A doc about docs and their fallout. The women who were teens when The Staircase was made about their family feel doubly exploited when The Staircase 2 comes out… a star of Hoop Dreams was one of the few participants covered here to profit from the film’s receipts and merch… Bing Liu’s family therapy in Minding the Gap somewhat backfired… Capturing The Friedmans guy wants to escape the shadow of the movie. Sometimes we’re just catching up with a subject later (The Wolfpack). After each example, a small team of scolds points out that there is no way to ethically create or consume art.
Tag: documentary
Art Talent Show (2022, Tomás Bojar & Adéla Komrzý)
Not really a talent show, but admissions week at an art academy. A pretty enjoyable True/False doc. Vadim Rizov: “beautifully shot and consistently funny while observing a zone where inspiration and bullshit perpetually dwell side-by-side out of impossible-to-separate necessity.”
Ren Faire (2024, Lance Oppenheim)
I should’ve done this in a TV roundup with The Sympathizer since I have nothing to say about it, but too late, I already created the post. Long doc about Texas Renaissance Festival founder “King” George’s half-hearted attempts to delegate and hand off power (and to date young women with natural breasts at the olive garden) and the employees and would-be successors whom he keeps screwing over. Lance shoots the hell out of it. Good enough to make us consider his sperm doc.
Lance is aware of the artifice and performance, wishes for a “documentary-subject performance” oscar in his Vulture interview.
Peppers & Garlic double-feature (Les Blank)
Hot Pepper (1973)
Rock doc about accordionist Clifton Chenier, made two decades into his recording career, and one decade before he’d win a grammy. No awards or recording studios in sight here, it’s more front porches and basement parties. Interviews with locals about their thoughts on racial integration (they’re for it). No fly on the wall, everybody waves at Les while he’s filming street scenes, and his camera is attentive to passers-by and animals and clouds, as usual. I imagine the interview with Chenier’s grandma would’ve killed with a crowd. Made the same year as another Louisiana music doc Dry Wood, and right before the Leon Russell movie.
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Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980)
Just a doc about garlic and its many uses and the people who are into it, but this is Les Blank so of course it’s a musical. Glad to see the featured Oakland barbecue joint is still family owned and sort-of in business. He digs up Werner Herzog for a sound bite about why his Nosferatu didn’t have a garlic subplot (this was pre-Fitzcarraldo/Burden of Dreams). Wim Wenders did some camerawork for this – why?
Garlic & Flamenco:
Fata Morgana (1970, Werner Herzog)
Opens with multiple plane landings from the same angle, almost some Same Player Shoots Again repetition but you can tell they’re different flights from the changing patterns of birds on the ground. The heat-haze over runway connects this to the desert scenes that follow, featuring some beautiful dune photography. Desert cities and very dead animals. A voiceover sometimes breaks in to read some biblical-sounding earth-formation text, which I could do without.
Part two, new narrator and text, not as archaic, plus some nice Leonard Cohen songs, and German researchers with sync audio. And part three, I don’t even know what to tell you. This all starts out as a photography demo, then becomes a collection of eccentricities and natural phenomena – Herzog in a nutshell. Dave Kehr: “Every shot has a double edge of harsh reality and surrealist fantasy.”
Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope 94:
Initially conceived as a sort of science-fiction film, Fata Morgana ended up closer to what today is labelled as an essay film, although it still seems to be rooted firmly in the realm of the fantastic, or even psychedelic. The film’s title is a perfect encapsulation of Herzog’s filmic universe, conjuring a desert mirage that can be filmed, although it does not exist – a reflection of reality, like cinema itself … There’s both a strange beauty and a barren, seemingly eternal sadness to Fata Morgana that bespeaks the ineffable, metaphysical qualities and intensity of experience Herzog tries to wrestle from visible reality.
Pictures of Ghosts (2023, Kleber Mendonca Filho)
Vital viewing for fans of Neighbouring Sounds, showing the history of Kleber’s family in their apartment where that movie was filmed. Funny, I mentioned Chris Marker in my writeup of his Green Vinyl, and the first thing I notice in his apartment is Marker’s book “Staring Back” – and I referenced Do The Right Thing in the same post, and here’s Kleber wearing a Do The Right Thing shirt. As Tsui Hark says, we all have the same references so we all make the same films. “Fiction films are the best documentaries” he says in part two, about the disappeared cinemas of Recife, Brazil, while reviewing the only known footage of certain destroyed landmarks in the backgrounds of features. The third part is the shortest, literally turning the locals into ghosts.
The director in Cinema Scope, on shooting digital:
At the end of the day it’s not the celluloid that makes a film, it’s the attitude that goes into each and every move … It’s quite perverse. I remember in the ’80s when CDs were introduced, the industry sold the idea that vinyl was nothing and you should get rid of it. It was part of the strategy to get CDs into people’s homes. In my family we kept the vinyl and also bought CDs. I like the idea of adding new ideas and experiences. I don’t understand why the industry always has to sell subtraction. With 35mm and digital, the best thing would be for me to have more options. But capitalism always finds a way to fuck everything up.
Sublime Frequencies double-feature
The James River Film Society, a mysterious organization which never emails me no matter how many times I submit my address to their subscription link, counterintuitively programmed a pair of hour-long Sublime Frequencies documentaries from director Hisham Mayet at a lovely large theater at noon on a beautiful Saturday, so I came out, along with as many as nine other people.
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The Divine River: Ceremonial Pageantry in the Sahel (2012)
Short riverboat setup, then it gets right into rocking and boogies down for forty minutes or so, each scene in a new location with a new musician or group. Apparently shot in Mali and Niger, there’s much dance, some cool structures and landscapes, and per the Sublime mission, no English translations or narration or titles. I figured the epic animal slaughter scene would be a good time to hit the restrooms – it’s also weirdly where the movie ended.
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Oulaya’s Wedding (2017)
More of a straight doc about a particular event, clearly explained to us. Group Doueh is a famed wedding band in Dakhla, a town on a coastline peninsula in Western Sahara, an area bordered by Mauritania and Morocco. The Doueh musicians’ own daughter is getting married, so they’re throwing the biggest party ever and inviting everyone. We get a behind-the-scenes look at the setup and prep in the first few days, then the event itself under a massive tent. Interviews with family and guests (spotlight on the gay male dancers). Plenty of music, so I could keep on bopping in my seat. We’ve long heard that Mdou Moctar and Tinariwen started as wedding bands, so the main attraction here was to see what these weddings are like.
The Suspended Vocation & Of Great Events (1978, Raoul Ruiz)
The Suspended Vocation
Very nice photography of a monk in a black-and-white film crosscut with his counterpart in a color film. Unfortunately “interchurch quarrels over dogma and religious practice” is not a topic that keeps me alert and engaged. The lead monk is played by Cahiers critic Pascal Bonitzer in color, and Didier Flamand (one of the Dalis in the new Dupieux) in b/w. Based on a novel from Pierre Klossowski, a biographer of Nietzsche and de Sade.
Ruiz in Rouge:
This book talks about all the quarrels inside the church, of different factions in the Catholic church. This was not very different from the discussions and quarrels inside the Left movement in Latin America. Which is not so strange when you think that this movement was composed of ex-Catholics. They transposed old Catholic quarrels into the Left; this is one of the ways you can read the political movements in Latin America.
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Of Great Events and Ordinary People
That’s more like it – the truefalsiest movie. It announces itself as a doc on Paris’s 12th during election season, but it’s really a doc about making that doc, then a doc about making docs in general, as it gradually swallows itself.
I think Ruiz has seen News From Home, since he opens a slow 360+ degree pan on its poster, and Adrian Martin points out the movie’s closing Le Joli Mai parody.
Ruiz increasingly spices up this cubist lesson in documentary deconstruction with surreal elaborations – such as progressively shorter re-edits of the entire film, avant-garde decentrings of image and sound, and crazy runs of ‘secondary elements’ such as particular colours, angles, gestures and camera movements (collect all shots that pan to the right …). The critical agenda tends to merrily lose itself – which is a mercy in our remorseless age of rigidly theory-driven essay-films.
The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974, Werner Herzog)
Werner as sports announcer, not comfortable in his onscreen role. I just “read” (listened to) his autobiography, which helped greatly with the ski-jumping context of this movie, and left me wanting to watch more Herzog films. Good music with big crashing drums by Popul Vuh.
