The Man Who Crossed the Sahara

What happened to Doc-a-Day? It's been more than a week since my last post. So soon after starting my challenge, I've run into a snag: I can't always work and blog at the same time. The next two months or so are going to be a blur of travelling, shooting, screening and writing. The beast of television must be fed. I'll be lucky if I manage a doc a week.

Nevertheless, I do have a film to discuss: The Man Who Crossed the Sahara, by Montreal filmmaker Korbett Matthews, which played at Hot Docs and is having its television premiere on Bravo! in a couple of weeks.

The Man is Frank Cole, a Canadian filmmaker recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records for being the only person to make a solo crossing of the Sahara. Cole documented his journey with a Bolex camera, spent the next ten years trying to finish the film, and then headed back to the Sahara to try another, even longer, solo crossing. This time his luck ran out, and he was murdered by bandits, just 70 km from the start of his journey.

The Man Who Crossed the Sahara tells Cole's story and tries to get at the mystery of why he was the weird, death-obsessed dude that he was.

The challenge in making a film like this is to help the audience connect with a subject who is a) not there to speak for himself, and b) largely unknown. As a viewer, why should I care about this guy? Does the film raise questions for me that I want to see answered? Is there something in the film that I can connect with? Does the film address any universal concerns or themes?

To me, this film doesn't do anything of the sort. It fails to find any answers or to get beneath the surface of Cole's character. And worse, it fails to make me see why Cole is compelling to the filmmaker himself.

On the surface, The Man Who Crossed the Sahara is certainly beautiful: great footage of the desert, a hypnotic soundtrack. But it's not engaging. It's not clear to me why Frank Cole is interesting, why he's worth more than an honourable mention in the Darwin Awards. The scenes from his early films certainly don't give any clues - the clips from A Life and The Mountenays just look amateurish. Life Without Death, his film about his successful Sahara crossing, appears to be more compelling, but there's something artificial and oddly pathetic about a documentary where a guy sets up a camera and then jumps in front of it to act out a scene.

So if it's not Cole's filmmaking, then what can draw us in? It's not his relationship with his family - his parents are stoic Anglos who add some unspoken emotion but no psychological insight. His best friend and some of his artistic collaborators tell a few stories about him, someone makes an oblique reference to some kind of extreme sexual tastes, but there's no psychological probing, no real insight or emotional connection, no controversy, no dialogue. Are his friends and family still trying to figure out why he did what he did? Or are they simply telling a well-practiced tale about a guy who was obsessed with death? There is no emotional arc to this film, it's a one-note story. We are to take it on the filmmaker's word that Cole was interesting, and then we are led down a linear path from the first signs of his death obsession to his violent end in the Sahara.

The kindest thing I can say is that The Man Who Crossed the Sahara is a forbidding film - it does not invite the viewer in. But really, I would go further. It's a film that doesn't know what it's about, that does not ask any hard questions or prove any theme. It's not that it leaves questions unanswered; it doesn't know what questions to ask.

There is one clip that illustrates the central problem with this film: one of Cole's filmmaking pals says, "The fact that he made films is proof to me that he was human." Really? To me, that's proof of nothing at all. And yet Matthews seems to take this as the gospel truth. As a young filmmaker, does he feel that his craft is proof of his own humanity? What's the connection he feels with Cole? From the film, it's impossible to tell. Maybe that's the emptiness at the centre of this film.

Rockets Redglare

After watching Bus 174, I went back to the pile of eBay DVDs, and picked one I had taken a chance on because it was cheap and available. Rockets Redglare is a film that premiered at Sundance and played at Hot Docs. The subject is potentially interesting - a New York comedian and character actor with a funny stage name and a dark personal history. So, what the hell. How bad could it be?

The answer, my friends, is "very bad." I lasted about ten minutes before giving up. There's a lot to be said for the DV revolution, which made the means of production available to just about anyone. The problem is that "just about anyone" doesn't necessarily have any filmmaking skills or talent, nor, most unfortunately, the modesty or self-awareness to realize this.

This film was apparently made by a first-time filmmaker with borrowed equipment. Well, number one, he should have borrowed a radio mic along with the camcorder, and maybe a book on camerawork, so that the interviews wouldn't look as awful as they sound. But the muddy sound and picture aren't the worst of it. In the ten minutes I watched, Rockets Redglare doesn't come across as the least bit interesting. The rambling clips from the likes of Steve Buscemi and Jim Jarmusch don't create a sense of mystery or raise any questions - it's as if we're supposed to be interested in his story just because these Gods of Indie Filmmaking were friends with the guy. And finally, there are the clips from Redglare's mid-80s stand-up act, which aren't the least bit funny. So. Bad shooting. Bad sound. No structure. Boring subject. Eject.

As of today, you can find my copy at a certain used-DVD store I frequent. One film that was available at the store was The War Tapes, a very good documentary about the Iraq war that was shot primarily by the soldiers themselves, with cameras supplied by the filmmaker. The soldiers got fantastic footage - intimate, raw and often heartbreaking. Throughout the process, they worked closely with director Deborah Scranton, who was back in the U.S. and communicated with them via e-mail and IM. And they clearly cared a lot about telling their story in the best way possible. That's the film that, from what I've seen, is most emblematic of everything that's good about the DV revolution.

The Cult of Walt

As I was writing the last post, I started watching a doc on Bravo about Walter Ostanek, the St. Catharines-based polka band leader. It's called The Cult of Walt: Canada's Polka King, and apparently it got a Gemini nomination for best bio. Go figure.

Why do people bother to make such things? The film has no structure, no style, and worse, no soul. The narration is full of cliches such as "perfecting music that is truly timeless" (to pick one that I happened to hear as I was writing this). It rides along on Ostanek's personal charm and the obligatory bits of polka perfomance. But all it does is keep repeating how great the guy is. There's no insight, no probing questions, no attempt to universalize the story or get beneath the surface. Yawn....

Ostanek has been on my radar for years. More than ten years ago I was hired to write a proposal for a doc series with the exact same concept as the BBC's (and CBC's) "Who Do You Think You Are?" I put Walter in the proposal... and the series didn't go. (Maybe if I'd put in Don Cherry instead...) Around the same time, I saw a lovely film at an early Hot Docs, when it was still held in conference rooms at the Park Plaza hotel. It followed Ostanek and his mentor Frank Yankovic on a tour of the Canadian prairies, and it captured the soul of polka, its players and its fans -- retired farmers who would polka for five hours straight, as long as Frankie and Walter could keep playing. That film made me want to learn how to polka. Watching this newer one, I didn't even tap my toes.