hunts
if it meant getting the right shot.
The fact that many film historians persist in calling Nanook of the
North the world's first documentary should ease the conscience of
every non-fiction filmmaker out there. Clearly, the path from unedited
truth to staged reality to docudrama is one built on brittle ice from
the very beginning. Flaherty even admitted his film was intended as
a "photoplay." After viewing the desultory results of that
first rough cut, he realized what every filmmaker comes to understand:
that the most important element of any good film fact or fiction is
a strong, sympathetic lead character. "Nanook," the fabricated
star, did not alter the veracity of the real Eskimo's difficult life.
Alakarialak did have to build igloos and hunt seals in real life.
In fact, this "noble savage" starved to death two years
after filming was completed. Tragic as this was, it served to validate
the authenticity of the harsh conditions, and elevate Flaherty's reputation
from that of ethnographer to a kind of interpretive poet of reality.
But his chicanery eventually got the better of him. In successive
films, Moana (1926), Man of Aran (1934), and Elephant Boy (1937),
he came under heavy critical fire for his "re-enactments."
Most documentary filmmakers will agree that truth is always in the
eye of the beholder and the hands of the editor. Even Frederick Wiseman,
perhaps this country's best recorder of unexpurgated truth in films
such as Titicut Follies (1967) and High School (1969), once wrote:
"A documentary, by whomever made and in no matter what style,
is arbitrary, biased, prejudiced, compressed, and subjective like
any of its sisterly or brotherly forms." All forms of documentary,
whether personal, biographical, historical, political, investigative,
or musical, treat reality as malleable. In the films below an opinionated
and by no means exhaustive list that was selected based on their makers'
unique vision and point-of-view the truth of the subject matter is
always relative and as susceptible to artistic interpretation as the
painting of haystacks.
Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh (1989)
"What would life be like if we hadn't the courage to attempt
anything?" writes Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother
Theo, one of hundreds he composed in his short, tortured existence.
Australian director Paul Cox uses Van Gogh's letters and diary to
open an intimate window into the loneliness of this singular genius.
John Hurt is the voice of Vincent, and we can imagine that superb
actor's raked and scrawny face as he reads, venting Van Gogh's rage
at poverty, his passion for painting, his despair when he realizes
madness will overtake him before he sells a single canvas.
Cox, a bit of a mad genius himself (Man of Flowers, My First Wife),
constructs an eccentric collage out of blurry issues/39/images of treetops,
fields, reflections in water; brief re-enactments; actual locations;
and Van Gogh's sketches and paintings. The artist's rejection of God
led to an embrace of nature and a desperate faith in the tangibility
of paint. The issues/39/images that crowded his mind crowd Cox's frames, until
the film acquires the feel of found footage from the mid-1800s.
"How does one become mediocre?" Van Gogh asks. "By
making compromises and concessions." This movie is an inspiration
to anyone wrestling with those same demons.
Koyaanisqatsi (1983)
Koyaanisqatsi |
The pretext of Godfrey Reggio's film was to juxtapose
the beauty and power of nature with the ugliness and destructiveness
of man. Exquisitely composed issues/39/images of desert mountains and crashing
waves gave way to shots of clogged highways and busy cities. But these
simple, digestible metaphors revealed something much more terrible
at work. Reggio's vision, when combined with cinematographer Ron Fricke's
estimable pictures and Philip Glass's rumbling score, depicted humanity
as a virus, eating away at Mother Earth until there is nothing left
to devour except itself.
In one sequence, the taillights and headlights of cars on a freeway
are filmed in fast motion, speeding in opposite directions until the
effect is like that of malignant blood cells cramming the arteries
of an overburdened city. Commuters scurry into trains and jam escalators
like an invasion of microbes. Workers stand at rows of identical machines
in a hot dog processing plant, their place in the world hardly distinguishable
from the packaged wieners that emerge. Lights in city buildings blink
intermittently throughout the night, as if the world was one vast
computer circuit. A stunning sequence of imploding apartment buildings
and office towers, cleared to make way for new apartments and offices,
demonstrates our expertise at destruction.
The movie's title, a Hopi Indian word meaning "crazy life,"
"life in turmoil," "life out of balance," and
"life disintegrating," now seems prescient. The chilling
final image is of a spaceship rocketing to the heavens, then exploding
before it can escape.
Streetwise (1984)
Streetwise |
The central irony of this documentary about street
kids in Seattle is the fact that the city was at the height of its
clean, Oz-like popularity, making several "most-livable"
lists. The conceit wouldn't have the same impact now, since Seattle
is just another bland, egocentric metropolis. But in the early '80s,
it was the place to move to, partially because the city had no secrets.
Its bums rubbed elbows with tourists. Street preachers howled above
the din of buskers. The rich weren't so far removed from the poor.
When the sun came out, which it did more often than out-of-towners
thought, everyone came out of the woodwork and the city's gray patina
bloomed with colorful characters. Director Martin Bell and his wife,
the esteemed still photographer Mary Ellen Mark, did nothing more
than depict the obvious. Who were these kids roaming the streets of
this emerald-like city? Who was taking care of them?
As it turned out, they mostly took care of themselves. Bell's acute
camerawork and remarkable sound captures kids living well beyond their
ages, constructing personalities for themselves with only other misfits
as role models. They speak and strut like character actors, their
thrift shop clothing a kind of costume. Their hanging out and panhandling
has an urgency to it, as important as a school assignment. But the
brutal fact is they have nowhere to go. They are the offspring of
drunk, criminal parents and they're patronized by parole officers.
The film's saddest moments occur in the company of adults, when we
realize how small and fragile these kids' lives really are.
When one of the street kids dies at the end of the film, it's the
kind of awful accident that can elevate a documentary from the merely
involving to the tragic. An unplanned denouement like that is a non-fiction
filmmaker's dream and worst nightmare.
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's
Apocalypse (1991)
Hearts of Darkness |
Culled from the diaries, audio tapes, and 16mm
footage recorded by Francis Coppola's wife, Eleanor, during the 238-day
production of Apocalypse Now, this film is an engrossing study of
obsession and self-questioning. As her narration says, they all went
to the jungle location in the Phillipines in 1976, and "little
by little we went insane." Without Mrs. Coppola's foresight,
there would be no film.
What emerges from this documentary is a rich deconstruction of how
Coppola struggles to wrest a personal vision out of the chaos of the
shoot. His unwavering energy and commitment is admirable, yet tainted
by a kind of subtle self-posturing. His wife records him standing
knee deep in water intent on lining up a shot, and then shows him
ranting about the awful film he fears he is making, "a 20 million
dollar disaster." His moaning insecurity is as self-conscious
as his genius.
We watch in fascination as shutdowns mount, as the swirl of men and
machines threatens to engulf all semblance of process. Meanwhile,
Coppola types away, trying to save the film. Of course, the knowledge
we have that Apocalypse Now is great, that somehow madness was overcome,
or madness gave the film the psychedelic edge it needed, lends this
documentary the stuff of classic drama.
Hearts and Minds (1974)
This was the first film to deal squarely with the
war that emerged from the damaged psyche of post-Vietnam America.
Produced by Bert Schneider's company, BBS (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces)
and directed by Peter Davis, a veteran of television documentaries,
the filmmakers predicted that audiences were primed for a liberal
analysis of the war, and their cool, straightforward, factual approach
proved to be a devastating and moving portrait of jingoism and the
awful compromises sane men were forced to make.
By weaving hard cold facts and emotional imagery, and through the
deft cutting of war footage against the rich immediacy of interviews
with returning soldiers, Davis awakens us to everyone's complicity
in the war. He avoids the protest movement, and instead trains his
camera on the politicians, the patriots, the deserters, the maimed,
and the regretful. He juxtaposes shots of a platoon torching a village
with the more insidious violence of two GIs getting it on with Saigon
prostitutes. He cuts from Daniel Ellsberg's emotional recollection
of RFK's assassination to the cold, metallic shot of a grunt zipping
a body bag. In the movie's most searing indictment of xenophobia,
we watch Vietnamese survivors cry and rage over the deaths of loved
ones, then cut to General Westmoreland proclaiming that "the
Oriental" does not value human life the way we do.
In this, the 25th Anniversary year of the end of the Vietnam War,
Hearts and Minds still packs a wallop.
The Last Waltz (1978)
There are many great concert films Gimme Shelter,
Stop Making Sense, Woodstock but this one stands above the rest. Its
pedigree is outstanding. Director Martin Scorsese's staging and camera
placement are audacious and kinetic. The soulful music by a cast of
survivors Dylan, Mitchell, Morrison, Clapton, Young, Harris; all who
continue to make music today rocks and gallops and pops. And the momentous
occasion The Band's farewell Thanksgiving concert of 1976 never descends
into maudlin eulogy. But there is something else at work, something
shaman-like moving at the edges of the stage, just out of frame.
One critic wrote that the members of The Band, particularly Robbie
Robertson and Rick Danko, resemble characters in a Scorsese fiction,
another crew from Mott Street, acting out the rituals of an aging
brotherhood. Scorsese has always zeroed in on the gang, not the Don,
and watching The Band the perennial back-ups we can understand the
allusions.
Perhaps that's where the mysticism works its way into this movie.
The Band is forever ethereal, shape-shifting, laying soft chords under
the Staples Singers; grinding out pop riffs for Neil Diamond; or jamming
with Dylan. One comes away wondering how anyone these days can make
music without the boys in The Band conjuring up the magic behind them.
Don't Look Back (1967)
Producer-cameraman D.A. Pennebaker's fly-on-the-wall
approach to Bob Dylan's stardom is quite a contrast to the Maysles'
Brothers similar technique in their film of the Beatles' first U.S.
visit. Where the Fab Four spent most of the running time mugging for
the camera, Dylan ignores it completely. Or does he? When he states,
"I don't believe in anything," it sounds like faux anarchy,
a smirk against his own celebrity. Yet it's obvious he loves the celebrity's
ability to manipulate interviews and ride off in limos. The contradictions
are what make this film fascinating.
It was Dylan's idea to begin the movie with the now-parodied gag of
holding up the white cue cards to "Subterranean Homesick Blues,"
with Allen Ginsberg lurking in the background. It was the star's only
obvious nod to Pennebaker's presence. For the rest of the film we
see Bob in concert, jamming and typing in his hotel room, and hanging
out with manager Albert Grossman and main squeeze Joan Baez, who drifts
around the periphery with the bemused grin of a woman looking for
a chance to flee.
The movie was shot during Dylan's tour of England in 1965, and the
zeitgeist hangs lightly in the air. He turns the tables on an embarrassed
Time magazine writer, telling him that the mainstream media has "too
much to lose by printing the truth." Dylan himself is wily about
the truth with reporters and fans, enjoying "taking the piss"
out of them instead of articulating the meaning behind his songs.
But when he gets on stage his message rings brilliantly clear.
In the final scene, Dylan and his entourage drive away from a concert
after clearing a clinging fan off the car's roof. When Grossman tells
the singer a local paper described him as an anarchist, Dylan, surprised
by the label, responds by saying, "Give the anarchist a cigarette."
It sounds like the title to a song.
Roger and Me (1989)
Roger and Me |
Michael Moore's popular, funny documentary has
lost none of its bite or deadpan appeal since its release. The film
shares Flaherty's dictum that character is everything and Roger and
Me gives us two: Moore and Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors,
who oversaw the shutdown of the plant in Flint, Michigan that resulted
in the loss of 40,000 jobs. The tubby Moore, in ill-fitting pants,
windbreaker, and baseball cap, is our David, a left-wing rabble-rouser
in Flint who decides to track Smith down and ask him, simply, "Why
did you do it?" Smith is a trim and heartless Goliath, guarded
by a phalanx of flacks and yes-men. The supporting cast is made up
of survivors, losers, and insipid gladhanders, namely Anita Bryant
and the unctuous Bob Eubanks, host of The Newlywed Game, one of Flint's
favorite sons.
The grit and relevance of this movie lies in Moore's persistent approach,
his willingness to stick with it, to document the decay of a city.
He risked continued embarrassment to get his story, and he shunned
sentimentality in favor of humor and bald-faced assessment. It was
a labor of love with little promise of reward, and Moore, who hasn't
had a hit movie since, has stuck to his guns. He still chases down
corporate bozos on his TV show, able to conduct weekly hit-and-run
forays instead of depending on the fickle marketing of feature films.
The Thin Blue Line (1988)
The Thin Blue Line |
The denouement to this film was neither dream nor
nightmare, but vindication, when the real killer of a Texas police
officer all but confesses into a tape recorder, and the innocent man
on death row goes free. This chilling, unexpected twist also exonerated
Errol Morris' filmmaking technique, in which he used fictional cinematic
devices recreations, expressionistic lighting schemes, and a lush
score composed by Philip Glass to enhance the verisimilitude of the
story. The result was a unique, hypnotic trance of a film.
In Morris' vision, metaphorical imagery propels the story. Since the
actual murder occurred a decade before, Morris re-enacts the events
with actors, props, and staged shots, instead of opting for the standard
structure of talking heads, documents, and still photos. Dramatic
inserts a spilled milkshake, a timepiece, a tape recorder take on
an iconic weight, cueing the viewer to the idea that a miscarriage
of justice happens in increments, through the accumulation of seemingly
inconsequential details. The fictional cloak lulls and comforts us
with the feeling that we're watching "a movie," with the
unnerving knowledge that the malevolence lurking within is very real.
Salesman (1968)
Albert and David Maysles invented the documentary
style they called "direct cinema," a technique in which
the camera never lied about the subject matter it recorded. Differing
from the French version of cinema verit in that nothing was
staged or rehearsed, the Maysles Brothers' approach guaranteed that
viewers were experiencing what it was like to walk in the shoes of
their subjects. "I suppose I've been fortunate enough to be better
served by chance than control," Albert once said. Working from
his conviction that "it's a noble thing to record reality without
controlling it," Salesman, the brothers' seminal portrait of
four door-to-door bible salesmen, is even more remarkable for its
intense and poignant characterizations.
The Maysles' ability to remain invisible in the motel rooms and kitchens
and cars that make up the salesmen's daily routine provides a unique
and unsettling viewpoint. We are alternately fascinated and embarrassed
by these borderline grifters, forerunners to Mamet's real-estate sellers
in Glengarry Glen Ross, the antithesis of Red Skelton's Fuller Brush
Man. They work through a swatch of eastern states, hyping the spiritual
necessity of buying their product while calculating their percentages.
The gaudy illustrations in the bible provide the contrast to their
grim surroundings.
The movie is edited like a feature film, in an era before jump cuts
routinely broke the rules of sequencing and crossing the line. It's
amazing that the Maysles could capture the vulnerability and private
moments of these four men; that they could reveal their vitality in
spite of the losing game they played, while adhering to the basics
of wide shot, medium shot, and close-up; nor did they resort to narration,
music, or staged moments while recording professional sound and pictures.
Salesman is a classic of the documentary form; a masterpiece in which
chance serves up secrets that control could never discover. MM