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KEY DOCUMENTARIES
Some really strong documentaries this year from across the world. A number of them are up-close-and-personal biographies, so let’s start with the best of those, Alex Gibney’s THE ARMSTRONG LIE. This film had to be put on hold in 2009 when the award-winning Mea Maxima Culpa director was just hitting his stride, because his subject, Tour de France cycling legend Lance Armstrong, was embroiled in a doping scandal. Then everything went back into production this year, and Armstrong finally came clean and admitted the enormous scale of his doping and his lies. Armstrong’s mantra was “to lose is death” and he seemed to have made a Faustian pact to win at all costs, forever concealing the truth … until his downfall. Almost shockingly candid in his revelations, which are sharply contrasted with his previous, on-camera protestations of innocence and outrage, this bang up-to-date documentary shows that he probably would have got away with it if his hubris hadn’t driven him towards his ill-advised 2009 comeback. Abandoned team-mates, his dodgy doctor, the complicity of many of the cycling fraternity who backed up his cast-iron, heroic cancer survivor image – all these muddied the waters for Gibney, who was himself a fan who could easily have “bought into the bullshit”. But didn’t. A must-see.
Another American maverick who made as many enemies as friends was the late Gore Vidal, who is celebrated in THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA, written and directed by Nicholas Wrathall. It starts with Vidal standing by the gravestone he’s planning to share with his dead partner, then criss-crosses his remarkable career, in which he had chums like William Faulkner, Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Newman and even JFK. He knew Amelia Earhart too, as she’d had an affair with his father, who married Jacqueline Bouvier’s mother. So the name-dropping comes thick and fast, as do the wonderful anecdotes and one-liners, building up a picture of a one-off, left-wing, society maverick, who’ll be much missed.
Ever so slightly to the right of Vidal, but sharing his devil-may-care attitude to all-comers is filmmaker John Milius, who gets his own life story told in Zak Knutson and Joey Figueroa’s MILIUS. In texture it resembles The Kid Stays In The Picture, but with extra helpings of macho and bravado for the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls crowd. Talking heads Walter Murch, Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas line up to pay homage to this bear of a man, who was kept out of the Vietnam War due to his asthma. And it’s generously stuffed with clips to illustrate Milius’ gift for memorable dialogue and mythic plot. From Apocalypse Now and Big Wednesday to Conan and Red Dawn, they all have his brilliant, if reactionary, fingerprints all over them.
A subtler and even more influential director to be given the full treatment is Italy’s Bernardo Bertolucci, in Walter Fasano and Luca Guadagnino’s BERTOLUCCI ON BERTOLUCCI. They’ve combed through every bit of archive, every Bertolucci interview out there, to give the fullest possible portrait – or self-portrait – of this man who loves movies. He talks of his time in analysis, of Pasolini and the language of cinema, of censorship, of French and Italian film movements, of musicals being one thousand per cent cinema, and on basing The Partner on Dostoevsky’s The Double (like Richard Ayoade at this year’s London Film Festival). In short, he reckons the pleasure of the relationship between the filmmaker and the viewer is sensual, and feels that cinema puts order in his chaos. Makes you want to watch his films all over again.
It would be hard to find a more harrowing documentary than Claude Lanzmann’s three-and-a-half-hour LAST OF THE UNJUST, which follows up his unforgettable holocaust film Shoah. It centres on Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia and the propaganda films made there, while Jewish elders ran the camp in the Second World War. The one surviving elder, Benjamin Murmelstein, gives lengthy first person interviews to Lanzmann, who pieces it all together in cool, matter-of-fact, almost prosaic fashion. Which makes the story that Murmelstein “has to tell” all the more devastating.
The festival also revived the classic 1966 Shirley Clarke documentary PORTRAIT OF JASON. This close-up of Jason Holiday is an outrageously entertaining, no-holds-barred interview with the thirtysomething gay, black hustler in his prime, who spends much of the time laughing at his own reminiscences.
And for a musical portrait, it’s hard to imagine a better on-the-road, warts-and-all movie than MISTAKEN FOR STRANGERS. Comically candid, this was almost accidentally commissioned by Matt Berninger, the elegant, focused lead singer of the rock band, The National, who had hired his awkward, slacker brother, Tom as a tour assistant. When Tom took it upon himself to document their world tour in minute detail, he got access-all-areas where he wasn’t wanted, keeping the camera rolling when he was explicitly told to turn it off, showing band members brushing their teeth, showering and trying to prepare themselves immediately before going on stage to thousands of adoring fans. Until they all finally got fed up with him and he was sacked. If you love The National’s glorious music, you’ll be uplifted by their performances. And if you like Spinal Tap style rockumentaries, you won’t be disappointed. This is hilarious.
Post Arab Spring, Egypt seems to be in constant flux, and a new musical craze has sprung up from this, shown by director Hind Meddeb in ELECTRO SHAABI. Young men use ‘Mahragan’ music as a frenetic way to express themselves, much like hip-hop crossed with Algerian Rai. They may seem a bit blingy and Westernised, but they’re also conscious souls who love Bob Marley, riffing, dancing and making beats, as they pour it all into making something uniquely Egyptian. And the action inevitably ends in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
Politics also enters into Fred Wiseman’s four-hour, in-depth epic AT BERKELEY, in which the prestigious US university faces devastating funding cuts, threatening their whole existence. Major soul-searching discussions and endless heated debates see intellectuals sparring with each other. But this also poses the bigger questions: what value do we place on education, and who is it for?
In Slovakia’s EXHIBITS OR STORIES FROM THE CASTLE, the subtle political question concerns how we care for our elderly. Palo Korec’s poignant, but unsentimental portrait includes several eccentrics and a couple with a simmering romance, but mainly gives us “stories of people who have lost everything – and the only thing they have left is their life.” Also looking at the less fortunate, novelist Xiaolu Guo’s short but thought-provoking LATE AT NIGHT: TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS has vignettes of East Londoners of all ages, backgrounds, jobs, political persuasions, faiths and nationalities, all with a love/hate relationship with their city, and mixed up with archive and a fake newsreader.
A more romantic view of London comes in Paul Kelly’s HOW WE USED TO LIVE, the fourth in his collective’s series on the capital. This is entirely constructed from colour archive dating from 1950 to 1980, and beautifully scored with music from Saint Etienne alumni, overlaid with Ian McShane’s timeless narration. The river, the pubs, the parks, the buses and everyone smoking everywhere, make it feel like a more innocent time. Football, music, nightlife, police, and the city “a forest of concrete and glass” are effortlessly, magically nostalgic. So much so that I’ve invested in their previous London Trilogy on a BFI DVD.
Jon Savage’s book TEENAGE has been brought to the screen by Matt Wolf, and focuses on American, English and German youths navigating those difficult adolescent days before they were given a voice, stopping its coverage at the end of the Second World War. The strengths are the fresh archive and the narration from the likes of Ben Whishaw, tackling age, race, politics, music, drugs and sex, constructing a “living collage” littered with quotes from actual teens. The only weakness is the obviously fake footage they’ve made to accompany some of the key characters, deliberately blurred, but detracting from Savage’s hidden histories. But when there’s also music from Gene Krupa’s band, who’s to complain?
Also constructed from memories, testimony and archive, ex-war reporter Greg Barker’s MANHUNT looks at the CIA’s tireless, two-decade-long pursuit of Osama Bin Laden. Their intricate ‘incident rooms’ are recreated, the rhythm and pace of the film shifting as they reach Homeland territory. There are major coups in getting the likes of General Stanley McChrystal to talk, in an admission that shock and awe only creates more terrorism, and that we need to understand better what motivates terrorists to take action, and ask: “why is the enemy the enemy?” We also see just how many key operatives are women with an eye for detail – the ‘Sisterhood’ – as Barker’s film tries to “provide a lens of history that doesn’t exist yet”. This is the searching, unglamorous antithesis of Zero Dark Thirty, and is perhaps all the better for it.
Perhaps the most innovative way to tell an horrific tale of systematic state abuse is director Rithy Panh’s decision to lovingly create and paint clay figures of characters and scenes in THE MISSING PICTURE. He’s looking back at his childhood, growing up under the horrific regime of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, working in forced labour camps, watching people die all around him as collectivisation and militarisation take hold. Private memories and emotions have to be stored away. And by distancing himself through the use of state propaganda archive and scale models, Panh somehow manages to bring it home even more vividly, underlining that “the revolution that they promised us only exists on film.”
To document a very different existence in Finnish Lapland, director Jessica Oreck’s AATSINKI: THE STORY OF ARCTIC COWBOYS follows brothers Aarne and Lasse as they tend, herd and finally kill reindeer. She homes in on the intimate, intricate details, then gives us fabulous wide shots of wintry scenes, vast expanses of frosted forests and round-ups warmed by the camaraderie and joking amidst the business. It’s at once beautiful, harsh and enlightening, and contrasts the herders’ state-of-the-art snowmobiles with their ancient slaughter techniques.
Finally, like many of the best documentaries, Paul Crowder’s 1 is a loving yet probing examination of a unique world – Formula One racing. He takes us into the gasoline-drenched, sometimes dangerous, always macho sport that’s produced heroes, fall-guys, and fatalities. Lots of fatalities. Until the sport started to pay more attention to safety, common sense, and bad press. Characters like Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley are now known for fuelling its success as a money-making machine, but they also helped get fatalities down to almost zero. You warm to the baby-faced Belgian Jacky Ickx, to Jochen Rindt, Fangio, Senna and Hunt. They knew no fear, and it’s easy to see why the glamour and not-so-cheap thrills of motor racing can be so seductive and addictive. And the whole thing’s superbly narrated by Michael Fassbender.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.