Poor, poor documentary

-or-

Hail to the tenth Muse!

The 11^th Documentary Festival in Thessaloniki, Greece—where Olympians might descend to party—provides the occasion for a debate between a dirge and the muse of non-fiction films:

DIRGE (denouncer of Documentary):

What mean instruments you have to reveal the world. How paltry a camera, even an IMAX, is to convey a landscape or monument.ⁱ Your blank eye and microphone aren’t worth the trust to show and sound for us; they reduce a presence and shrink experience.

Works by African filmmakers presented for the first time in the Balkans made a festival coup in Thessaloniki. Yet some works clearly showed the limits of your art.

In presenting his movie on the massacres in Rwanda, director Gilbert Ndahayo had poise before the audience. He was more effective by his words than through his film Behind This Convent. The speeches of survivors in close-ups before a fire, like the confessions of the murderer of his family, appear flat onscreen.

“An image can say a thousand words,” the director tells a Tribeca audience in his movie. And one stays with you—of Rwandans scrubbing bones and skulls with toothbrushes, in plastic basins used for soaking feet. But the tenuousness of civilization is better evoked in eyewitness articles and photos than by your recording devices.

The festival featured exhibits of photographs, including one by Vasia Pelegrati of her time in Malawi. Details such as boys lying prone on the backs of cattle, a shirtless man on a black vinyl couch between roofless columns, or the back of a woman’s shirt, torn into strips like ribbons of office, absorb the imagination more in their single frames than the twenty-four per second of many movies. Documentary, abdicate from your tiny throne of truth!

DOCUMENTARY (defending herself):

But I can recover the world for you, and turn perceptual limits into social understanding. In Heddy Honigmann’s Oblivion, the camera follows two pre-adolescent sisters along a crosswalk with their acrobatics, moves forward with them through cars as they ask for money, then to a traffic island where their mother sits with younger siblings. The trailing frame makes us focus on the girls and their lives of play and begging. The unbroken shot means less in a sentence than when it is seen, as words capture less well emotions surfacing on a face and changing gestures of a figure in the duration of a take.

And what pleasures I bring compared to a photograph. Oblivion uses an original device to convey passing time in a café: rather than cutting from one customer to another, a wide shot of the tables dissolves to a patron in the same place, in a later part of the day, or to a new arrival. A photograph carries an instant, but cannot absorb us into a community of people, and those who wait on them, as in one of my works.

 

DIRGE:

Your praise may be true for one or two films at a festival, but a good documentary is even rarer than a solid fiction. Few works display your latent protean strength, for it’s tough to turn appreciation into smart choices of craft. The decisions of which people and places to shoot, what to show and hear of them, how to structure events, and the sounds to accompany them can impact our understanding of the world.

But documentary, you frustrate, confuse, and mollycoddle.

DOCUMENTARY:

I enrich, enlighten, and provoke you.

DIRGE:

How conceited you are, as you obscure where you should illuminate. The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector reveals the egomaniac in his mansion, where he refuses to talk about his trial for murder; shots of him in different hairstyles in court; effusive quotes about his work in pop music, and a few performances of his songs. I would rather have watched the Ike and Tina Turner Revue rocking “River Deep, Mountain High” nine times more than go back to the interview with him.

DOCUMENTARY:

You couldn’t take your eyes off him.

DIRGE:

Because I kept waiting for more of interest that never came: explanations of how he worked in the studio and crafted his songs, interviews with his singers, other archival footage, and if there was no money, even asking today’s teens if they can hum “Da Doo Ron Ron,” to provide some relief from his creepiness!

DOCUMENTARY:

I’m not flawless. But rather than frustrate, I anchor audiences in novel locations, like the Three Men and a Fish Pond of the clearly named Latvian film, or the home cluttered with fabrics, needles and mannequins of Mimi and Vali, who sit with their white heads back to back in The Ladies. Or I enlighten you to a writer’s routine, as with Gunnar Staalesen, born and living in Bergen, Norway, interviewed for the Greek TV program The Antennas [sic] of Our Time.

But you think I’m self-satisfied.

DIRGE:

You’re supposed to be in your golden age. You can inspire a film with a theme on the varieties of boredom, Bloody Mondays and Strawberry Pies, in the new section “Hybrid Docs,” a category popping up across documentary festivals. Your works could make more inventive connections than globetrotting blockbuster fictions. But instead you befuddle.

DOCUMENTARY:

You melancholic malcontent.

DIRGE:

Why shouldn’t I be demanding with you? Even a good documentary, like Oblivion, is too long.

DOCUMENTARY:

But even the ones you criticize have a noteworthy moment or experiment with technique. In the Iron Ladies of Liberia, the audience gasped when the police pursued grave robbers, and one dropped the child he was carrying like a shopping bag. I doubt that could be imagined for a fiction feature.

DIRGE:

I don’t like the movie although it received a warm reception with other festival films. And I’ll tell you why—

DOCUMENTARY:

Wait; I was saying that experiments with techniques also enliven a documentary. The soundtrack in Bloody Mondays and Strawberry Pies mixes quotes from Notes from Underground and American Psycho, peoples’ comments, sounds of their workplaces, and their homemade songs, over scenes of them at work icing pastries, calling an investor, or setting down a prayer rug to speak in a market.

DIRGE:

But you still can’t follow the film. Documentary, you are either too challenging or cosset people with reality.

DOCUMENTARY:

The old twin charges!

DIRGE:

Your followers doubt your strength. Behind This Convent relies on insistent music, one of the unnecessary conventions of western documentaries. Thessaloniki festival-goers gave the audience award for an international feature to the praised Burma VJ—Reporting from a Closed Country. And the movie’s footage is a prize, obtained in defiance of the country’s repressive government. But as the music swells with the crowd of protesting monks and citizens of Rangoon, it casts doubt on the worth of the material: as if the marchers can’t struggle for civil freedoms without orchestral help.

DOCUMENTARY:

Are you against the use of music in documentaries?

DIRGE:

Oh no, except it’s a rhetorical device. Documentary, how often you prove your feebleness as a form with the weakness of your causes. How you abuse that Greek invention, rhetoric!

DOCUMENTARY:

You are right to be demanding. It’s not enough to wield a camera and microphone adeptly, to struggle for access at the beginning and coherence at the end. Filmmakers should question their choices—but that doesn’t differentiate fiction from my works.

DIRGE:

Except that bad choices in documentary have a different effect; they produce rhetoric.

DOCUMENTARY:

I won’t deny inspiring a political point of view or a poetic order.

DIRGE:

But there’s a difference: the calculated use of language to persuade or influence people, can bring an issue to public attention, or counteract a mainstream view. But rhetoric in a documentary reassures viewers while trying to rouse them to indignation over issues like corporate greed, political corruption, and global warming (respectively, Crude, Iron Ladies of Liberia, and The Age of Stupid).

Since we live in such a rhetorical society, your use of it relegates you to a handmaiden of opinion rather than the queen of observation.

DOCUMENTARY:

But can someone have a social conscience and not use rhetoric?

DIRGE:

I’ll give an example from another of your popular works at the festival. The movie Crude argues that Texaco, the oil company that merged with Chevron, did lasting destruction to the Amazon and its natives. The film is oriented from the side that gave it full access, the Ecuadorian and American attorneys who seek compensation for the victims. While the filmmakers interview a scientist among other Chevron employees, we do not get what would be most desirable and damaging: inside knowledge of how the business operates, including its cover-ups. A spokesperson’s slip of the tongue is the greatest conviction the film makes, as a well-intentioned work that nonetheless diminishes its cause, even if it won the festival’s World Wildlife Fund Award. Oh documentary, you’re an abject form!

DOCUMENTARY:

But I have these antidotes to rhetoric: heterogeneity, serendipity, and—in my differences from photography—vitality through time.

DIRGE:

But how often do these virtues come out in your films?

DOCUMENTARY:

Each muse can falter with recalcitrant mortals. But the salient characteristics of our arts can also shift. Nowadays, my works defend a pluralistic democratic society, in the multiplicity of sources I can bring together—

DIRGE:

Can offer—

DOCUMENTARY:

The original title of Honigmann’s Oblivion was “The Word of the Silent One.”ⁱⁱ The film shows the grandson of a sash-maker demonstrating how to wear one properly—and then cuts to former President Fujimori struggling to adjust his Presidential ribbon after being elected. The comedy prompts you to re-interpret footage from parliament.

Then, the discoveries found in documentaries upset rhetorical premises. The form can satisfy viewers in different paths than the ones they anticipate. The “musical docu-tragi-comedy” Courting Condi turns a cheesy dating quest into a damning account of the former Secretary of State. Actor Devin Ratray plays a besotted musician who follows Condi’s career path to discover that she wouldn’t make a desirable mate. While he begins as a love-struck goon who could never get near her, the film ends by his rejecting without ever meeting her.

DIRGE:

As written by director/producer Sebastian Doggart, the film is a planned exposé. The hokey musical numbers only mask the critical rhetoric.

DOCUMENTARY:

Can’t a catchy pop tune have insightful lyrics? The film’s framework provides a popular setting for the penetration into Rice’s career. Other docs like Resurface, Blindsight, and Operation Filmmaker show how audiences willingly take detours from assumptions in documentary.

DIRGE:

Meaning you gull the rabble?

DOCUMENTARY:

I’d prefer to say that people are more open to what can happen: as documentarians exert less control over the whole world they film, as non-fiction harnesses the unrehearsed, and since flaws and even failure can be true without being fatal, documentaries expand the currency of film stories. Mark Twain knew that “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”ⁱⁱⁱ

DIRGE:

It still sounds like a con game to divert expectations to your agenda. It’s a subtler form of rhetoric.

DOCUMENTARY:

You forget how documentarians can track a subject until it transcends their initial point-of-view, ’til the filmmakers themselves are surprised. The resulting vitality through time counteracts the immediate aims of persuasion.

The Thessaloniki festival presented a tribute to the Greek documentary maker Fotos Lamprinos, whose works show finesse with archival footage. To make a film that doesn’t defeat its own argument in the telling, he says, depends on both a cinematic education and lucid comprehension of political life. He demonstrates both in his latest movie, Captain Kemal, about a Turk who once fought against the Greeks, only to lead the Greek communist guerillas in the Civil War. Kemal recalls one of their anthems, as the editing of archival photos makes his comrades appear to accompany him in song. Kemal’s change of sides demonstrates both the passion for a cause and the impermanence of most rhetoric.

 

Another hero, the Latvian matriarch of My Mother’s Farm, makes dogged improvements to her community, working on the land like her parents before Soviet communism. She writes news articles, crusades for a bus line to stop by her village, and pays opera singers in farm goods to perform in their town. Still, after decades of tough labor, she has no adequate pension, is forced to sell her land, dies companionless and without moving to the city as she wished.

The film uses her daughter’s voice-over to tell her mother’s life. It also poses visual eloquence against imperialist and nationalist dogma. The movie reverses archival footage of a parade of Soviet tanks under snow; the flakes falling upwards dissolve into a harvest coming down out of a farm machine. When the Soviets withdrew, the mother sought to revive her family and country’s history before the war: an illusion, as she later admits.

DIRGE:

So you either push with rhetoric or depress with life’s vanities.

DOCUMENTARY:

Why do the audiences that wait for a final clichéd kiss give my works such leeway?

DIRGE:

Are impatient and dissatisfied fiction film-goers your spectators too?

DOCUMENTARY:

They are even if they don’t know it. I elaborate the fuller realization of screen reality, including acknowledgement of death with the worth of a devoted life. My Mother’s Farm ends not with the heroine dying but with the success of one of her causes, to have a shuttle run to and from the airport in Riga.

DIRGE:

You’re lost if you think your films win more than evaporating goodwill.

DOCUMENTARY:

A little enlarged sympathy, a tad more energy, and less susceptibility, from the—

DIRGE:

—drab, deluding, formulaic—

DOCUMENTARY:

—tough-minded, most adventurous Muse.

Notes