Terra de Ninguem/No Man’s Land (Salomé Lamas, 2012)

Lisbon has two major annual film festivals, Indielisboa, and Doclisboa. The fact that there is no major mainstream film festival in that city is already a sign that it’s not your average film-town. The fact that their documentary film festival is one of the major events of the year, with packed theatres throughout the ambitious 10 day event, is another. This year I was fortunate enough to be invited to serve on the New Talent jury (one of four juries convened), which meant that while I couldn’t see all of the films I had ticked on the program, I did get to see some of the freshest talents coming out of the documentary world. We were tasked with giving two prizes, one for an emerging Portuguese filmmaker and the other for an international emerging filmmaker. I won’t try to enumerate all of the 14 films we judged, but I’ll tell you the highlights.

Although we didn’t end up selecting Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea it was a strong contender. Rivers is actually a well known experimental filmmaker in the UK who has made many short films, but as this was his first feature length film and the competition was only for features, he was eligible for this prize. Rivers shoots all of his work on film, in black and white, harkening back to not only another time in film aesthetics, but in the world. This feature, which observationally documents a current day Scottish hermit, could have been shot any time in the last 50 years, dated to the present only by a brief glimpse of a recent model 4x4. The film’s ethereal timelessness, and indeed the alternative model of time as measured only in increments of need (cooking, washing, eating, sleeping) and desire (listening to music, reading) rather than the instrumentalist temporality the rest of us have gotten so used to, is precisely its power.

The other film to mention before discussing the prize-winning films is, Captivity (André Gil Mata), a quiet meditation about the young filmmaker’s dying grandmother. It begins in the hallway of a stately village house with the sound of belaboured breathing groaning loudly on the audio track. The filmmaker longs to capture some sign of recognition from this elderly matriarch as she in turn is involved in the all-consuming effort to cling to the last gasps of life. She is captive in the house, in her body, in the echo chamber of her own lungs, and the overwhelming sense of the film is one of claustrophobia, effectively communicated through acute observation and astute personal voiceover narration. It’s a slow but moving gem.

I’ve no doubt these films would have won, had not these other two been in the competition. The film that won the Portuguese prize was Terra de Ninguem/No Man’s Land, by Salomé Lamas, a nearly pure talking head interview film, bringing us face to face with Paulo, a shady but thoroughly compelling character, who spent most of his working life as a mercenary assassin working for the Portuguese government, the CIA, and other equally nefarious ‘clients’. His story, if it is indeed even true, details the shadowy outlines of official history, the counter-insurgent movements in the former colonies, the para-military exercises in Latin America, and much more. His chronology seems to roughly coincide with official history, and the story is verifiable except that this man seated before us has no registered documents, no address, no official identity. Like any good assassin, he leaves no trace. Leaving aside the vexing question of veracity, it is the identificatory feelings that this figure awakens that makes this film so disturbing. The documentary spectator is well versed in identifying with the victim and witness, but is much less prepared for the disturbing experience of identifying with the perpetrator.

The other prize-winning film was called Espoir Voyage (Michel Zongo) perhaps the first film I have ever seen from Burkina Faso. Zongo attempts to find the trail of his brother, who died as an economic migrant working in the cocoa fields of neighboring Ivory Coast when the filmmaker was only 4. A road movie with a quest, the structure is familiar, even if the characters, the vehicles, the conditions of movement and statis revealed in this film are not. A better testament to why and how self-representation can be the best antedote to the oversimplifying and condescending gaze of the colonizing other could not be found. I look forward to seeing more from this filmmaker to be sure.

The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)

A documentary that recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, moving quickly on to Toronto, is about to take the documentary world by storm. I’m not one to make such predictions lightly, and of course, I could be very wrong, as the film in question is so brutal, so demanding, and so beyond anyone’s wildest nightmares of what could be, that it may truly be too much for audiences and critics alike. But suffice it to say, I've never seen anything like it.

Its title, The Act of Killing, may seem anodyne at first. But given that it’s a film that features actual Indonesian death squad leaders, not only re-enacting their gruesome ‘acts’ for the documentary’s camera, but also ‘acting’ in their own, fantasy-musical-gangster film that they’re making about their unusual lives, the title is apt. The Act of Killing would be powerful enough if it only documented the lives of these frightening men. But this film goes further, with a film within a film structure, and completely outlandish representational strategies (the gangsters film themselves in garish Technicolor in fantastical tropical sets that even Busby Berkeley could not have conceived), giving it an otherworldly quality, rarely if ever found in all but Herzog or early Errol Morris documentaries.

Indeed, it is clear that both Herzog and Morris found a kindred spirit in director Joshua Oppenheimer (the film is credited with three directors, one anonymous, and the other, Christine Cynn, who was more involved in earlier phases of the production), as they both signed on as executive producer. Herzog is quoted on the film’s website as saying: “I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade.” Morris actually introduced the film at Telluride. He says: “Like all great documentaries, The Act of Killing demands another way of looking at reality. It starts as a dreamscape, an attempt to allow the perpetrators to reenact what they did, and then something truly amazing happens. The dream dissolves into nightmare and then into bitter reality. An amazing and impressive film.”

Imagine a world where gangsters rule, running all of the state institutions, celebrating their achievements in rallies and on tv. I don't mean politicians who behave like gangsters. I mean cruel, uneducated, petty criminals who were recruited by the regime 45 years ago to commit extrajudicial killings of hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens with their bare hands, and then spending the last nearly half century getting rich and accruing power and bragging boldly about their barbarous acts. This film is shot in Indonesia, a country that has never had to reckon with its bloody past, as the brutal victors remain in power. The only comparison I can make would be if the Nazi's had won the war, and Auschwitz had become a model for how to deal with society's 'undesireables.' In other words, the world in the film is the world turned upside-down and inside out. We spend time with these men, but thankfully are never asked or expected to love them. Nonetheless, they force us into an encounter with power that is unvarnished in its façade, raw and unstoppable. Any thoughts of a world where there is the rule of law, codes of ethics, basic shared notions of civility and decency, is just a dream; the film reveals the stark reality. And despite the hot pink aesthetics that would make John Waters proud, the truth that it shows, is far from pretty. The fact that, as Morris suggests, the dream begins to unravel towards the end, does nothing to undo the unnerving experience of having seen hell and understanding that it’s right here on earth. Any film, documentary or otherwise, that can do that, deserves to be called a masterpiece.

Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003)

When Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003) first came out, it was a big hit, not only on the festival circuit (it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance that year), but theatrically as well. It was one among a string of documentaries in the early 2000s to prove that documentary can have popular appeal. What I notice nearly ten years later, upon rewatching it, is that it is a rare ‘popular’ documentary that neither dumbs down its presentation, nor capitulates to the over-simplifying formulae of popular genre.

It is, most definitely, a genre film, a ‘who dunnit’ crime mystery to be more specific. For those who haven’t seen it (and I highly recommend that you do), the film is about a middle class suburban American family in the 1980s, embroiled in a scandalous trial over paedophilic acts that allegedly took place during afternoon computer classes for children. The late 1980s was a time of rampant hysteria about paedophilia in the US, a frantic wave that seems to have spread to England shortly thereafter. This mass obsession seems to have generated a spate of ‘cases’ rather than the other way around. That is to say, it’s unclear that paedophilia was on the rise at all, but instead, the agitated discourse around it seems to have conjured up a collectively imagined epidemic, shored up by questionable police tactics and legal procedures, not to mention frenetic media coverage.

What’s fascinating about the film is not so much the way it conveys the zeitgeist of the times, but its way of managing the material. Arguably, the last time a film had so destabilized the certainty and security of the viewer, was in 1960, when Alfred Hitchcock knocked off his leading lady less than ten minutes into Psycho, as the character, Marion, with whom we identify as our narrator, dies a horrible, screeching, death in the shower. That feeling of having nothing but the flimsy shower curtain to cling to for guidance is hinted at in Capturing the Friedmans, where we are meant to simultaneously hold in our minds the fact that the pater familias, Arnold Friedman, a seemingly sweet and caring father, unassuming and unexceptional in every way, is an admitted paedophile who, nonetheless, likely did not commit the crimes for which he was accused.

There have been many articles written since the film was released, lamenting the fact that Jarecki was not more emphatic in his support of Arnold’s innocence and the clear manipulation of facts and evidence by the police, not to mention the bias of the judge, who declares in the film that she was convinced of the accused’s guilt right from the start, a shocking admission from a jurist who is sworn to uphold the principle of ‘innocence until proven guilty’. And while there are clear cases of documentaries that have served to redress injustice within the legal system—the most famous is Errol Morris’ Thin Blue Line (1989) which was credited with reopening a capital punishment murder case that had the wrong man on death row — I believe Capturing the Friedmans does something equally impressive, by refusing to settle on simple fairy tale truths of ‘guilt’ or ‘innocence’. The law itself, the very system designed to give unambiguous verdicts, in this film, is revealed to be nothing more than compromised bargains reached in backroom negotiations with slippery lawyers.

While the squabbling family unravels in front of the camera under the probing reach of search warrants and the hostile treatment in the press, it is not just the individual members that appear to be unbalanced, but the scales of justice as well. I think the greatest achievement of this film is to turn the tables back onto the viewer, who finds herself endlessly shifting positions, never knowing finally who is to blame or where the truth lies. In that process, we can’t help but notice that the role of judge and jury is one we play all too eagerly when watching a documentary, despite the fact that films are not actually evidentiary of anything other than the filmmaker’s point of view. If Capturing the Friedmans captures anything at all, it is the viewer, who is caught in the act of trying to pronounce judgement based on what we’re given in a film. If a spectator can leave that film realising how ill equipped s/he is to play the role of moral arbiter, then Capturing the Friedmans will have succeeded in challenging the unwarranted ‘superior’ position of documentary spectatorship better than any other documentary I can think of. It is for this, and for its commitment to ambiguity and complexity in the face of, not despite, the ‘facts’, that this film deserves to be remembered.

A friend of mine recently left journalism to make documentaries for a well-known news and information television channel. She confided in me that she’d like to take one of my documentary classes, as although it’s now her full time job, she actually knows very little about the form. Most of her journalistic experience was in radio and print, and translating her ideas to the audio-visual medium has proven a challenge. This confirmed my suspicions that those who hire television documentary producers expect little more than illustrated radio-plays, with no intention of either training their staff in the craft of filmmaking or prioritizing the visual elements of good storytelling. Having some experience years ago making short ‘documentaries’ for television, I’ve often repeated to my MA students that if their greatest aspiration is to make tv documentaries, they really didn’t need to be on our course, as the training we give would be superfluous to the demands of the job. If you have an idea, know how to research it, and can work with a camera crew to get your interviews lit and in focus, then the rest is really just by rote. In fact, most tv documentaries are so formulaic aesthetically (interview, supporting archival footage plus other illustrative visual material, maybe voice over narration) that if you’ve watched a few and understand the basic principles, any semi-intelligent person could do it. Who needs to spend thousands of pounds to study that which you could better learn ‘on the job’?

Not that there’s anything wrong with aspiring to make television documentaries. They are, after all, the most familiar form of documentaries known to audiences, not to mention one of the very few ways one can make a living in the field. You can have an interesting life and feel that in some sense you are contributing to the circulation of knowledge, informing possibly millions of viewers at any one time. As jobs go, it’s pretty sweet. The problem is, firstly, that these films are just content filler for television’s insatiable programming needs, not for the most part, memorable or important films. Secondly, there are fewer and fewer such jobs, as television tends to ‘outsource’ its documentary making to independent filmmakers, only buying the projects once they’re finished, thus not taking any risks along the way. Most stations and networks have only a few on-staff documentary producers, as it’s much more cost-effective to buy the finished product. That means that independent documentary production companies are often using their resources to make films they believe television will buy, tying up potentially talented independent filmmakers’ time producing middle-of-the-road television.

Ironically, I have many students who come to do their MA in documentary practice with us precisely because they’re tired of making television documentaries. They sense there’s something more to the form, but haven’t had the opportunity to explore what that might be. I wish I could offer classes, workshops, intensive sessions to everyone who wants, on the aspects of documentary that people don’t otherwise get exposed to—everything from observational, first person, essay, experimental and lyrical docs, to the wonderful hybrids that integrate fiction in uncanny ways. There are so many films I would want to show, so many techniques to talk about. And maybe then people would understand the craft that goes into really great documentary, and the art of it. Maybe then, we wouldn’t hear questions like I heard at the world premier screening of Belmin Sonmez’s film Simdiki Zaman, at the Istanbul Film Festival this year insinuating that a documentary filmmaker, naturally, wants to ‘graduate’ to making fiction films. Maybe then, we might see more truly innovative and challenging documentaries coming out of Turkey, rather than people thinking they need to do their creative work in a different form. Why can’t we take our lessons from masters like Kiarostami and Panahi in Iran, Varda and Marker in France, or Herzog in Germany, who show us that the documentary form has infinite potential to be great and inspiring art. Maybe then we’d see fewer dull docs and more memorable films that we’d be proud to call documentary.

Rouge Parole (Elyes Baccar, 2011)

When the revolutionary spirit caught fire over a year ago and started spreading wildly, I suppose I was not the only one glued to the tv. But television news has its limitations, biases, investments, which make it a less than satisfying way to hear the stories, learn of the struggles, and indeed get a feel for the atmosphere of the events. Filmmakers and amateurs alike grabbed their cameras in Tunis, in Cairo, all over, and some hastily edited their footage into films. Others set up archives to gather all of the materials, audiovisual and otherwise, of the revolution, to research, study, edit, when the dust settles. Making sense of momentous events that transform so quickly and have so many facets is no simple matter. Yet, international festivals immediately began to request films to show. Imagine, Ben Ali flees Tunisia in January 2011 and No More Fear (Mourad Ben Cheikh, Tunisia), the first film about the Tunisian revolution, premieres at Cannes in May of the same year. Mubarak resigns on the 25th of January, and Tahrir–Liberation Square (Stefano Savona, Italy) premieres at Locarno Film Festival that August. Both of these films will be shown in the upcoming Istanbul Film festival, in a program that I’m curating under the auspices of docIstanbul, called ‘Filming Revolution’.

But we didn’t simply want to be one more festival greedily demanding the impossible from filmmakers in this historical moment. We wanted to create a program that could reflect on the question of how one films revolution, what can be revealed in the moment, what needs time for reflection, what is lost in the urge to produce quickly and what gained. I began to look to the dynamic films of past revolutions, to bring them into fruitful dialogue with those of the present moment. It seemed to me there is much that can be learned. It is this conversation, these sets of questions, that we will bring to the Istanbul Film Festival.

We’ve selected a handful of historical films about revolutionary movements in the general vicinity of Turkey (Eastern Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa) to screen up against films from the current movements, especially in Egypt and Tunisia. Well known films like Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) will be screened as will lesser known gems from the region, such as the Palestinian filmmaker Heiny Srour’s heady experimental docu-fiction feature film about women’s participation in the Palestinian liberation struggle Leila and the Wolves (Lebanon/UK, 1984). A more recent film Orange Winter (Andrei Zagdansky, 2007), tells the impressive and under-reported story of the peaceful struggle that won a transition of power in the Ukraine in 2004-5. I thought it important to include a film from the Iranian ‘Green’ movement that emerged during and after the 2009 elections in Iran, yet in the current political climate in Iran, finding a suitable film proved a challenge. I found, however, an interesting film made by an anonymous Iranian filmmaker in Paris, who is literally trying to piece together the puzzle of what happened based on the clips s/he could find on YouTube. The result is the intriguing Fragments of a Revolution (2011), which we will screen.

The two films from Tunisia, Rouge Parole (Elyes Baccar, Tunisia/Switzerland/ Qatar, 2011) and No More Fear, seen back to back, give a multidimensional view of the events leading up to and following the fall of the Ben Ali regime. And the film we’ve chosen to depict the events in Cairo, Tahrir-Liberation Square, is a fascinating observational film by outsider Stefano Savona, the viewing of which makes one feel the force of Mubarak’s thugs and the counterforce of ‘the people’ resisting with every means at hand, including digging up sidewalk cobblestones as ammunition.

For this dynamic program, we are inviting filmmakers, historians and film scholars from the region to give some perspective to the program as a whole, and to discuss the pressing question faced in these recent days, of how one films revolution.

Fix Me (Raed Andoni, 2009)

It all boils down to this: who has the right to a headache… As some of the readers of this column may have realised, I often write about first person documentaries. I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed with them, but I’m interested in the tensions between the personal potential in documentary and the social or political dimensions seemingly inherent in the form. It can all go terribly wrong, of course, with self-absorbed people making uninteresting films that have no relevance to anyone besides their mother. My focus has been, though, on films that manage to be both personal and political; that succeed in drawing together the particular and the universal. I have written, for instance, about a first person film where the filmmaker pursues answers for himself and his family that perished in the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia, by ingratiating himself and then becoming confidant to the second in command of the Khmer Rouge. The film (Enemies of the People by Thet Sambeth and Rob Lemkin, Cambodia/UK, 2009) is both of significance to the filmmaker personally, while also in the service of a larger social, political and historical purpose, eliciting the long withheld truths about a painful and still damaging period in Cambodian national history. I’ve found myself arguing both here and elsewhere, that a first person film becomes meaningful specifically when it brings into relief the relationship between the individual and the collective, when it speaks not in the first person singular ‘I’, but in the first person plural ‘we’.

Then along comes Raed Andoni’s film Fix Me (2009, Palestine). The premise is simple. The filmmaker goes to a psychologist to try to unravel the reason for his headaches, which have been plaguing him since 1989. One might expect that he’d go to a doctor, but considering that 1989 was the year of the first Intifada and the year Andoni was imprisoned by the Israelis for taking part, one quickly understands that the headaches are very likely psychosomatic. His mother, in the film, questions him about his self-absorption, chiding him to be less involved with his own problems. Others around him, such as the man he shared a prison cell with, cannot understand his pre-occupation with himself when his people still need him. The film is part of a struggle for individuation, a claim to one’s right to a headache, along with the right to one’s dreams and hopes and individual satisfactions. Had it been articulated by a spoiled American, one might not be so sympathetic, but for a Palestinian who has given years to the dream of a nation, at the expense of his own personal aspirations, one is compelled to see it differently. He should, indeed, have the right to express himself not in the collective ‘we’ of first person, but really, just as ‘me’, a guy with a headache.

I delighted in this film’s subversion of my earlier certainties, reminding me that while generalisations may apply, the exceptions will prove more interesting than the rule. Quite the opposite of naval gazing self-absorption, I found this film wryly challenging in its demand for a filmmaker’s right to focus on something so simple, personal and downright apolitical as his headache. In contrast to my impatience with the indulgent use of psychoanalysis in Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, Israel, 2008), where Israeli soldiers try to come to grips with their feelings of guilt at having participated –unwittingly-- in the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, all the while without taking any real responsibility for it, I found Fix Me a welcome antidote, where a filmmaker, rather than hiding behind a collective, is willing to stand up before it. I had little patience for Folman’s headaches as it were, but had all the time in the world for Andoni’s. It all depends on who one believes is entitled to complain, the perpetrator of state violence or its recipient.

The Green Wave (Ali Samadi Ahadi, 2010)

I had been hearing about The Green Wave (Ali Samadi Ahadi, 2010, Germany) since it came out in 2010. Friends had reported back from IDFA that it was a ‘must see’ film. Combining animation and interviews with archival material ranging from blogs and tweets to cell phone video, the film reportedly vividly captured the extreme highs and lows of the Iranian activist movement from 2009. I have been doing some research on films of revolutionary movements and this film was high on my list to see. So I rushed to the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London as soon as the film opened there.

In addition to unearthing several interesting films, my research has taught me two things: The first is that only successful revolutions get to be called by the name of the country (the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Egyptian Revolution). Unsuccessful attempts get a colour: the Saffron Revolution (Burma 2007), the Green Revolution (Iran 2009). An exception, though this leads me to my second point, is the Orange Revolution (Ukraine, 2005). The second thing is that not everything that is called a revolution should really be considered as such. This would seem to be true about the movement in Iran, which while having all of the signature events of a revolution – protests, government crackdowns, arrests, martyrs, even (and this is a bit old fashioned) a leader — would be better understood as a corrective to the revolution, not an overthrow. What the protestors were demanding was fair elections, freedom of speech, and civil rights for minorities, women, and others, within the rubric of the 1979 Iranian revolution, not instead of it.

The Green Wave doesn’t explain all this, perhaps because it tries hard not to alienate its intended audience: young Western viewers. The film is not particularly informative but is instead an emotional appeal by a dissident Iranian filmmaker calling on Western viewers to support the freedom struggles of young Iranians. The film leaves you deeply moved by a sense of injustice and the bravery of the activists, even if it is never entirely clear what the actual politics of the movement or the political platform of its main leader might be. One leaves the theatre with a strong sense of outrage of the illegitimacy of the Ahmadinejad government, whose repressive power grab was expressly backed by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, but to say the film manipulates viewer’s emotions in favour of the opposition without indicating its political platform, is simply to state a fact.

The film does attest to a brutal period in contemporary Iranian history, one that is by all accounts still on-going. There is no doubt that power is being abused and that people are being arrested, tortured, and murdered all because they dared to speak out in favour of a more democratic future. The film itself was clearly a labour of love, made in a lightening fast 10 months and juggling multiple elements, stories, and events, creatively contending with obvious gaps in coverage. Initially seeded with funding from the Heinrich Böll foundation and finished with co-production funds from Arte and several other Western broadcasters, this well-intended film bears the imprints of its intended audience rather than its subject. The film is scant in substance and heavy in affect, giving it more pathos than political pull. Still, as a film driven by passion and commitment, with a strong sense of urgency about it, it certainly does not fail to leave its intended audience moved.

El Sicario: Room 164 (Gianfranco Rosi, 2010)

After a four-year false start with the London International Documentary Festival (LIDF), a festival that in my estimation has never really taken off, London has finally gotten a documentary film festival it can be proud of. The Open City London Documentary Film Festival, that had its inaugural run in June, seemed to hit all the right notes with a strong selection of international documentaries, several interesting strands (such as, ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘Obsessions’, ‘Field and Factory’, and ‘Science Fictions’), affordable ticket prices, and a centralised location at University College London that allowed for an electric festival atmosphere to develop (despite the relentless rain). The organisers behind the festival have experience running the RAI (Royal Anthropological Institute) International Festival of Ethnographic Films, but decided that London deserved a documentary festival that went beyond strictly ethnographic concerns and that was neither set up to serve the industry (Sheffield Documentary Film Festival does that perfectly well), nor held hostage to the whims of a programmer who seems out of step with documentary and audiences alike (a problem that plagues the LIDF).

Open City is modelled on the Jilahva International Documentary Festival in the Czech Republic, a festival that according to the Open City festival director, Michael Stewart, who knows the festival well, manages to balance aesthetic and political concerns in contemporary documentary, offering audiences some of the best of what documentary can offer. The connection with Jilahava meant that there was a strong showing of Eastern European documentaries, which while not necessarily my favourite aspect of this year’s selections, were nonetheless very interesting.

Despite the fact that the promised pedal-powered open-air screenings (with volunteer’s pedalling their bikes attached to Magnificent Revolution’s bicycle powered generators) were rained out every night for the duration of the festival, the rest of the screenings that I attended (thankfully all indoors) were quite well attended. Several prizes, some of which I had my doubts about, were handed out at the end by an eclectic jury, but the top prize-winner was a film called El Sicario: Room 164 (Gianfranco Rosi, 2010, US), one of the best documentaries I’ve seen all year. You wouldn’t think that a film based on a single interview with a retired hit-man for the Mexican narco-traffickers, sitting in a bland motel room with a black sheet over his head, would make for riveting drama, let alone a confrontation with one’s own moral code, but this powerful encounter with this animated and articulate trained assassin is absolutely unforgettable.

Had El Sicario  been the only memorable film I had seen, I’d still be singing the festival’s praises for bringing it to my attention. But I saw many other excellent films as well. Some films screened are making the documentary festival circuit all around, like Lisa Poitra’s The Oath (2010, US), about Bin Laden’s driver, or Erasing David (David Bond, Melinda McDougall, 2010, UK) about one man’s effort to evade the surveillance society, but others were less predictable and in a sense even more rewarding, such as the observational film about asylum seekers, The Arrivals  (Claudine Bories, Patrice Chagnard, 2010, France) or the surprisingly humourous Donor Unknown (Jerry Rothwall, 2010, UK) about all of the children born from the same anonymous donor’s sperm. I’d be happy to see the festival diversify further with inclusion of more films from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, but all in all, I think we’re off to a great start.

Pina (Wim Wenders, 2011)

When I heard about Wim Wenders 3D documentary about Pina Bausch, I had my doubts. To start with, what documentary project has the kind of money it takes to shoot in 3D? Prior to this film, the only 3D documentaries I had ever heard of were about extreme sports, or plumbing the depths of the sea. You know the type I mean: X Games 3D or Under the Sea in 3D. It was always the technology that was being celebrated and a suitably dynamic subject that would draw in big audiences needed to be found. Who had ever heard about 3D technology being made available for a documentary on the arts?

And then, I have to admit, that as much as I liked the music in Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club, and the sweeping crane shots in abandoned buildings and train stations were certainly seductive, I nonetheless had my serious reservations about the film. With American musician Ry Cooder having to give his imprimatur at every turn, ‘translating’ as it were, the genius of these aging Cuban musicians so that Western audiences could appreciate their music, making stars of them despite their economic and political circumstances, and most likely profiting wildly off of those very circumstances, all distracted me from the beauty of the film. It resembled too closely the European/American colonialist gaze with a huge profit margin attached to it for me to settle comfortably into the exquisite music, and I wondered if this new endeavour was also simply a calculated money maker like the last. Add to this that I’ve never been a huge Pina Bausch fan and we had the makings of a disaster for me, so when I donned the heavy plastic 3D glasses at the Barbican Cinema, I can say my expectations were very low: A gimmick wielded by a showman about a sadistic taskmaster of a choreographer. Let the show begin!

Actually, when it did begin I saw everything in double and thought perhaps Wenders was making a self-reflexive joke, highlighting the excess of the technology by ‘misusing’ it. But it turned out my glasses were faulty and when I swapped them out with the attendant who was luckily on hand, everything suddenly came to life. As the curtains in the film were drawn it felt as if the dancers were coming into the audience, practically dancing with me. The spatial relations were highlighted and one’s senses heightened. The delight of the visual experience was only made more sensuous by the precise yet unpredictable movements of the dancers. I was completely entranced.

It occurred to me afterwards that it was not a particularly good documentary about Pina Bausch, who had died unexpectedly only 5 days after being diagnosed with cancer and just 2 days before the initial shooting was scheduled to begin. This is not the film they had intended to make. That film was cancelled, and Pina is Wenders’ tribute to his friend. But as a result, the dancers reveal very little about Bausch and are generally interviewed only to add to her mystique. It is a hagiographic eulogy to be sure, with not a step out of place. We are never even treated to a rehearsal. Every performance is picture perfect, in glorious Technicolor and, of course, in 3 dimensions. The only thing that remains flat, is our impression of Pina herself, never allowed the full dimensionality of a complex person, but rather glorified and sanctified like a god. Still, the rendering of her dances in 3D made me appreciate her artistry more than I ever had and certainly this is a worthy tribute. I now cannot wait to see next 3D documentary (it seems to be a trend), by someone I consider to be a far superior director, incapable of cliche, and in whose hands 3D will no doubt become a spellbinding myth spinning apparatus: Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Pina (Wim Wenders, 2011)

Enemies of the People (Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin, 2010)

I have been thinking a lot recently about the politics of first person film. The question that has been gnawing at me is: are first person films merely extensions of a weak identity politics and a soft, even neo-liberal, form of humanism, or do they have the potential to operate in the service of a more radical political agenda? In other words, and to be utterly reductive, are they self-absorbed and individualistic or is it possible for them to comprise an important political intervention, via the use of personal narrative.

I recently attended the Brighton SEE Documentary Film Festival where this question was answered in the form of a revealing contrast. In the afternoon of the last day, I watched a well-made film called My Kidnapper, by a British television producer named Mark Henderson, who spent 101 days held hostage in the Columbian rainforest, kidnapped by the Marxist rebel faction, the ELN. In the film, he and some of his fellow hostages (a German and two Israelis) go back to the site of their abduction to work through their trauma. As Mark and his German fellow abductee confront two of their former kidnappers (who had initiated contact not long after Mark’s repatriation) with stories of personal distress, essentially wrangling an apology out of the now repentant former guerilleros, they evoke the discourse of individual human rights, arguing that there was a gross contradiction between the guerilleros’ fight for freedom while depriving these individuals of theirs.

This is a prime example of the way in which individualist ideology is utterly uncomprehending in the face of collective revolutionary struggles, and shows precisely how first person film, even when dealing directly with a political subject, can tend toward political regressiveness. The film itself attempts to return the hegemonic power relations back to their global order, with the Europeans and Israelis taking ther ‘rightful’ place as moral arbiters while holding all of the economic (not to mention cultural) power in their hands. At the same time it neatly transforms characters from former colonial and/or perpetrator cultures, infamous for their human rights infringements, into the victims at the hands of their brutal, inhumane, hosts.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the last screening of the festival was the awe-inspiring Enemies of the People (Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, 2009) where Cambodian journalist, Thet Sambath, is compelled by personal reasons (the death of his father, brother and eventually his mother at the hands of the Khmer Rouge) to uncover the policies behind the notorious ‘Killing Fields’. Sambath spends years, slowly, patiently, building trust and developing relationships not only with village level functionaries who turned into cold-blooded killers during the merciless campaign, but also with the second-in-command under Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, who eventually and for the first time in history, admits the orders to kill came from the top. Astonishingly, there is a recognition of mutual humanity and a shared history in these face-to-face encounters enabled by Sambath’s gentle, never accusatory, approach, which is eventually rewarded with the perpetrators’ deep reckoning with their own actions. This film makes us register on all levels the magnitude of the national trauma and the power of film in the processes of mourning, healing, and witnessing for the future, all indispensible elements in the process of cultural and political change.

To come back to the question with which I began, it became undeniably evident, seeing these films virtually back to back, that a film like My Kidnapper is motivated by a liberal-humanist political logic of individual rights and liberties, that fulfils only the most self-serving ends of making the West feel righteous in the face of the barbarous rest, while Enemies of the People is a potent vehicle towards national reconciliation, which attempts a much more ambitious collective project with far reaching social and political aims. If My Kidnapper confirmed my worst fears of first person filmmaking, Enemies of the People renewed my confidence in the power and potential of the first person mode of address.

The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories (Andrey Paounov, Bulgaria, 2007)

Last month I finally managed to be in Istanbul for one of the SaturDox events at Depo. I had heard they were popular and that there were usually people sitting in the aisles and crowding the exits, crammed in to see the documentaries that Necati Sonmez and Emel Celebi, along with their Documentarist team, select for these bi-monthly screenings. I know Istanbul is film crazy, and that the city has no trouble supporting several film festivals, with audiences packing the house repeatedly, but I have never really known Istanbul to be ‘documentary crazy’. In fact, up until recently, I have often felt that I was peddling my not entirely welcome wares when always talking about documentary developments and documentary related news. I can remember conversations with Turkish film scholars, with us scratching our heads trying to think of one single person writing about film in Turkey who focussed on documentary as their main subject. And this just a year ago. We might still struggle to find very many, but at least now we know there are some. In the Visible Evidence documentary studies conference we organized at Bogazici last August, there were at least 10 Turkish presenters. And at the SaturDox event, I realized, that the rumor was true: Istanbul seems to be discovering documentary! I couldn’t be happier.

The film that was screened, The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories (Andrey Paounov, Bulgaria, 2007), was a tragic-comic reckoning of a post-soviet town situated bucolically yet miserably on the banks of the Danube, with, as the name of the film suggests, a serious mosquito problem. The film was projected from a computer, with the wrong aspect ratio, cutting off the sides and some of the titles, with digital noise in the frame, and yet none of this seemed to matter at all to the gathered audience on this rainy winter night. People packed in to see the film and mostly stayed for the discussion, moderated by Sonmez, with two representatives of new documentary directions in Turkey (Zeynep Dadak and Özgür Doğan) and one somewhat more old-school contributor (Yüksel Aksu). Through the haze of my fluish head, and the muddle of my Turkish comprehension, I could still decipher that the level of discussion about directions in documentary was incredibly sophisticated and bode well for its future. Dadak talked about the use of humor in the film—something of a new trend in Eastern European documentaries (she cited last year’s Cooking History, Peter Kerekes 2009, Czech Republic,as another example, and I might add the Polish short Szcesciarze (The Lucky Ones, Tomasz Wolski, Poland 2009) to back up her claim). Doğan discussed the strategic truth-value in documentary, that he and collaborator Orhan Keskinsöy, felt was absolutely crucial for their film Iki Dil Bir Bavul (2008). He claimed, I think rightly, that had they approached the same topic in a fiction film, they would have been dismissed as ‘too fantastical or alternatively ‘too ideological’, yet with documentary, despite the fact that it too has its fabrications and slavish concessions to narrative, it is harder to dismiss or deny. This idea of the strategic use of documentary for its ‘truth value’ is indeed a very advanced and impressive understanding of its function in the world of images, nothing naïve or underdeveloped about it.

This made Aksu’s contribution all the more surprising and out of date, as he claimed that Turkish documentary was not as developed as it could be and he decried the ‘mentality’ that made this so. It seemed to me that his assertions were missing the very apparent fact that things are indeed changing in Turkey for documentary, and the change was happening right under his nose. Even with my stuffed up schnaz, I could smell the winds of change—and they did me a world of good.

Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller, 2010)

How should one choose which films to go to at the London Film Festival? Perhaps I’m not the one to answer this question. With such a commercial festival, I tend to opt for the films without distributors, which are usually the artist’s films, experimental films, and of course, the documentaries. This year I decided to limit my attendance to 10, so I had to choose carefully. Anything that I believed I would be able to see in the theatres or buy on dvd was immediately eliminated. Love stories, of which there were a seemingly endless number, mostly French, were also out.

There were several new films by veteran documentarians like Errol Morris, Patrick Keiller, and Kim Longinotto, that I felt I should see (though why I didn’t go to Frederick Wiseman’s new documentary, we’ll never know), along with John Akomfrah’s return to the cinema (he became well known in Britain in the 1980s for his work with the Black Audio Collective) and Turner Prize winning artist-turned-filmmaker, Gillian Wearing’s debut film, Self Made. So these, for the most part, comprised my selection.

While Errol Morris’ new film, Tabloid, was entertaining enough, it was so feather-light that it failed to make much of an impression. One had the feeling that he popped this one out while working on something much more challenging. Patrick Keiller, known for his ‘Robinson’ series (London 1994, and Robinson in Space 1997), revived his made-up protagonist for a third film, Robinson in Ruins, after thirteen dormant years. Admittedly, the Robinson trilogy is best appreciated by a well-educated English audience, since most of the arcane references are lost on imposters like me, who live here but are not ‘of’ the place. Knowing and accepting that I was at a distinct cultural disadvantage with the earlier films, I could still marvel at their sardonic yet erudite wit, and the cultural critique always embedded in the meandering narrative. His visuals were also always arresting. The visual style of his new film is similarly captivating, as Keiller is a consummate landscape filmmaker and his eye for poetic visual ironies is very sharp. However the narrative rambled, as did his Q+A session afterwards, and one had the distinct impression that he had perhaps finally lost the plot.

Kim Longinotto, a feminist documentarian who has made some truly memorable films in the past (Dream Girls 1994, Shinjuki Boys 1995, Divorce Iranian Style 1998, Runaway 2001) screened her new film about the extraordinary leader of the ‘pink saris’ gang in Uttar Pradesh, India, yet in her post-screening Q+A session, she managed to be so condescending toward her subject that I had to reflect back on the film to realize that indeed, the film was quite conventional, attempting to fit the central protagonist, Sampat (devlet gibi bir kadin) into a traditional heroic narrative, and as she fit the mould too imperfectly, it inevitably fails to deliver the kind of hero such films demand. I suppose I had thought of that very failure as the film’s strength, but then I realized that Longinotto had actually been looking for one, and her disappointment was like that of a disciple who realizes her saviour is merely human, and cannot forgive her for it. The dynamic that emerged was a very troubled one, and although I can’t say for sure whether it is apparent in the film itself, the experience of the Q+A afterwards had a very unsettling effect.

It went from bad to worse upon seeing Gillian Wearing’s human experiment, Self-Made, where the artist placed ads asking people if they wanted to be in a film, and subjected 7 unlucky winners to ‘method acting’ sessions to bring out their emotional expressiveness. It was a bit like reality television meets pop-psychology, as the 7 reveal their loneliness, their troubled relationships with parents or themselves, and one by one the film attempts to resolve their traumas through ‘acting’. The superficiality of the endeavour was unmistakable, though again, the Q+A session emphasized the weakest points of the film. I suppose there are two morals to this column, the first is: don’t let me pick the films; and the second is: it’s not always a good idea to have filmmakers speak after their screenings.

Pink Saris (Kim Longinotto, 2010)

Sky on Location (Babette Mangolte, 1982)

Sometimes you go to a screening of a film that is not particularly great but that nonetheless inspires you to new thought. That was the case when I went to a screening of a film by renowned cinematographer, Babette Mangolte, known predominantly to me as Chantal Akerman’s cinematographer, but also known in her own right as a documentary filmmaker, mostly of performance art. This film, however, was called Sky on Location (1982) and was in part a filmic study of landscape, and in part a meditation on the cultural histories that are grafted onto landscapes, like a palimpsest. The idea is of course a good one, even if this particular film was not a stellar example. But as I say, the screening got me thinking.

Firstly, there was the fact that we were in the attic loft of an ‘alternative’ screening space in East London called ‘no.where’ and we were watching the film projected on 16 mm film. The noise of the projector was a presence in the room, reminding me that it had been years, literally, since I had seen a 16mm film projected on anything but a video screen. Mangolte even pointed out the fact that the film was made just as video was gaining prominence and she realized that viewing habits were beginning to change. Attention spans began to grow shorter. The singularity of the screening as an ‘event’ had begun to wane. The loud purr of the projector was a sound I had almost forgotten, and it reminded me that I was actually watching a film on celluloid, the play of light and shadow flickering in intervals across the room onto a broad white screen. I suddenly became nostalgic for film in a way I had never been before. There was a fragile but undeniable presence of the film and a unique ephemerality that is simply not part of the experience when watching a film on dvd. I had the sense that I may never be able to see this film again, which made it somehow precious.

And then there was the idea of landscape as the central organizing principle of a documentary: the sky as the set of the film; the sun as the main actor; the land in all of its fascinating formations, the mise-en-scene. Mangolte told us that when she first saw the impressive views of the American West, it was out of a bus window, which can, in effect, mimic the frame and even the motion of a camera. With the sun changing the lighting so dramatically, and the landscape changing form over time, she thought, “well, there’s a movie”, for what after all is a movie if not “change in time”?

There are others who have taken the idea of the unfolding landscape as cinema much further than Mangolte does in this film. In fact, the filmmaker with whom Mangolte has collaborated most closely, Chantal Akerman, is a master at evoking meaning and narrative through extended pans of landscape. Her film D’Est (1993), not, incidentally, shot by Mangolte, manages to reveal whole complex histories of Soviet and post-Soviet eras in her deceptively simple drive-by shots of the terrain.

One of my companions at the screening reminded me of James Benning’s work, which takes many of the same themes as Sky on Location (nature, landscape, the environment, the American West, native American culture, colonialism, racism, etc.) but in his films, such as Deseret (1995) or El Valley Centro (2000), all of the central themes are made manifest through a simple, spare sound montage overlaid onto extended landscape shots that allow us to meditate on the ways that culture imprints itself on the land, like an indelible stain. Although Sky on Location, with its chaotic editing and excessively didactic voice over text, was not in itself a great revelation, the experience of seeing it screened on film at no.where, was something I’m glad I didn’t miss.

*

I have never been a great fan of National Geographic style ‘human nature’ films and I have my suspicions about ‘salvage ethnographies’, which presume to record the last days or last rites, really, of what some filmmaker believes to be a dying practice or culture. So it was with some trepidation that I recently watched Son Mevsim: Şavaklar (2008), Kazim Öz’s paean to a tribe of shepherds as they migrate seasonally with their herds from their stone house villages which provide winter shelter, to their summer mountaintop yurts, where the grazing fields are plentiful. Needless to say, the scenery is picturesque, the lifestyle depicted is simple but hard, and the people themselves seem almost perfectly attuned to their environment, a fantasy that only urban dwellers can afford to maintain.

However, despite my skepticism, I found the film surprising, in that while it indulged in some of the clichés of such representations, it worked in tension with the protagonists themselves, who at once seem to be the spinners of their own mythology (as the film begins and ends with parents telling bedtime tales to their children, and even to one another) while at the same time debunking some of those very myths (as when a shepherd tells the camera dejectedly that “this is no life at all” or when we see the dengbej not only singing while working, but also to an audience in a concert, revealing her life beyond this image of rural isolation). These moments, in effect, deromanticize the struggles we see on screen in one quick stroke. The film is beautifully shot, predominantly by Öz himself, and while we would expect sweeping landscapes and photogenic children, we may not expect to see the slow and thoughtful observational footage from the sheep’s eye point of view, and even less the humorous repetitions of images of labor (such as the women making the flat bread), that playfully but insistently suggest the arduousness of the tasks.

This is no ‘heroic narrative’, nor a nostalgic portrayal. It is an unflinching look at a migratory pattern that while still practiced, reflects a harsh reality that indeed should not necessarily be mourned if and when it passes. This approach is quite different from another recent observational film about sheep herding, this one in the Western United States, called Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor, 2009). Sweetgrass is also impressive in its visual style and indeed reminds one of nothing so much as a typical Hollywood Western, but these modern day shepherds complain to their mothers on cell phones that they can’t take the hardships anymore, and despite their hi-tech walkie talkies, often fail at their task of herding the sheep to their pastures. In other words, they are no longer cut out for the job.

While Sweetgrass is a classic salvage documentary depicting the final season of this particular sheep herding practice in Montana, Son Mevsim (which translates in English as ‘the last season’) simply refers to an ongoing cycle of seasons, and the cyclical structure of the film itself, which begins and ends in the stone houses of the winter retreat. The American counterpart really wallows in nostalgia, while Son Mevsim: Savaklar manages not to fall prey to generic conventions and cowboy fantasies, I was happy to see.

For more in depth discussions of Son Mevsim: Şavaklar and other recent Turkish and Kurdish documentaries, I hope you will join us for the upcoming documentary film studies conference, Visible Evidence, which will be convening at Bogazici University from 9 through 12 August 2010. There will be panels focusing on Turkish and Kurdish documentaries as well as much else. For more information about the conference, please go to our website: http://docistanbul.org/visibleevidence2010/eng/

*

I recently saw the Austrian made documentary, Muezzin (Sebastian Brameshuber, 2008) at the Istanbul Film Festival. The film is about the annual Turkey-wide competition for the best ezan chanter in the country, a competition that I might never have known existed, if not for this engaging documentary. It occurs to me that no matter how many of this type of documentary I’ve seen, I don’t seem to tire of them.

The ‘competition film’, as I’ve come to call it, should be considered a subgenre of the documentary, though till now I don't know that anyone has identified them as such. If film genre can be defined in terms of structure and formula, then I think we’ve got clear evidence that this is indeed a genre. In the romantic comedy, for instance, we know that the intended couple will begin by hating each other, come together near the middle, pull apart three quarters of the way through the film, only to be ultimately united in the end. In an action film we can expect a certain number of chase scenes, building up in intensity, casualties, and hopefully exciting special effects, as we draw near to the conclusion. In the 'competition documentary' there are always a certain number of contestants whom we track from preparation through to competition, the penultimate scene being the competition itself and then a final coda to conclude, talking to the contestants, or at least the winner, after the event is over. In Muezzin, actually there are two competitions, the regional championship and the national championship.

In this genre, it is crucial that the director choose the contestants carefully, both in terms of the range of 'types' and in terms of the likely winner(s). So in a film like Spellbound (Jeffrey Blitz, 2002) it was important that the director show a mix of class backgrounds and skill level so as to create a range of sympathies (who, for instance could root for the over-privileged, heavily tutored, pampered white girl, when there is a self-taught, motivated and talented African American girl who  inspires our 'underdog' sympathies?). In Muezzin, we see five contestants from Istanbul, only one of whom goes on to compete in the countrywide finals. Part of the fun is trying to guess (in my case, completely erroneously), who might end up the winner.

There is also a built in event-driven structure which is somehow very reassuring especially since documentaries can seem to be quite arbitrarily structured otherwise. The viewer knows that in the end there will be a winner and several losers and we hope that the director was prescient enough to anticipate who might be the likely winners. In fact, this could be part of the thrill of this type of documentary, since unlike a scripted fiction film, we know it's a gamble with no preordained outcome. In another recent Turkish ‘competition documentary’, Uç Saat (Can Candan, 2008), the director’s choices did not involve any clear ‘winners’, but within the context of the grueling college entrance examination, that said quite a lot about how few are meant to succeed in the competitive educational system in Turkey.

At its best, the competition documentary can reveal important social and cultural dimensions without appearing to have an obvious ‘message’ or axe to grind. The director of Muezzin judiciously avoids both exoticizing and overemphasizing the religious aspects of Turkish culture, while unearthing unexpected surprises, such as the leading judge and Imam’s early training at music conservatory with Bülent Ersoy. Such details go a long way to dispel myths of divided cultures and alien worlds, even while keeping the audience’s attention focused on the prize.

*

I write this dispatch from Pamplona, Spain, right in the middle of my stint as a juror for the documentary film festival called ‘Punto de Vista’ (Point of View). To be a jury member on a film festival is a great honour that I feel I hardly deserve, but it provides an excellent opportunity to ‘take the temperature’ of the field. Of course the selections are somewhat determined (or at least influenced) by region, so there is a high proportion of European and Spanish documentaries in particular, but even so, it’s interesting to see the trends. Out of over 700 films submitted, a selection committee chose 21 films (feature length and shorts) to show in competition and there are three awards plus two special mentions that we as a jury can bestow. By the time this dispatch has gone to print, the prizes will all be awarded, but as I write this, I have only viewed approximately half of the selected entries and it would be very difficult to predict which ones will win.

What I have noticed so far though, and I think it’s not too early to say so, is a distinct return to the observational documentary form. I don’t know if this has to do with the collective ‘proclivities’ of the selection committee for this particular festival or whether there is indeed a return to this style of filmmaking that for so many years had fallen out of fashion. As I have written in these pages before, specifically in reference to my column about Iki Dil Bir Bavul (Orhan Eskiköy and Özgür Doğan, 2008), observational filmmaking requires dedication and craft, and is not for the faint-hearted. The shooting ratio tends to be high, the recording of the material takes real care and skill, and the story can only really be found (or crafted, rather) in the editing room. Television producers have tended not to like the form because it isn’t economically efficient (taking too long to shoot, with no guaranteed coherent film at the end of the process), and theorists have tended to dislike it because of the sleight-of-hand required that forces the people in front of the camera to pretend they don’t see or interact with those behind the camera.

Two of the observational films in this festival break with the ‘fly on the wall’ convention though. One, a French documentary called Le Plein Pays (Antoine Boutet, 2009) the protagonist, a reclusive tunnel digger in the south of France, is so oddly asocial that he babbles mostly incoherently to the camera, fully acknowledging the camera person’s presence, while never entirely allowing us to be certain he knows what a camera is. And another, a film shot in Surinam by an American filmmaker called Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell, 2009), is so tightly choreographed that although there is almost no dialogue and never a rupture of the ‘fourth wall’, the shots are so elaborate that there is absolutely no way that shots weren’t selected, if not directed, with the camera in mind.

Both films break with earlier conventions of observational cinema (non-interventionist, invisible, fly on the wall filmmaking) in very obvious ways. However, I’m not absolutely convinced that this apparent return to observational filmmaking is such a good thing, if it is indeed a trend. After all, both films most certainly partake of the voyeuristic tradition of the observational ‘mode’, the first one attracted because of the oddity of the character, the second with a more ethnographic gaze, neither of which are signs of documentary’s most salutary tendencies.

Immersion (2009) [Note: no German title for this one]

The last two months could have been dubbed ‘Harun Farocki Season’ in London. Not only were 22 of his films screened at the Tate Modern, but there was a retrospective of his video installation work held simultaneously, and for the first time in this city, at a remarkable non-profit gallery recently opened by an heir to the Sainsbury’s supermarket fortune, called Raven Row.

For those unfamiliar with Farocki’s work, he’s a German filmmaker who began his career in the 1960s, making radical, anti-narrative, ‘engaged’ films created with the aim of disrupting complacency and disturbing the status quo. He was kicked out of film school in 1968 for his political activism, along with Holger Meins (a member of the Red Army Fraction, who died in prison the following year). Farocki has always been something of a rebel, famously excoriating his fellow New German Cinema compatriots, such as Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, for capitulating to bourgeois narrative techniques. His methods may have mellowed since he burned his own flesh with a cigarette in his 1969 anti-war film, Nicht löschbares Feuer  (Indistinguishable Fire), but his message continues to be jarringly acute and painfully astute about the operations of power in Western society.

In Farocki’s films the sinister side of capitalism and consumerism quietly emerges. In Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten (The Creators of Shopping Worlds, 2001), Farocki observes shopping mall planners as they chart and then choreograph our consumption patterns. Ein Tag im Leben der Endverbraucher (A Day in the Life of the Consumer, 1993) is a compilation film comprised of 40 years of advertisements to present 24 hours in the life of a consumer, and it isn’t pretty.

I know of no filmmaker that comes close to Farocki’s ability to reveal the intimate, at times symbiotic, relationship between the cinematic ‘eye’ and the watchful eye of the state. With Farocki’s films, one is always impressed by the correspondence between the camera and aggression, the image and control, whether seen in the surveillance footage of prison yard shootings by guards (I Thought I was Seeing Convicts, 2000), or in the footage taken from a ‘suicide’ camera mounted on a missile in Eye/Machine III (2003).

Farocki tends to be less concerned with the excesses of cinema per se, than with the excesses of those in power, who harness the camera as a weapon of aggression against civilians. He points our attention to the ways in which we are all caught in the crosshairs of surveillance, and that imaging itself, with the full range of techniques that his videos document (precision guided missiles, simulated warfare, electronic panopticons on roads and in prisons, shopping mall surveillance, etc.) now sets the conditions of daily life both during war and peace time.

Harun Farocki is easily one of the most interesting and certainly one of the most prolific filmmakers working today. His dialectical montage can be quite challenging and it’s no great surprise that he hasn’t found commercial success with his work, but in the last decade when his work has found its way into art galleries and museums, it is finally getting the attention it deserves. I believe he’s overdue for a retrospective in Istanbul.

Auge / Maschine (Eye/Machine, 2000)

Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1969)

What has the world come to when documentary comes to mimic mockumentary, not once but twice? Possibly the most famous and certainly the most beloved mockumentary of all time has to be Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap! (1984) about a fictional heavy metal band’s spectacular fall from the height of their spandex success. This is Spinal Tap! was so true to life and so close to the bone of American heavy metal culture’s excesses and absurdities, that many people mistook it for an actual documentary and assumed that Spinal Tap was a real band. So much so, that the actors playing the band members (Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer among them) decided to take this ‘band’ on tour, eventually even releasing albums under that name. As if this was not ridiculous enough, many heavy metal stars, such as Eddy Van Halen, and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, said they failed to see the humor in the film, as it was so true to their experiences.

I had always found it impossible to believe that anyone could be fooled by Spinal Tap’s conceits. It really is hilariously over the top, so clearly making fun of not only the music but the culture that surrounds it. Who could really believe in an album (and tour) titled Sniff the Glove, or a story about a drummer spontaneously combusting on stage? This only shows how little I know of the heavy metal world, or maybe the world in general. In fact, two contemporary documentaries have proven without a shadow of a doubt, that This is Spinal Tap! is actually social realist drama of the  most literal and unembellished kind. If Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s 2004 documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, with lead singer James Hetfield’s infantile, alcohol driven tantrums and the filmed group therapy sessions with the painfully earnest psychologist did not prove this, then surely Anvil!: the Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervaisi, 2008) will not fail to convince.

Opening with a string of well known metal heads (Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, Slash from Guns and Roses, Lemmy Kilmister from Motorhead) touting the greatness of the now forgotten band that seems to have disappeared while its peers and rivals went on to great fame, the film already appears to be a set up, like Woody Allen’s fake documentary, Zelig (1983), which employs the likes of Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow to attest to the fictional lead character’s historical fame and notoriety. Cut to a shot of ‘Lips’ Kudlow, the lead singer of this ‘legendary’ band, driving a suburban car and describing the menu of the school lunches he delivers to disabled youngsters. In the next scene he’s actually wearing a hair net while packing the food. The aging band members haven’t seen success since 1984 (the year Spinal Tap! came out) and of course the film documents an Eastern European tour that goes spectacularly wrong. Just like Spinal Tap! Anvil ends with the band playing for thousands of screaming teens in Japan, and again, just like Spinal Tap! Anvil finally gets some gigs, due to the success of the film. When life imitates art imitating life to this extent, one really has to wonder about this eternally refracting mirrored existence we live. Is it really a coincidence that Anvil’s long time drummer’s name is Robb Reiner? Is this someone’s idea of a joke?

I write this dispatch not from London but from Los Angeles. I’m on the University of California Campus, the site of the 16th annual Visible Evidence Conference. Visible Evidence is a documentary studies conference that has been held all over the North America and Europe, venturing one year to Brazil and another to Australia. Next year docIstanbul will be hosting Visible Evidence at Bogazici in Istanbul. I have been participating in this conference since its inception in 1993, at Duke University, and although I have not gone every year, for me it is consistently the most stimulating event about documentary film that I have had the privilege to be a part of.

Many people have been coming up to me asking if the rumor of bringing the conference to Istanbul are true and I am proud to be able to tell them, yes, it is. Everyone is very excited to come. It is, of course, an academic event, so those readers of my column who have an allergic reaction to ‘theoryspeak’ may not be very interested, but my hope in giving an account of the types of presentations that are given at this dynamic event is that maybe it will spark an interest in someone to propose a presentation or a panel for next year’s event. My not so hidden agenda, after all, is to be part of the development of a lively documentary studies culture in Turkey—something that is already in the air and that I’m hoping the conference next year will help to solidify further.

I’m writing this only after the first day of the conference so I can make my deadline, but we’ve already heard presentations about documentary video games (imagine trying to solve a real life crime based on conflicting evidence given), interactive documentaries (online sites where rather than having to watch a linear story, you can pick and choose what aspects of the subject you are interested in and construct your own experience of the story), pathos and music in documentary (we rarely think of documentary genres, let alone documentary’s emotional manipulations), and my favorite presentation so far (call me morbid) ‘the Autoptic encounter’, which discussed the UK television series Anatomy for Beginners and the uncanny experience of looking at cadavers. In that talk, by a recent PhD named Allison de Fren, I learned that the word ‘autopsy’ in English etymology refers to the act of seeing with one’s own eyes (the title of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s film about autopsies, in fact), but also ‘seeing oneself’, which means that in effect, looking at a cadaver is a way of seeing ourselves from the inside, so to speak, hence the vertiginous effect. The opportunity to imagine the strange aptness of the term is just one of the many pleasures of being here.

I myself will be presenting a paper in a few days about the intimate relationship between the camera and the gun in recent documentary and activist films. Although this is a topic I have only just begun to research, it is incredibly rich in implication and the history of the interpenetration between the camera and the gun goes back to the very beginning of the motion picture, with Etiene-Jules Marey’s ‘Fusil Photografique’, invented in 1882.

I won’t burden this column with the details of my talk, but just to say that the term ‘shooting with intent’ sometimes really does imply ‘intent to kill’. [alternative line: …but just to say, that if the camera viewfinder is in line with the gunsight, capturing an image becomes a lethal affair.] The power of the documentary image and its socio-political implications become very clear to me at this conference. It’s always a treat to share these ideas with and to hear new ideas from people who are just as passionate about the form.

For more information about Visible Evidence and to keep posted about the conference next year.

Werner Herzog is easily one of the best and most imaginative documentary filmmakers working today. He has a way of making the earthly seem sacred, and the profane profound. Remember his Lessons of Darkness (1992), where Saddam Hussein’s burning oil fields made an apocalyptic vision when coupled with the soaring strains of Wagner and the sparse prose of Herzog’s narration. He has made countless poignant documentaries that give us visions of our fellow humans as simultaneously inspired and insane. In Herdsmen of the Sun (1989) he showed us Wodaabe tribesmen who participate in elaborate beauty pageants competing for the attentions of the women, in a welcome if surreal gender reversal. In How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976) he chronicles the incomprehensible, tongue-twisting argot of American cattle auctioneers.  It is not uncommon to leave the cinema after one of his documentaries, feeling disoriented, unable to fully assimilate the material presented.

Herzog works in many registers: operatic, mystical, elegiac, comedic, but more recently the one most prevalent in his documentaries has been my least favourite. I call it the “Boy Scout strain”.

I don’t know if Turkey has something equivalent to the Boy Scouts, but in the US, where I was raised, the Boy Scouts were very popular. In it, boys learned how to how to start a fire with flint, how to pitch a tent, how to tie a diamond-hitch knot, all the while wearing uniforms vaguely reminiscent of Hitler Youth. Admittedly, as a tomboy, I was envious of my male friends who seemed to really enjoy their time in the Scouts. But as an adult, it all seems eerily militaristic: training young boys to be good soldiers and macho men.

So you’ll forgive me if, despite his undeniable skill, I was hesitant to see Herzog’s latest documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, thinking it would be about yet another male adventurer or survivalist, with idiosyncratic ideas about the world, living on the edge of civilization. Think of his last few documentaries: Grizzly Man (2005), starring the man who lived with, and was eventually eaten by, Grizzly bears; White Diamond (2004), about an airship engineer who wants to explore the rainforest in his helium filled flying machine. These are all good and engaging subjects, but a bit too muscular for my taste.

Encounters does indeed have many of the elements of his Boy Scout strain, filled with survivalists and dreamers, all in the midst of a (losing) battle with nature. Yet, at the same time, it transcends these concerns and enters the realm of the abject operatic, with visuals of tentacled deep-sea creatures under the blue-grey ice-ceiling, and sinister red volcanic lakes burbling before sending geysers of molten lava meters high. Its ‘reassuring’ message is that mankind won’t survive to destroy the earth, but will go the way of the dinosaurs, possibly in our lifetime. Pessimistic, you say? Not for Herzog, who compares the hideous manmade outposts in the South Pole with the exquisite beauty of the surrounding nature and makes us firmly believe that the earth would do better without us. This surely goes well beyond the Boy Scout terrain, and into the realm of the prophetic.

In a famous interview given to Francoise Truffaut in the 1950s, Alfred Hitchcock endeavored to explain the difference between letting the spectator know more than the individual characters in a scene, or confining the spectator’s knowledge of a scene to a character’s point of view. He described a scene in a café where a bomb is ticking under a table where two people are having a mundane conversation. The characters don’t know the bomb is there. If the spectator remains ignorant of the bomb, in line with the characters, then they may be bored during the conversation and then experience a moment of surprise, when the bomb goes off. But if the spectator knows the bomb is there, suspense is created and you’ve got the viewer at the edge of their seat through the whole scene. Hitchcock uses this story to spuriously claim that it’s always best for the public to know everything, as if he cared deeply about the public’s right to know. In fact, all he really cared about was to make an entertaining, suspense filled, movie.

It has been asserted, by documentary film scholar Brian Winston, that documentary is indeed premised upon such ideals (and legal claims) and that the “public’s right to know” underpins the rationale of most documentary filmmaking. It is arguably the ethical ground upon which a documentarist stands—sometimes even failing to make entertaining and suspense filled movies as a result. But I believe their success or failure to make good documentaries does not and never did ultimately rest on such civic-minded good will. In fact, if anything, you could say that prurient interest and sensationalism have always provided equally strong motivations behind documentary filmmaking.

The ruse of the legal or ethical principle –- that documentary is high minded and public spirited—has been a documentary bogeyman since its inception. A documentary is no more a public service than is a work of art, though both may indeed ultimately “serve” society in some way. And just as documentary is not a public service, a documentarist is not a public servant.

I’ve always maintained that a documentarist is under no particular ethical contract, no set standard of behavior or rules of engagement that must be followed by all. Documentary making is not like medicine where one has to take the hippocratic oath, or even like journalism (such as it is) where one is allegedly bound by a duty to neutrality and objectivity. It is an art like any other, to be pursued in line with the moral and ethical code of the individual filmmaker in question. That means one can only hope the filmmaker has a deeply engrained sense of right and wrong, but it does not assure that a film is either ethically consistent or true. Nothing can guarantee that.

Keywords: Documentary Ethics, Truth in Documentary, Alfred Hitchcock, Francoise Truffaut, Brian Winston

Otel Odaları (Hotel Rooms, Sevinç Yeşiltaş, 2007)

I’ve recently been reviewing my MA students’ proposals for their upcoming final documentary projects. It’s got me thinking about exactly what makes for a really good 20-25 minute documentary. Of course an unusual or dynamic topic is generally a good place to start, but that shouldn’t be the only way to proceed. Most of the films are character driven, which seems fair enough, given our general fascination with other human beings. We are an endlessly intriguing subject to ourselves. But in 20-25 minutes, how many characters can a film sustain? Is it best to focus on a single individual or have multiple characters? Surely if the film is driven by a singular character, say a musician or an artist, or as one of my students proposed, a gay, Nigerian, Anglican priest, then, it will almost certainly have to revolve around that one character and try to find enough dimension and detail to warrant the 20-25 minute treatment.

However, if the film is attempting to portray characters who are all affiliated with a single institution (a school, an organization), or a community (one student has proposed a film about a small village in her country that has, over time, developed an entire language communicated through whistling!), then how many characters can such a time length accommodate? The question really is not how many it can accommodate (though surely not many more than 5 or 6, unless the attention to each character is very scant), but rather how few. If you want to include more than one character, then should you just jump to two? The answer, in my estimation, is three or more always works out much better than two. A news-editor friend of mine from New York told me many years ago that she edited to the ‘law of threes’. Why would this be?

The issue came up again for me while watching an otherwise excellent short Turkish documentary, entitled Otel Odaları (Hotel Rooms, Sevinç Yeşiltaş, 2007), which focuses on two men who live in what we would call in English a “flop house”, a low budget, bare bones “hotel” for indigents. The bulk of the video is spent on one lonely character, an elderly musician who finds no peace with his wife, and intermittently retreats to his solo life in this historical, crumbling hotel, where rooms rent for 5 TL per night. The second character gets less screen time and can be easily confused with the first in that he too is elderly, poor, and lonely, eking out a living, in this case as a shoe shine. Both characters are great, the trouble is, with only two of them in the film, there is a kind of taut equilibrium that doesn’t allow either of them to emerge. They become equivalences, almost canceling each other out. A third character would have lent dimensionality to the piece, yes, perhaps precisely the way we live in 3 dimensions, not two. Otel Odaları is beautifully shot and the characters are observed with such loving attention that one wants the film to succeed fully. Yet without a third character, it feels oddly lacking: flat, you might say.

Keywords: Character-driven Documentary, Otel Odaları, Sevinç Yeşiltaş

Bitch Academy (Alina Rudnitskaya, 2008)

One of the great surprises of the London Film Festival this year was a program of three short documentaries by a young Russian filmmaker named Alina Rudnitskaya. Rudnitskaya works with the St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) Documentary Film Studio, originally established in 1918, the year of the Russian Revolution. Of course, Rudnitskaya has not been working there from the beginning. In fact, as a young woman born in 1976, she would have just come of age in the post-Communist era. And it is precisely this post-Soviet culture that she documents so well, specifically ways in which the transition and transformation has effected the lives of women.

The screening was organized chronologically, beginning with Rudnitskaya’s twenty minute film Amazons (2003) about a group of women equestrians who make their living riding horses through the streets of St. Petersburg, giving pony rides to children in parks and at birthday parties. The film follows the induction of a young woman as she aspires to join the fierce clan of urban cowgirls.

The second film, Besame Mucho (2006) reveals a similarly dissonant scenario as we are introduced to a range of average, middle aged, working class women from a small provincial Russian town, who in their free time sing for an amateur choir that is preparing a performance of arias from Verdi’s Aida. The hardships of the daily life of a garbage collector, a nurse, and a cleaning woman are juxtaposed with the soaring melodramatic score of the opera. The women emerge as multi-dimensional characters with ambitions far beyond what their modest daily lives would imply. This is not a particularly novel story, of course, yet it is always somehow compelling to witness the extraordinary aspects of ordinary people.

It was the third film in the series (and her most recent), Bitch Academy (2008), which most baldly [can also say “bluntly”] revealed the effects free market capitalism has had on women in this post-Communist era. This film follows several women in the pursuit of skills to attract a man, preferably one with disposable income. What we learn is that there is an actual “school” in which these skills can be acquired, and the sessions, which are an unholy mixture of group therapy, dominatrix training, and charm school, are meant to teach women how to please, and ultimately ensnare, a man.

Aspirations to something different, something beyond what life offers on the face of it, is the thread that runs through these films. Rudnitskaya’s strict (and some would say old-fashioned) adherence to observational filmmaking techniques means she eschews interviews, voice-over narration and even inter-titles, that might help to clarify or contextualize the images that we see. What we lose in factual and historical detail, we gain in sympathy of feeling, and we are left with a very visceral impression of the lives of a range of extraordinary ordinary women in post-Soviet Russia.

Keywords: London Film Festival, St. Petersburg Documentary Film Studio, Alina Rudnitskaya, Amazons, Besame Mucho, Bitch Academy

Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)

Have you heard of the new trend: The animated documentary? And why not? some of the most memorable graphic novels have been non-fiction. Think of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjan Satrapi’s Persepolis. Very probably you’ve seen the film Persepolis (2007), but as with any other autobiographical feature film based loosely on the life of the filmmaker, you weren’t thinking about documentary. It’s a matter of form. The form that Persepolis took was akin to a fiction film, using the codes and conventions of narrative cinema, not to mention employing well known actors to perform the characters’ voices.

What I just saw yesterday at a press screening in London is different. Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, Israel, 2008), which premiered at Cannes this year, is a documentary about one soldier’s occluded memories of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and it is a film executed almost entirely in animation. Imagine a documentary that incorporates re-enactments and dramatizations, and then imagine those dramatizations portrayed in animated illustration rather than live action video. I do an injustice to the film by describing it thus, but I’m just trying to give an idea.

Of course, the use of animation is not new in documentary. Elements such as maps of military invasions and the like have been animated in documentaries for decades. We have also seen an increase in the use of animation in documentaries that aim to entertain as well as inform, such as Michael Moore’s animated American history lesson in Bowling for Columbine (2002), or the animated sequences of McNugget production that made audiences squirm in Supersize Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004).

Perhaps it was just a matter of time before documentary filmmakers got really serious about animation and produced feature length work. The first feature length animated documentary, Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10 was released in 2007 in the US, about the famous trial of American anti-war activist Abbie Hoffmann and his fellow Yippies. That film, however, integrated animation with archival footage, relying heavily on the actual film footage of the anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The animation was used to re-construct the carnivalesque courtroom scenes of the famous trial, for which written transcripts were the only available document. Waltz with Bashir, goes even further than this, relying almost entirely on animated footage, even to depict conversations and interviews conducted by and with the filmmaker.

Bella Honess Roe, writing her doctoral dissertation on animation and documentary at the University of Southern California, suggests that there are two general ways in which animation has been used in documentary: substitutive and interpretive. Substitutive, would account for any animated footage that fills in missing imagery, for which perhaps there is no archival footage or material. Interpretive animation sequences in documentary depict that which is unrepresentable in photographic imagery, such as emotions, the imagination, states of mind. Waltz with Bashir uses both substitutive and interpretive animation, and it does so to very powerful effect. The emotional power of this animated documentary is not to be underestimated.

Keywords: Animated Documentary, Persepolis, Marjan Satrapi, Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman, Bowling for Columbine, Chicago 10, Bella Honess Roe

Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes (2006)

The BFI Southbank is a reparatory cinema, which means it generally only shows a film two or three times before moving on to the next. This enables it to do broad ranging retrospectives and thematic programming. Every month, however, it features one or two films that are so beloved or so masterful, and so certain to draw a crowd, that it is screened repeatedly over the course of the month. This month, for instance, as part of their Jeanne Moreau retrospective, they’re screening Jules et Jim no less than 14 times. Very occasionally a documentary is programmed into this coveted slot. So when Jennifer Baichwal’s film Manufactured Landscapes (2006), about the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky was scheduled to be screened 10 times, I made sure to catch one of them.

The promotional materials for the film foreground the fact that the film would be in some sense about Burtynsky and his large-scale photographs of poisoned post-industrial, landscapes. But it also held out the promise that the film would be a truly powerful environmentalist indictment against the stunning waste and detritus of late capitalism. Certainly the opening dolly shot revealing rows and rows of anonymous factory workers, endlessly assembling mysterious objects that turn out to be everyday household appliances, such as fans and irons, inspires a mesmerizing and horrifying fascination. Burtynsky’s photography is itself always simultaneously mesmerizing and horrifying, but I have always found photography of that kind embodies an impossible, and ultimately quite unforgivable, paradox: aestheticizing that which must, in good conscience, be condemned.

I somehow believed that the film would go beyond Burtynsky’s paradox and expound further upon the profound devastation industrial waste is wreaking on the planet, and the human consequences of advanced technological assembly-line labour. I retain a naïve faith, despite my better judgement, that film can animate and enliven debates that still photography cannot. I believe, even though I should know better, that film can directly address what the static image can only point to. I expected this film to take a position, to boldly state that which Burtynsky’s imagery hints at: that these images, however perversely seductive they may be, are nonetheless harbingers of our demise. What I did not expect, and what I was dismayed to find, was that the film was committed to reproducing Burtynsky’s deceptively sublime vision in filmic form. Burtynsky claims, in a public talk recorded for the film, that “If I said ‘this is a terrible thing we’re doing to the planet,’ people would agree or disagree. By not saying what you should see, that may allow them to see their world a little differently.” This is precisely the line the film takes as well, refusing to commit to anything more than Burtynsky’s agnosticism on the subject of environmental and human degradation.

In some of the publicity material for the film, reproduced slavishly by reviewers, the film is favourably compared to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006), suggesting that where Gore pontificates and “lectures”, Burtynsky and Baichwal leave the viewer free to come to their own conclusions. What could that possibly mean? How do you come to an independent conclusion about toxic sewage, mountains of e-waste, and miserable, even murderous working conditions in the ship cemeteries in Bengal or the sweatshops of China? What is the point of remaining agnostic about issues like these? How can one justify such an “even-handed” position as anything less than criminal? I left this well-lauded film, quite beside myself, disturbed by its sirenic beauty and utter lack of critique. The “ethical dilemma”––to like or dislike the film, to resist its allure––is of course my own and any viewers, but the fact that the filmmaker felt that to be a defensible position to leave us in, should weigh on her conscience. This film could have said so much more.

Keywords: Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim

Ironeaters (Shaheen Dill-Riaz, 2007)

Spring was the season for documentary film festivals in London. Or rather, it was the season for film festivals that featured and even highlighted documentaries. In March, London hosted the Human Rights Watch Film Festival (HRWFF), which although not documentary specific, tends to include a large number of documentaries in its line up. April saw two more festivals in town: the relatively new London International Documentary Film Festival (LIDF), in its second year, screening in 8 different locations around the city; and the much more well established and less peripatetic London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (celebrating its 22nd year) held at the BFI Southbank. If I didn’t have other things to do (like my job, for instance), I’d have been going to several films a day, every day, for a month solid. As it is, I’ve done little else besides eat, sleep, work, and go to film screenings. Feel sorry for me.

The HRWFF showed strong films from Brazil (Behave, Maria Ramos, 2006); Chile (Calle Santa Fe, Carmen Castillo, 2007), Estonia (Kalinovsky Square, Yury Khashchavatski, 2007), the US (Everything’s Cool, Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand, 2007), and many other countries. One particularly memorable film was the Japanese/US co-production, White Light/Black Rain (Steven Okazaki, 2007), about the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The filmmaker found the few remaining survivors of the blasts who tell in chilling detail of their memories not only of the day itself but of the aftermath. Shockingly, he also interviews young people on the streets of the two cities (according to the film 75% of Japan’s population was born after 1945) who seem to have absolutely no idea about what happened. The film is one of the most potent anti-war films I have ever seen.

The London International Documentary Film Festival was very ambitious for a festival in its second year, showing 80 films in 8 days, spread out all over the city. It does make the festival a bit hard to keep track of, but they kept the ticket prices down and the multiple venues meant that people from different parts of the city might be more likely to come. The festival as a whole was quite refreshing; less focused on “industry” than most doc festivals and more on “conversation.” In fact it was subtitled, “A Conversation in Film” and they meant it. Many screenings had a panel discussion afterwards so that audiences could learn more about the topic or issues raised by the film. One screening I went to, of a phenomenal film called Ironeaters (Shaheen Dill-Riaz, 2007, Bangladesh/Germany) about the workers who break down ships for iron in Chitagong, Bangladesh, had a panel that included the filmmaker, a Bangladeshi writer, and a representative from the International Trade Union Congress. Moving the focus away from the film itself or the conditions of its production, the discussion could encompassed questions of workers rights, unionization and international efforts to improve working conditions for the “ironeaters’”.

Of course, not all documentaries are oriented around “topics” or “issues” but for those that were, this was an opportunity for people to discuss with one another and ask questions of experts, rather than just going off on their own without any further illumination. It seemed to be an attempt to revive the notion of the public sphere, which although a bit idealistic, is still a worthy aim. Film screenings, in fact, are one of the few places left where such a public sphere could possibly be reconstituted. Good for the LIDF for trying.

It’s great to live in a city that has so many film festivals, or that’s what I keep telling myself as a consolation for missing the Istanbul Film Festival. If only I could be in both places at once.

Keywords: Human Rights Watch Film Festival, London International Documentary Film, White Light/Black Rain, Steven Okazaki, Festival, Ironeaters, Shaheen Dill-Riaz

Under the Bombs (Philippe Aractingi, 2007)

Take this personality test:
When the ground starts trembling or the bombs start falling, what do you do?:
a) run for cover
b) lend a hand
c) grab your camera

The answer for Lebanese director, Philippe Aractingi, is unquestionably: c) grab your camera. Aractingi is not a documentary filmmaker per se (he did begin as one) but he is someone with quick reflexes and a keen sense of the dramatic. His film, Under the Bombs (Philippe Aractingi, 2007), was shot in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, during and immediately after the Israeli bombardment. Under the Bombs features two professional actors improvising a loose script centered around Zeina, a wealthy mother returning from abroad in search of her sister and young son in the South of Lebanon, and Tony, the Christian taxi driver who agrees to take her on her quest. Their “backdrop” is the recently devastated landscape and destroyed roads and bridges of Beirut and South Lebanon. The “supporting cast” is comprised of actual Lebanese people, who were experiencing the full effects of the attacks as Aractingi’s cameras rolled. Needless to say, the tension is high, and emotions raw. The film is undeniably engaging, yet there is something contrived about it. One is left with an uneasy feeling that real suffering was used to showcase a compelling drama.

The Lebanon summer war was arguably the most video-documented in the history of the region, in non-fiction and fiction. It almost seems as if anyone in the region with a video camera, or even a mobile phone, chose option “c”. Documentarians, from Lebanon and abroad, assigned themselves the noble task of witnessing the brutal consequences of aggression, but I would argue that many are just as prone to the tendency of opportunism as Aractingi, as they went about proving their metal as intrepid filmmakers in a war zone.

Aractingi’s is not the first film to set up a fictional narrative with the backdrop of actual historical events. Abbas Kiarostami and Michael Winterbottom excel in this terrain. One of the earliest instances of this type of hybrid filmmaking is Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool shot in Chicago in 1968 during the anti-Vietnam War protests at the American democratic national convention. Wexler’s fictional characters wind their way through scenes of hippies, activists, and flower children chanting and waving banners. The tension rises when the US National Guard’s tanks roll into downtown Chicago and fire live bullets into the crowd. There is a famous moment in the film where the fictional bubble is burst as a frightened camera assistant yells out to the director, “Watch out Haskell, they’re real.” Medium Cool opens with a scene of a news crew at the scene of a car accident where they coolly film the severely injured driver as she moans in agony, making sure to “get the shot” before calling an ambulance.

The great difference between Wexler’s groundbreaking film and Aractingi’s is that Wexler’s intent in Medium Cool is to highlight the ethical dubiousness of the filmmaking impulse in the face of human tragedy whereas Aractingi’s intent would seem to be to merely to exploit it.

Under the Bombs won the Human Rights Award at the Venice Film Festival, and first prize as well as best actress (Nada Abou Farhat) at the Dubai Film Festival. It is premiering in the UK at the Human Rights Watch film festival in March.

Keywords: Under the Bombs, Philippe Aractingi, Medium Cool, Haskell Wexler, documentary ethics

The English Surgeon (Geoffrey Smith, 2007)

Are feature length documentaries becoming more like classical fiction features? Has the recent, unprecedented success of documentaries, and their newfound theatrical home, inclined documentarists to aspire to produce something more akin to the familiar cinematic fare? If you think of recent blockbuster documentaries like Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) or Michael Moore’s Sicko (2007) then the answer would be no. For all of its success, An Inconvenient Truth was little more than an updated version of the old-style “illustrated lecture” that gave documentary such a bad name in the 1950s and 1960s. And Michael Moore’s antics are a cross between hyped-up journalism and comedy: call it journo-tainment, if you will.

But the UK premiere of three feature length documentaries at the London Film Festival, The English Surgeon (Geoffrey Smith, 2007), In the Shadow of the Moon (David Sington, 2007), and Terror’s Advocate (Barbet Schroeder, 2007), suggests something is afoot. Each of these big budget documentaries have all of the elements of driving, emotionally compelling drama, featuring heroic (or in the case of Terror’s Advocate, Faustian) male leads at the center. Further, they attempt to create impassioned sympathies by depicting Herculean feats or moral battles of good against evil.

In the case of The English Surgeon, even the title seems to want to ally itself with its fictional kin. This film, more than any, fits the mould. With exquisite production values (though shot on HDV) and an affecting score (by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis), the film recounts the struggles of an English brain surgeon as he attempts to assist his Ukrainian counterpart in establishing a state of the art clinic in Kiev, despite the bitter opposition faced by the uncomprehending and obsructionist authorities. It really is a moving film, described by the LFF as being full of “tense drama and heartbreaking pathos.” It received a standing ovation at the screening I attended, and for good reason. The experience of watching the altruistic doctors triumph against all odds has its resolute pleasures, not to mention its usual palliative effects.

Further substantiating the claim is another big budget feature length documentary, which immediately following its LFF premiere went on to a major UK theatrical release. In the Shadow of the Moon (David Sington, 2007, produced by Ron Howard) is unabashed in its epic aspirations. Although it recounts a well-known story of NASA’s successful (and also unsuccessful) attempts to land on the moon, it is nonetheless set up as a suspense film, with the breathless anticipation of a thriller. The heroic men of the various missions recount their tales of triumph and woe accompanied by powerful archival images of their flight and plight. One astronaut reminds us that the US Apollo program was designed to raise morale of the American people and American stature around the world at a time when it was losing the war in Vietnam and its image was at an all time low. It isn’t hard to see that the film had a similar mission to polish the tarnished image of America today.

Admittedly, Terror’s Advocate is more complex than either of these other films, made as it is by the director of General Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait (1974), a filmmaker famously adept at representing the intricacies of the macabre. Here the protagonist, Jacques Vergés, plays the inscrutable lawyer, outmaneuvering his cleverest opponents with unparalleled skill. His clients run the gamut from freedom fighters to fascists, and the moral uncertainty and vacillation of it all is as gripping as the best drama.

Documentary has always had some affinity with a range of fictional genres (courtroom dramas, detective films, war and adventure films, musicals, even comedy), yet for better or worse, only now are we beginning to see documentaries that cannot easily be differentiated from their generic counterparts in fiction.

Keywords: Genre, London Film Festival, An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim, Sicko, Michael Moore, In the Shadow of the Moon, David Sington, English Surgeon, Geoffrey Smith, Terror’s Advocate, Barbet Schroeder

Ali Kazma, Care, from Obstructions (2007)

This is only my second London Dispatch and already I’m breaking my promise to report on documentary events in London. Although I am writing from London, I want to devote this column to the presence of documentary in the 2007 Istanbul Bienali. This year’s bienali, curated by Ho Hanru, is loaded with documentaries of all kinds, whether in the three official documentary film programs screened at scheduled times during the exhibition, or the random video installations, many of which use documentary in very innovative ways.

There are three main points I want to make about the presence of documentary in the bienali. The first is that documentary images, whether still or moving, have always been a part of the art world, even when not recognized as such. Secondly, the more politically oriented the curator, the more documentary images one tends to see in an exhibition (despite the fact that documentaries are not necessarily nor inherently political). And thirdly, documentary in the context of the art world requires a much more expansive definition than that which goes by the same name on television or in the theatres. The main elements that distinguish documentary in the art world tend to be duration and spatial, sometimes even sculptural, presentation. The work can be multi-channel, and is not pressed into the demands either of unforgiving television programming slots, or for that matter, the limited attention span of a television or cinema-going audience.

Several of the documentaries in the exhibition seemed motivated by activist inclinations, such as Maquilapolis (Vicky Funari, Sergio de la Torre), about the piece-work factories in Northern Mexico or Turku Soylemeyen Tepe (Ege Berensel, Serhat H. Yalçınkaya, Banu Ornat) about the Inay movement against a cyanide factory in Bergama. But there were also more experimental documentaries, such as the haunting black and white film Object (Kan Xuan) which explores the abstract disorientation of watching known substances  such as flour or milk dropped into water; or Obstructions (Omer Ali Kazma), a 4-channel installation, making disturbing visual parallels between the labor of a ceramicist, a clock maker, a brain surgeon, and a slaughterhouse worker.

I call attention to the nearly ubiquitous presence of documentary in this year’s bienali only to emphasize the intimate and ongoing relationship between art and documentary, a connection that most fail to acknowledge, even when it would seem hard to ignore.

As a final note, if you missed this year’s bienali, don’t miss the rare opportunity to see Kutluğ Ataman’s eight  hour documentary, Semiha B. Unplugged (1997), playing through February 2008 as part of the “Modern and Beyond” exhibition at Santral Istanbul.

Keywords: Istanbul Biennial 2007, Kutlug Ataman, Semiha B Unplugged, Maquilapolis, Vicky Funari, Sergio de la Torre, Turku Soylemeyen Tepe, Ege Berensel, Serhat H. Yalçınkaya, Banu Ornat, Obstructions, Omer Ali Kazma