Saturday began with Starbux breakfast, then we stopped at Shortwave for tea after the movie. Quiet Takes opened the morning screening on solo keyboard, appropriate mood. We could have watched this from the theater balcony but did not, a missed opportunity. Pawel films from his own balcony for months, getting some good one-off reactions from a variety of neighbors and passers-by, and finding some regular characters. His building’s caretaker speaks of the husband who died 20 years before, calls him a useless drunk. Robert gets the most screen time – Pawel gives him clothes when he’s fresh out of jail, we see him trying to get his life together, and he’s still struggling at the end, says he doesn’t want to end up as trash, a drunk, a criminal, but the straight work he’s found is hard and unrewarding. Time also passes via a regular woman showing up with her newborn baby, and Pawel’s own dog having puppies. Some memorable appearances by a very shy woman opening up to the camera, some shitty nationalists stopping during a parade, and a gay man who’d just lost his longtime partner.
Tag: documentary
Fire of Love (2022, Sara Dosa)
Despite technically being a Sundance premiere, we were the first in-person audience for a movie made to be seen on a big screen with a big soundsystem. I should look up whether the archival footage even had sound, or if this was a foley fest. It puts together a good heroic narrative, the volcanologist couple turning their studies from gently predictable “red” volcanoes to dangerous “gray” volcanoes, and after authorities ignore warnings in Colombia and thousands die, they make a scare film about those deaths, which convinces people to evacuate next time. Filmmaking saves lives. A slick movie, not as personally troubling as others today, despite all the deaths. Kyren Penrose opened, solo acoustic, and we got beer and pretzels at Broadway afterwards.
It Runs in the Family (2022, Victoria Linares Villegas)
The director investigates her Uncle Oscar, her fellow gay filmmaking family rebel, digging up all she can find on him, which isn’t much. Oscar had been repressed by Trujillo, which inevitably brought to mind Oscar Wao. Lots of design and performance in this movie, bringing in more family members for interviews and to adapt Oscar’s screenplays. Sometimes feels slight, but I’m interested in the idea of families erasing their memories, whether on purpose as a destructive act, or accidentally through forgetting. Also sometimes feels awkward, like when two people face each other on a large stage reading aloud emails that they’d sent each other. Some of the less stagy bits outshone these setpieces, like after her tortured attempt to gently bring up to an elder family member the idea that Oscar may not have been entirely straight, when she finally arrives at her point he says “oh yes I knew.”
World premiere by our second punk filmmaker of the day, wearing band t-shirts whenever she’s on camera. Angel Bat Dawid didn’t have time to play all of the 20 instruments she’d brought along, but she made the strongest first impression of any T/F musician, coming out singing from the back of the bar and leading a call/response on her way to the front.
Children of the Mist (2021, Diem Ha Le)
Diem filmed young Di and her Hmong family for three years, but ends up focusing on one incident near the end of that period. Di goes off with a boy named Vang during the new year celebration, therefore he’s said to have “kidnapped” her and she is his bride – even though Di said before and after that it’s not what she intended. Diem gets involved with her subjects, speaks from behind the camera, has conversations, gets into rice paddy mudfights. I chuckled when she told Di that she’s done the wrong thing, since one of the highest compliments reviewers pay a film is that it’s not judgemental of its characters. The payoff of the director’s involvement in the story onscreen comes in the festival’s most harrowing moment. Vang’s family gets tired of negotiating and of Di’s refusals, and simply pick the girl up and carry her away kicking, as she looks back to the camera screaming for Diem to save her, instantly turning this from “portrait of a girl in a particular culture” or “child bride issues doc” into an emergency study in ethics. The misty mountains were very lovely, too. Living Hour opened again but picked up the tempo, and we calmed down after the movie at Cafe Poland with some pierogis and bigos (wow).
Sirens (2022, Rita Baghdadi)
We arrived late and tired on Thursday, skipping our planned first film (Where Are We Headed), instead opting for beer and food at Broadway Brewing, then apples and sausage and coffee at Cafe Berlin the next morning.
Lilas and Shery lead a metal band in Beirut. Formerly a couple, they still rock out together but Lilas (not out to her family) is with a new girl visiting from Syria. Movie looks good, sensitively made. The director says she didn’t set out to make a “rock doc,” but after the band infighting and breakup and makeup and the one gig with sad attendance at a Glastonbury side stage, that’s what she made. Includes footage of the port explosion, which was the focus of another T/F movie (Octopus). Opening band Living Hour played us some mostly-light slowcore.
The Reagan Show (2017, Sierra Pettengill & Pacho Velez)
Watched in prep for the director’s True/False movie. An archival doc of Reagan footage, ok. Doesn’t go as far into the off-air camera-setup territory as Adam Curtis does, and we weren’t very interested in Reagan, but it was either this or Bigbug.
Joy Ride (2021, Bobcat Goldthwait)
“Still can’t look at the audience telling that story.” Just a road trip doc with Bobcat and Dana Gould on tour, off to a rocky start with a car crash. Alternates them chatting in the car with stage performances, which I had to pause a couple times just to catch my breath. Some good attacks on Louis CK and Jerry Seinfeld, with a self-deprecating edit gag. I could’ve been in this movie had I known about their Highland Inn gig – oh well, I wouldn’t have been able to pause in person, and might’ve just collapsed. Produced by Chavez’s guitarist’s brother.
Taming the Garden (2021, Salomé Jashi)
One of those docs that seems to be covering an interesting situation per the description writeups (rich politician in Georgia buys giant/ancient trees and transports them over water for a private garden) but the experience of watching it is something else entirely, no facts given about the unseen owner, the garden only glimpsed at the end. Mostly we see the workers performing tree removal, the townspeople who are affected by this activity, and we hear each of these groups in idle conversation, arguing over what it all means. Visually, the movie likes playing with scale and duration, revealing things gradually, showing the reverse angle of what you’d expect. A holdover from last year’s T/F/ND/NF lineup.
Robert Koehler absolutely raved about this in Cinema Scope:
As in her astonishing debut, The Dazzling Light of Sunset (2016), Jashi’s art is complex, Chekhovian: she allows space for the viewer to realize that everyone has their reasons, to admire the sheer engineering prowess involved in this literal rape of living things from their native soil to suit the whims of an oligarch, and even permits a certain sense of beauty to bleed into the absurdist finale … What courses through every moment of Taming the Garden isn’t anger, which would be the easy way out; instead, Jashi’s movie plays honest witness to the practice of power in the 21st century, where the natural world is being remolded at irrevocable cost.
Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton (2013, Silha & Slade)
Learning about a San Franciscan fave of the Anthology Film Archives and the Visionary Film book I keep at my bedside. I’ve skimmed Broughton’s own filmmaking book Making Light of It, which I bought because of its great title, but my book collection is a shambles and I can’t find it right now.
He hangs out with other poets, including Anais Nin, starts filming with The Potted Psalm, then Mother’s Day is his solo debut. He goes to Europe with his first films and makes The Pleasure Garden in England, which goes to Cannes, where he’s presented an award by his hero (and mine) Jean Cocteau… is offered commercial film work, but turns it down, and doesn’t make another film for 15 years.
Lotta stock footage with talking heads. I respect that the doc tells its own story instead of sticking to strict chronological order, but don’t respect that it motion-graphics one of Broughton’s poems. It spends more time on his love affairs than his post-1960’s work (he had a kid with Pauline Kael, then cheerfully proclaimed homosexuality late in life).
I’d only previously seen his Four in the Afternoon, and the collab with Sidney Peterson – the hope was to watch a bunch more after this doc, but only got to one.
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Loony Tom (1951, James Broughton)
Tom will not rest until he has kissed every girl in the countryside. A straightforward randy romp, with piano music and a spoken poem at the top and tail. Broughton’s friend Kermit was quite good at being a silent comedy star.
