4 Little Girls

All the discussion about whether I have an obligation to be nice made me question my choice of films. It's easy to fill the blog with posts about so-so Hot Docs screenings and films chosen almost at random from the firehose barrage of docs on TV. But the point of this blog is to learn. And while it's true that as much can be learned from a film's failures as from its successes, it's only true up to a point. Truffaut learned his craft by watching Hitchcock, not Ed Wood.

So I decided it was time to raise the bar and watch some better docs. I turned to the precariously balanced pile of DVDs by the TV, and picked 4 Little Girls, Spike Lee's 1997 film about a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Added bonus: the film was shot by Ellen Kuras, whose directorial debut, The Betrayal, was my hands-down favourite at Hot Docs.

4 Little Girls has an arresting opening sequence: Kuras's beautifully impressionistic shots of the cemetery where the girls are buried, cut with archival footage of protests and photographs of the funeral, and set to "Birmingham Sunday," Joan Baez's haunting song about the bombing. The mood is established, and we have all the background we need. We then meet Maxine and Chris McNair, parents of Denise, one of the four victims. They are the heart of the film, telling deeply personal stories about their own lives as well as their late daughter's, who feels very much alive to them still. Lee uses the extreme close-up to great effect: the faces sometimes fill almost the whole screen, so that we are literally face-to-face with the participants. The handheld close-up is a powerful tool, often as powerful as Errol Morris's Interrotron gaze. (Though I imagine this probably works better on television than on the big screen.)

Lee interweaves the stories of the four girls and their families with the story of Birmingham, one of the most racist, violent cities in the segregated South. He takes us inside the families - parents trying to explain segragation to their young children, slowly getting involved in the civil-rights movement, often prodded by their own teenagers - and the community as a whole, which was in the process of mobilizing for a hard-fought and dangerous challenge to the racists who ran the town. By focusing as much on the social setting as on the families, Lee creates a much richer picture of the community that was targeted than we normally see in this type of countdown-to-the-event historical doc.

This made me think of course of another film I saw recently, Sturla Gunnarsson's Air India 182, which is airing this weekend on CBC. Lee and Gunnarsson make some very different choices: Lee focuses on the families' daily lives and relationships, and on the community; Gunnarsson, on the victims' last few hours, the suspects and the investigation. Lee uses impressionistic imagery - family photographs shot handheld, creating a home-movie effect, archival footage tinted blue; Gunnarsson shoots detailed, literal re-enactments. Both use graphic images of the victims, Lee flash cutting to photos of the girls on the autopsy slab, Gunnarsson showing news footage of bodies being pulled out of the ocean. Both are powerful films, but I think 4 Little Girls is a more complete emotional experience: rather than dwelling on the search for justice, the investigation, the trial -- the Mississippi Burning approach -- Lee chooses to tell the story of the girls and their community, an unembellished, personal and direct approach. Air India 182 is a very competent summary of the story that's appeared in the papers over the last 20 years, with few new revelations. 4 Little Girls is a work of cultural history.

There is one misstep in 4 Little Girls that shows just how powerful a pure look into the past can be. About two thirds of the way through the film, Lee brings up a series of church burnings that happened in the South in the mid-1990s, when the film was being made, and includes comments from three people who had absolutely nothing to do with Birmingham in the 1960s: Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby and (improbably) the late Reggie White, an NFL football player turned preacher. It's a jarring turn, and in his attempt to bring the story into the present day Lee wrenches us out of the world he's so painstakingly created. There's no need to make these explicit connections. When you tell the story well enough, the audience can make its own emotional and thematic connections to the present.

Overall, though, 4 Little Girls is a very satisfying film - cinematic both visually and as an emotional experience.

The Black List

Coming from a documentary filmmaker, there are few insults worse than “It was all talking heads.” People talking, that’s just not cinematic, they say. Tell the story through action!

To me, when done right, people talking can be just as exciting as the most eye-popping action, the most beautiful cinematography. The Black List is a perfect example.

Director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and interviewer Elvis Mitchell set out to explore the African-American experience, and to rehabilitate the term “black list." They pulled together an incredible line-up of interviewees, from Colin Powell, to Sean “Puffy” Combs, to Toni Morrison. The results are riveting.

I used to be sceptical about Errol Morris’s Interrotron device, which allows the interview subject to look directly into the camera and feel like he or she is talking to the interviewer. Morris’s The Fog of War changed my mind; The Black List has sealed the deal. The subjects, about twenty of them, all beautifully, lovingly lit, sit in front of a plain slate-coloured backdrop and talk directly to the audience – directly to me. It’s hard not to pay attention.

It’s also hard not to pay attention when you’re expecting to see the usual African-American suspects, and the first person who pops up on screen is Slash. Slash! The guitarist from Guns’n’Roses (who also makes an appearance in Anvil! The Story of Anvil). Dude’s black? I would have said Jewish before black. Hell, given the history of G’n’R, anything but black. Turns out Slash’s mother is African-American, and he learned to play guitar while hanging out with his cousins in South-Central. And hey, Slash is actually articulate and interesting. And he’s followed by Toni Morrison. Can you see Slash and Toni Morrison chit-chatting at a party? That would just cause a rift in the space-time continuum. So the film gets off to a great start.

What follows is a list of people who cover the range of the African-American experience: Keenen Ivory Wayans, women’s erotica writer Zane, Kareem-Abdul Jabbar, Suzan-Lori Parks (if I hadn’t seen this film, I never would have known how beautiful her eyes are), Bill T. Jones, etc., etc. Each of them appears on screen for maybe four minutes, and each interview vignette ends with an interesting climax. Who says that an interview film can’t have a decisive moment just like a Cartier-Bresson photograph or a cinema vérité film. (All those people who worked on Wild Blue Yonder should watch The Black List.)

This is a film that works well in the theatre, but is also perfect for TV, the medium of the close-up. It’s just too bad it’ll likely never make it to Canadian TV – too American, too unconnected to the “Canadian” experience, the broadcasters will say.

It's too bad. One of the most memorable moments in the film comes from Chris Rock, who says, ”True equality is the equality to suck like the white man. We want the license to fail and come back, and learn.”

Those of us who work in Canadian TV know a little bit about that. We want to be able to suck like the Americans.