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.
As I've written before, I have a fascination with Eastern Europe. I've travelled there, and I know a fair bit about the history of the fall of the Soviet Empire. So naturally I had to go see The Singing Revolution, which opened theatrically in Toronto last weekend. I even dragged the long-suffering Mme Holiday along.
The Singing Revolution is about Estonia, a small country across the Baltic Sea from Finland, directly north of Latvia and Lithuania, and formerly the northwest corner of the Soviet Union. In the late '80s and early '90s, Estonia led the way among the Soviet-occupied nations in carving out independence from Moscow, and was the first to actually declare itself an independent state during the August crisis that finished off the Soviet Union in 1991. The Estonians accomplished this in particularly Estonian fashion - quietly but firmly, simply gradually refusing to acknowledge any Soviet authority in their country. And, like the other Baltic nations, they express their national culture in song - hence, the Singing Revolution. The whole story of Baltic independence is magnificent and inspiring: three tiny peoples, nearly defeated over 50 years of brutal occupation, staging a peaceful revolt against the great Russian bear, and winning. It would make a great documentary.
Too bad this one ain't it. The Singing Revolution, produced and directed by James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty, is a pedantic recitation of facts that bleeds all the drama and emotion out of the story. Less than five minutes into the film, I knew we were in for a long night: the filmmakers had started in on a chronological history of Estonia, complete with title cards announcing each year. We hear about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Soviet invasion, the Nazi invasion, the Soviet re-invasion... all told in pedantic, cliché-ridden narration. There is so much storming across borders, I could have sworn I was watching the War Channel. And a whole cascade of Estonian names - leaders of this faction and that one, names that are important only to Estonian historians and schoolchildren studying for a test. There are about a dozen interview subjects who appear throughout the film, but aside from their names and occupations, we are told next to nothing about them until the end credits. Turns out, their stories would have been quite interesting to hear: the guy who spent 30 years in Siberia, the singing revolution leader whose parents had been powerful Estonian Communists, etc. This should have been a film about them, not a laundry list of events out of a high-school textbook.
But what's even worse is that the film takes the narrowest possible view of history. Estonia wasn't the only nation in the former Soviet Union to stand up against the regime in the years after Gorbachev declared glasnost and perestroika. Revolts were happening all over, from Latvia to Uzbekistan. I'm not suggesting that this should have been a film about the fall of the Soviet Union, but by focusing on Estonia to the exlusion of any other former Soviet republics, the filmmakers fail to show how the Estonians are different - why their culture and national character produced the "singing revolution." What's interesting about the Estonians is that, compared to their Baltic neighbours, the Latvians and Lithuanians, they were quietly pragmatic. Instead of making demands and picking fights with Moscow, they simply started acting as if they were independent. That approach is far more interesting if contrasted with what was happening elsewhere.
The film also gives scant credit to Gorbachev for the reforms that made the Estonian national awakening possible, and makes just passing mention of the Russians, led by Boris Yeltsin, who finished off the Soviet Union by standing up to the tanks when the hardliners staged a coup against Gorbachev. The film would have been far more subtle and convincing if we'd heard from some non-Estonians: from Gorbachev, for instance, and from the ethnic-Russian opposition in Estonia, who are charicatured in the film and get all of one brief clip.
Instead, The Singing Revolution takes the narrow view that you'd normally hear only from hardcore Estonian nationalists. Is the rest of the world going to be enlightened by this Estonian-Sunday-school-style history lesson ? Or are we just going to be put to sleep?
I've been thinking about my review of Air India 182, and talking to colleagues, and I feel more and more that I missed the boat. I never thought I'd be writing reconsiderations, but I am trying to make this blog as honest and useful as I can - and I guess that sometimes means writing an addendum.
From a craft standpoint, Air India 182 is most certainly an impressive film: well thought out, and masterfully shot and edited. But the film's scope is extremely narrow: it tells the story of how the bombing of Air India 182 was carried out, why Canadian authorities were unable to stop it, and the effect it had on the families of the victims. That's it. It provides little context, and gives us nothing new aside from an interview with a CSIS agent. Aside from that one interview, it's a story we've heard many times, albeit usually in bits and pieces, over the last 23 years. And so the question is, after 23 years... that's it?
Surely, with a budget rumoured to be in the range of $2-million, the film could have accomplished more than that. It could have explored in much greater depth the growth of Sikh radicalism in the B.C. temples, and its roots in the Punjab - in other words, the environment in which the plot was hatched, and the culture of fear and silence that protected the perpetrators. It could have looked more closely at the failed investigation, and the lackadaisical attitude of the Canadian government, which sent condolences to the Indian government but not to the families of the hundreds of Canadian victims. In other words, it could have explored the culture that produced the terrorists and the one that allowed them to get away with mass murder. But the film barely touches on these aspects. Director Sturla Gunnarsson, whose wife (and Associate Producer) is a Sikh British Columbian, acknowledged his anger at the Canadian government in media interviews, but in the Q&A at Hot Docs all he had to say was, to paraphrase, CSIS and the RCMP didn't bomb the plane, the terrorists did. It's almost as if Air India 182 goes out of its way not to disturb the peace.
I can't help but think that the $2 million spent on this film could have paid for three or four films with less expensive visuals and more depth.
And another problem: the Ken Burns Effect. No, I'm not talking about the photo-manipulation tool in iMovie. The real Ken Burns Effect is this: when Burns tackles a subject - say, baseball, or the Second World War - it effectively puts the kybosh on any other filmmaker going to PBS for funding for any other story on the same subject. Burns, by eating up huge amounts of money and presenting his film as the definitive story, sucks the oxygen out of the room and - inadvertently, to be sure - shuts down debate. (The Canadian corollary is the People's History effect, but Ken Burns is more famous than Mark Starowicz, and he did it first.) Now that $2 million has been spent on the "definitive" Air India story, how likely is it that anyone else will be able to get funding for a different take?
Sturla Gunnarsson is definitely not one of those people who've had to wait for success. His first film, After the Axe, was nominated for an Oscar in 1982, and since then he's gone on to a stellar career as a director of both documentaries and drama. So it's no surprise that his new film, Air India 182, is masterfully crafted. Though very much a television project - one of those high-profile, big-name productions the CBC's Documentary Unit loves to throw bags of money at - this is a film that looks great on a big screen.
Much has been written and broadcast over the past 23 years about Air India Flight 182, which blew up off the coast of Ireland with 329 people on board in June, 1985 - the worst terrorist attack in North America before 9/11. There have been a few documentaries about it, notably Shelley Saywell's Legacy of Terror, made in 1999, and most recently an episode of the factual series Mayday. But Air India 182, with its A-list director, A-list budget and authoritative title, clearly has ambitions of being the definitive one.
Gunnarsson chooses to tell the story in straightfoward fashion, boiling the story down to the bare essentials: a step-by-step account of the last few hours of the lives of the victims, told by their families, intercut with a reconstruction of the planning and execution of the crime, based on evidence presented at the two trials and the recent judicial inquiry.
The most significant new element that Gunnarsson brings to the film is the dramatic re-enactments, which are very elaborate, well-cast, and at times extremely moving. Score one for the master drama director. Also impressive is the interview with a senior CSIS official (now retired? I don't recall), who provides a lot of context and details about the investigation. How did Gunnarsson get this guy? Normally, CSIS people aren't even allowed to admit they work for CSIS. Score one for the master documentarian. There's no question the film works well on its own terms.
But here's where the discussion goes over post-screening drinks: Where else could this film have gone? Why did Gunnarsson stick to the narrow storyline he chose, instead of A) delving more deeply into mainstream Canada's (non-)reaction to this horrendous crime and the seriously messed up investigation, which produced only one conviction, or B) looking more deeply into the roots of the conflict between extremist Sikhs and the Indian state, the politics of British Columbia's Sikh temples, etc. Based on my quick survey, non-Indian Canadians tend to want to know more about the former, immigrants from India about the latter.
I'm not a fan of judging films based on what I think they should be, rather than what the filmmaker intended. But I do wonder: how many other, more revealing, films could come out of this horrendous event?
