Every documentary filmmaker has to be at least slightly in love with their subject. You don't have to subscribe to Albert Maysles' "love is all you need" approach to filmmaking, but some kind of love - ranging from universal human empathy to the kind of obsession it sometimes takes to get a film made - is pretty much a requirement.
In The Pied Piper of Hützovina (which I watched via the excellent new on-line rental service Jaman), director Pavla Fleischer takes that to 11. The film is about Eugene Hütz, frontman of the band Gogol Bordello. He's a Ukrainian-born, New York-based punk rocker obsessed with understanding his Roma heritage and reviving Gypsy music. He's also impossibly charismatic - the kind of guy women flutter to like moths to a flame.
Fleischer is one of those moths. She meets Hütz by chance on a car ride in Eastern Europe, falls head over heels, and decides that making a film about him would be a good way to get close to him. This we learn in her somewhat rueful narration over shaky video of that fateful car ride. Young Pavla looks so in love, we just know her fall is going to be harsh.
A year later, Fleischer has gotten Hütz to agree to the film project - a road trip through Ukraine and Russia to explore his roots and meet his musical heroes. But when she and her camera crew meet up with him to start the journey, it quickly becomes clear that Hütz has his own agenda and wants no part of her romantic plan.
To Fleischer's credit, she perseveres, and the film she ends up with isn't bad at all, if a little thin. Hütz delivers on the charisma part, jamming with Roma musicians in the Carpathian mountains, speaking seriously and emotionally about his passion for their music and culture, and arranging visits with various official keepers of the Gypsy music flame, not all of which go the way he expects. But there isn't much of an arc here; he's a guy with a guitar, on a quickie trip, with no goal and little at stake. So the story becomes as much Fleischer's as Hütz's: her disappointment, her attempts to stay connected and rescue her film. She doesn't protect herself or soft-pedal any of it, and her charm and honesty help us forgive the self-indulgence of using filmmaking as a seduction strategy.
I'm sure Fleischer learned a lot in the course of making this film: don't let your personal feelings cloud your judgment as a filmmaker; when you're directing in the field, don't dance until you're finished shooting; think through your structure and scenes before you shoot, or you'll end up having to put yourself in the film to recue it; etc.
She rescued her film pretty well. But on her next project, I bet she'll go easier on the love.
OK, so I'm doing research. And at the moment, this involves watching a bunch of films about dance music and nightclubs. So tonight I'm watching High Tech Soul, which bills itself as "the first documentary to tackle the deep roots of techno music."
What a mess! Clip after clip after clip, no thesis, no story development, and the organizational style of a high-school class presentation. Of absolutely no interest anyone but the most committed fans. I am 25 minutes into the film and there has not yet been a music sequence used as anything more than a few seconds of b-roll. I've heard about the history of Detroit (the first nine minutes), and seen a series of brief clips about DJs, promoters, etc. I still don't know what makes techno techno, what makes it exciting, how it relates to its musical forebears, or why I should care at all.
The best film I've seen about a subgenre of popular music is Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, which addresses both fans and non-fans, doesn't take itself too seriously, and at the same time tries to answer all the common questions about the genre. In comparison, High Tech Soul is strictly amateur hour.
These days, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato are kings of reality TV, producing such shows as "Sex Change Hospital" and "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal." But they started out as documentary filmmakers, getting their first major attention with a doc and then a feature film about New York's king of the "Club Kids," Michael Alig, who's now doing 10-to-20 for killing a fellow partyer. The feature-film version of Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin, is better known, but here at Doc-a-Day, we believe fact is more interesting than fiction, so we looked at Party Monster: The Shockumentary, released in 1998.
The story is a familiar one: gay kid comes to New York from the midwest, drops out of college, gets involved in the downtown party scene, the drugs flow, bad shit happens, and it all ends in tears. Lou Reed built a career on songs about this type of thing, and you can save some time by getting a copy of Transformer and forgetting about this derivative 80s scene.
But I guess if you came along in the 80s, as Bailey and Barbato did, you missed the whole Warhol Factory thing, and this was all you had. And what thin gruel it is. Party Monster feels long at 57 minutes not just because the Club Kids are unidimensional, but because it tells a story that everybody already knows. The film provides no perspective or insight, and lets barely coherent drug addicts - including Alig himself - prattle on and on. There is no art in this film, no metaphor, no psychological insight; just a predictable tabloid story without a single surprise. We've seen it all before on Geraldo, where the Club Kids were apparently frequent guests. Party Monster treads the same ground, scratching no deeper than insights such as "they wanted to make fun of consumer culture and be part of it at the same time." There is a story to be told here, but Bailey and Barbato weren't interested in exploring it. They were just practicing for their brilliant career as reality kings.
It's not true. Doc-a-Day is not dead. It's just been sleeping while I worked my fingers to the bone finishing up two contracts while starting a new project. Finally, in this brief window between work and vacation, I've managed to watch a film.
I'd long been meaning to see Iraq in Fragments, which I missed at Hot Docs and during its theatrical run. And so, when reader Contessie mentioned it in a comment last month, I figured it was time.
Directed, photographed, written and scored by James Longley, Iraq in Fragments is an anthology film - three stories, from three different parts of Iraq, documenting the impact of the war on people from three main groups: Sunni in Baghdad, Shia in Sadr City, and Kurds in Kurdistan. The three segments are united primarily by Longley's remarkable cinematography. The first thing you notice is the super-saturated colours - everything is more vivid, more intense than you expect. But that's not the most important thing. The camera roams the streets, constantly shifting point of view from observer to participant. It's as if, in the midst of the chaos, it's impossible not to be a participant.
The style is particularly effective in the first segment, a profile of an 11-year-old boy who works at an auto repair shop in Baghdad. This is a near-perfect short film in itself: intimate, full of surprises and remarkable access. The camera is in the middle of the action, seemingly invisible to the participants, who never give any sense of playing to it. The boy speaks only in voiceover, a technique from the days of film that's sadly little used today, when tape is cheap and all interviews have both sound and picture. The drama is as much in the contrast between what the boy says and what we see happening. Longley clearly stuck around long enough to become part of the scenery. The camera is just there; the boy, his boss and the men who sit around drinking tea and talking politics seem to just go on with their lives, oblivious to it.
Part 2 takes place among the followers of Shia cleric Mukhtada al-Sadr, known as the Mehdi Army. The strength of this piece is the access. Longley gets amazing footage of a nighttime self-flaggelation parade, but even more remarkable is a raid by a group of armed, masked thugs on a street market, where they beat and arrest everyone they suspect of selling alcohol. The scene is punctuated by the constant sound of gunfire - it's terrifying. Later, the wife of one of the arrested men pleads for his release, her child crying from hunger. And all of this is on camera. But on the whole, this segment doesn't work as well as the first one, mainly because there's no central character. At the beginning, a man tells his story in voiceover. We think we'll see him soon enough, but we never do. "Is it him?" we wonder every time the camera settles on a new person... but we never find out. Other voices appear and disappear, but we never really get to know anyone. Longley is a distant observer in the Shia community; it seems like he never got close to anyone, although they let him witness some amazing things.
The third segment, in Kurdish territory, starts off beautifully -- two boys, best friends, playing together and dreaming about the future. Somehow, the scene reminded me of Satyajit Ray, who had a way of capturing the languor and innocence of childhood just before things get serious and ugly. But again, as soon as Longley veers away from the boys, the segment becomes confused and unsatisfying. There's an election. But what does it have to do with the story of the boys? Eventually, he brings the story back to the kid who will never get to medical school... but not as elegantly as he might have.
On the whole, Iraq in Fragments is an incredible achievement, both for its cinematography and the access Longley was able to get. I'm looking forward to seeing Sari's Mother, the fourth chapter of Iraq in Fragments, which he turned into a stand-alone short.
One more thing, to answer Contessie's question in the comments to the previous post. The reason this film works with three separate stories is that Longley doesn't try to interweave them. Each stands alone, and the filmmaker doesn't try to mess around with parallel storylines, segues, etc. The effect of the three stories is cumulative - and, for me at least, this works much better.
Years ago, I tried to make a film consisting of three interlocking stories that shared a theme. It didn't work out so well. The stories had fit together so beautifully in my head and on paper, but on film it just wasn't going to work. They were too different, the thematic links were turning out to be tenuous, I was trying to shoehorn three stories to fit an idea I'd had months before... a recipe for much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth. Thanks to some luck and a supportive team, I was able to salvage the film by re-thinking it completely, but I vowed never to try this again - no more threes.
This is the first thing I thought of when watching Rama Rau's Losing My Religion. The film, made for the doc strand on Omni, the multicultural broadcaster, is an exploration of the way people's faith changes in a new cultural environment. The three subjects are: a woman who came to Canada as a child and has rejected her parents' Ismaili Muslim faith, a Sikh boxer who battled the Canadian Amateur Boxing Association for the right to compete while bearded, and a man from the former Portuguese colony of Goa who's converting from Catholicism to Hinduism after studying the colonial history of this Indian state.
On paper, it works: the apostate, the devout, and the convert - a nice triangle. I can imagine how the proposal was written. But in reality, these stories are so different that it's difficult to see how they belong together in one film. The Ismaili woman argues with her mother and thinks about how she and her Danish husband will raise their soon-to-be-adopted child. There seems to be little at stake for her: her religion was lost long ago, and neither her disappointed but sweet parents nor her secularist husband seem to be making a big issue of it. The boxer simply recounts his (long-ago, it turns out) battle with the boxing authorities, but we learn little about the nature of his devotion to his Sikh faith. Did having to take a stand bring him closer to his faith? Or was he just being stubborn, as befits a young boxer? And the convert... well, his main interest is the history of Goa, which strays very far from the theme of transformation in the diaspora. His motivation and concerns appear to be very different from those of the other subjects, and while he's definitely a familiar type of immigrant intellectual, his change of faith just doesn't strike me as fitting into this film at all.
Losing My Religion is about three very different intellectual and emotional journeys, but it never gives a sense of the internal struggle that people who take faith seriously go through on their way to losing it. Perhaps that's why we don't see the commonality among the three subjects -- the struggle would have been the common element that would have tied them together. Instead, it feels like all they have in common is their South Asian heritage.
Stylistically, the film has its virtues. The boxer is a quirky little man (yes, little - he fights in the light flyweight division) who drives a freakish vintage lowrider. And the camera moves nicely with him as he drives, runs, trains, etc. But there is less opportunity for a cinematic treatment of the other subjects, and they pale in comparison.
So all in all, my advice to any young filmmaker contemplating a film about three unconnected characters: think very, very hard before you shoot a frame. Then find one great character and forget about the rest.
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.
It's been a busy couple of weeks, quite apart from the hilarity of the comments posted all over this blog by the pseudonymous Winston and my e-mail correspondence with Korbett Matthews, producer-director-writer-cinematographer of The Man Who Crossed the Sahara, who desperately wanted to know my real name, so that he could look up my films and take his revenge. My advice to Korbett: stop obsessing about what other people think of you and make a better film next time. Success is the best revenge.
All this, especially the work I get paid to do, distracted me from posting about the film I'd been looking forward to most this year, Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure.
Morris's previous film, The Fog of War, is one of my favourite docs of all time - as close to a perfect documentary as I have seen. Gates of Heaven and The Thin Blue Line are also on my personal top-10 list. And the buzz around Standard Operating Procedure - reported $5-million budget, a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, a simultaneous book release - suggested this film was expected to make a big impact.
Instead, the film is already gone from theatres here in Toronto. When I saw it two weeks ago, in its second week of release, there were six people in the theatre on a Thursday evening, including my group of four. Across North America, SOP isn't even close to matching the box office success of this year's Canadian doc sleeper hit Up the Yangtze. What went wrong? As far as I can see, a lot more than just the fact that it's damn near impossible to get the public to watch yet another documentary about Iraq.
It's difficult not to judge Standard Operating Procedure against Morris's other work, and by the standards he himself has set. Compared to most films by mere mortals of the documentary world, it's an extremely impressive work: Morris throws his unparalleled interviewing skills and visual imagination at the story, and these things carry it a long way. But it's not his best film. Far from it.
The story is one of the biggest American scandals in modern times, about which everyone thinks they know something. If anyone can make us re-think our opinion, it's Morris, who once proved the innocence of a man convicted in Texas of killing a cop. And just as importantly, it's a story about photographs, which gives Morris a lot more to work with than Alex Gibney had in Taxi to the Dark Side, his Oscar-winning investigation of a killing at Baghram prison in Afghanistan.
Morris attacks the story with his usual mix of interviews, carefully staged re-enactments and metaphoric visuals. The interviews, conducted via his Interrotron device, are by far the best thing about the film. Morris may be the best interviewer working today. His subjects aren't just answering questions; they're invariably telling stories, reflecting, revealing. I have to admit that for a long time I thought the Interrotron was just a gimmick, but after watching a few of Morris's films more carefully recently, I can see its impact, and would love to try using it myself.
But the Interrotron, which really can enhance the connection between interview subject and viewer, is not a magic bullet: I've also seen films that have used a similar device with far less interesting results. The key to Morris's success is that his questions force the subjects to think on camera: you can see them considering a question or changing their mind – that's what makes the interviews dynamic and exciting. The achievement in Standard Operating Procedure is that he gets interesting, revealing answers from the soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib abuses. In Fog of War, his subject was a highly intelligent, charismatic man reflecting on a 60-year career; in SOP, Morris gets similar results from a half-dozen army grunts who've been reviled in the media and have little reason to trust anyone with their story. (I guess it doesn't hurt that Morris paid them for the interviews.) I'd love to watch his rushes and see how he does it.
But here's the problem: there are so damn many of these interviews - something like a dozen - that Morris loses control of the film. A few of the subjects - Sabrina Harman, the lesbian solder; Javal Davis, the African-American one; Tim Dugan, the contract interrogator - are so engaging, I thought each of them was worthy of a film of his or her own. But the result of this embarrassment of riches is an unfocused film: Standard Operating Procedure has too many strands, which Morris never quite brings together. Clocking in at almost two hours, the film has one false ending after another. At least half a dozen times, it feels like the film has reached a natural conclusion, only to lurch onto another point. If only Morris had struck to the central questions: how the events in the photographs came about, what really happened, and why. Instead, he dwells on too many related events, and too many stories from minor players. It's a heavy barrage of claims and ideas, difficult to keep track of, and 90 minutes into the film, rapidly becoming overwhelming. The Thin Blue Line methodically built a case for the innocence of Randall Dale Adams; SOP just doesn't have the same storytelling discipline.
And there's another element that took me out of the story. Morris is famous for his dramatic re-creations. In The Thin Blue Line, they were disciplined and sparse, and used for a specific reason: to examine the conflicting stories told by several eyewitnesses, and to expose the implausibility of some of these accounts. In Fog of War, Morris mostly used metaphoric imagery and archival footage. But now, working with a huge budget, it's as if he's lost all sense of restraint. The torture of Iraqi prisoners is meticulously re-created based on the infamous photos. Actors play soldiers and prisoners, and there is even a close-up of a vicious, snarling dog, complete with scary growl. It doesn't work. Most of these scenes are much too literal, serving only to break the connection between the storyteller (i.e. the interviewee) and the viewer.
I had a discussion this morning with a producer who's pitching a hybrid documentary-dramatization series, and so I had to think about what bothers me about the use of literal dramatization or re-enactment in documentaries. I think the problem is that such a hybrid serves neither documentary nor drama. A retrospective documentary such as this one (as opposed to what Allan King calls an actuality drama) relies on a connection between the storyteller and the viewer, and the engagement of the viewer's imagination. Cutting to an overly literal dramatization breaks that bond, and invariably interferes with the imagination. Full-out drama, with actors and a script, relies on a suspension of disbelief and an immersion in the world created by the filmmaker. Cutting to an interview in the midst of this breaks the suspension of disbelief, and makes the drama feel contrived. A successful blend of the two needs to show just enough to give viewers something to hang their imagination on. In Standard Operating Procedure, Morris shows too much.
Standard Operating Procedure is not a bad film. Morris is too skilled to mess things up completely. But it looks like, in trying to do too much, he lost control of the story. One clue to how things went on this production is in the credits: there are three editors listed, and three "co-editors." Two of the co-editors were the editors of record on five of Morris's best-known films. Reading between the lines, I would guess there was a lot of unhappiness in the Standard Operating Procedure cutting room.
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.
I've been thinking about what to write about Daddy Tran: A Life in 3D, because it's an interesting case study in the family-film subgenre.
Daddy Tran - cinematographer John Tran's father, Hai - is a character: a diminutive Vietnamese immigrant with a list of obsessions the length of your arm, the biggest of which is photography. He was a professional photographer in North Vietnam, until the post-Vietnam-War situation became untenable and he fled with his wife and three young children, in a leaky boat, through pirate-infested waters. The family eventually settled in Calgary, where Daddy Tran worked in a photo lab and spent every available cent on used cameras, to the consternation of his long-suffering wife. Eventually, he opened a used-camera store, which was a local institution until it closed last year, a victim of the digital revolution. Now retired, Tran spends all his time taking 3D photographs - an odd format that is hard to convey in film. And he haunts his children - including John, the cinematographer, who clearly made the film (with his wife, producer-director Siu Ta), not just as a tribute to a patriarch but as an attempt to come to terms with a difficult man.
The tone of the film is lighthearted - it's a lovely tribute to a man who sacrificed a lot for his family and built a good life in difficult circumstances. But it mainly skims the emotional surface until family members start to talk about Daddy Tran's fears and obsessions (the multiple locks on all the doors in the house, the need to show off his wealth), and his explosive temper. It turns out that everyone is afraid of Hai's moods and caters to his demanding behaviour. This is where the film cries out for a response from Daddy Tran himself... but it doesn't come. It feels like it took all the courage the filmmakers had to even broach the subject in the film. And it's true - I asked John about this; he said he and Siu were too afraid to bring it up with him.
But apparently something really interesting happened after Daddy Tran saw the film (at its Hot Docs premiere): he started talking more to his family about his life, his fears and his temper. Turns out, he may be open to dialogue and change after all. I'd love to see another chapter to this film - Hai Tran a year later, more reflective about his life, his family and his emotions, and dealing with the need to slow down. In Daddy Tran, he never stops moving or talking, as if he can't bear to stop and reflect. I'd like to see what comes out when he's ready.
Parent films are emotionally difficult to make. You have to be ready for anything the parent throws at you and ready to face the consequences (see Mark Wexler in Tell Them Who You Are). With a difficult parent, that's a daunting task. It only seems worth the risk if the filmmaker believes that something good will come out of the process - something more than just a watchable film.
For the Trans, good things are happening, now that the film is finished. But I wish these things were in the film.
I was challenged the other day by a reader who felt that Doc-a-Day didn't have a strong enough voice or personality. And it's true - it's one thing to express strongly held opinions, but that doesn't mean one has anything new or valuable to add to the myriad reviews already out there. The intent of this blog is to analyze why films work or don't work, paying special attention to craft and structure, not for any kind of pedantic or didactic purpose, but to force myself to think about films in a more systematic way. I didn't start this blog because I wanted a soapbox, but I think that in the course of seeing and blogging about 15+ films at Hot Docs, I started using it as such.
Now that all that excitement is over, I'd like to get back to the original purpose. That's my documentary challenge.
The real one - the International Documentary Challenge - is a timed filmmaking competition in which teams have five days to make a short doc. It takes me back to where I started - I spent years making short pieces for magazine shows, usually with the same kind of restrictions: one day to shoot, one day to edit. This has given me a special affinity for this kind of competition, and a pretty good idea of what's reasonable to expect from such an exercise. So today's post is really more for the benefit of IDC participants.
This year's 14 Doc Challenge finalists ranged from the pedestrian to the near-magical. The ones that worked best, not surprisingly, had both a strong character and visuals that supported the story.
"Ars Magna," about a master anagramist, found a way to make the letters dance on screen, externalizing the anagramist's thought process. "Ghost Bike," where the central character was an idea - a white bicycle placed near spots where a cyclist had been killed - had a meditative feel and sense of mystery that perfectly fit the subject. "Click Whoosh," about the demise of the Polaroid instant camera, had not just great characters but a distinctive visual style: it used split screens framed in white, like a Polaroid photo, and showed how the photos are different and why they are loved.
The films that didn't work for me tended to be the ones that were poorly designed, or not designed at all. A film from Quebec about ice fishing was simply "a day on the lake," with no strong characters and no theme. "Let's go to the ice-fishing camp and see what we find" is a very risky way to make a film. If you find a strong character and stick to them, you might get something great. But if such a person isn't there, or you spread yourself too thin and just shoot everything that's going on, you end up with not much at all. "All the Eights, 88" had a very engaging character - an 88-year-old widow with a twinkle in her eye, reflecting on the long life already behind her and what lay ahead. But the supporting visuals just didn't cut it: the film kept cutting back to a bingo hall, where she liked to go and where presumably the filmmakers had met her, but this did nothing to deepen or advance the story.
All this makes me think about a one-line lesson that a wise and cranky (why do these two attributes so often go together?) screenwriter gave me years ago: character drives story, story proves theme. If you can't identify these three elements and how they work together, you don't have a good film.
It also reminds me of the lessons I learned in doing short, quick-turnaround pieces: 1) To make an impact in six minutes, it's important to be visually stylish, as with the Polaroid split screens, and the dancing letters. 2) Take the time to shoot as well as you possibly can - in a short piece, boring visuals kill you every time. 3) Hit 'em over the head - with emotion, comedy, a surprise, anything. You have very little time to make an impact.
And yet... really good filmmaking rarely fits any kind of formula. My favourite of this year's Doc Challenge films was an experimental first-person piece by New York filmmaker Eric Daniel Metzgar, which could hold its own at any Images-type experimental-video festival. "Beholder" is a meditative first-person piece about living in New York and seeing the city through a video camera. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between beholder and subject, Metzgar doesn't just cover the character-story-theme bases, he takes us on a ride. And that feeling of being on a ride is what good documentary filmmaking is really about for me.
