0 Time Indefinite (1993)

USA, 114 minutes, documentary
Director/writer/photography/editor: Ross McElwee
With: Ross McElwee, Marilyn Levine, Ross McElwee Jr., Charleen Swansea, Dee Dee Gerarty, Lucille Stafford, Melvin Stafford, Adrian McElwee

As much as anything, Ross McElwee's ruminating and lovely documentary Time Indefinite is about transitions—from nothingness to life, from being single to marrying, from life to death, the classic transitions around which we construct our most profound rituals, updated to the age of media. Sherman's March may be the better known of McElwee's idiosyncratic personal documentaries, wherein he impishly conflates Civil War atrocities with his own inability to stay coupled, but Time Indefinite extends a few years and clicks of maturity the preoccupations with love and life and expectation and disappointment, bringing something more sober often missing in the earlier project (though Sherman's March is definitely worth seeing too and may be the better picture).

In Time Indefinite, which explicitly makes all kinds of connections between home movies and formal film structure, McElwee is notably fond of the moment when the film runs out of the camera, and the casual reality in which we have been immersed suddenly, jarringly, turns into scratches and sprocket holes, black screens of intractable interruption. It's apparent from what we see that McElwee is the kind of guy who shows up to every event with a camera on his shoulder and a viewfinder in his face. His friends and family are variously tolerant and exasperated, often looking directly into the lens and telling him to shut off the camera. There are times I want to tell him the same thing. But then the sudden shifts and amputations inevitably bring their own disappointments. Just when it was getting to the good part....



In the two years or so covered by Time Indefinite, a good deal happens in McElwee's life. In his late 30s and early 40s, he is having one of "those" periods. He marries (finally, and much to the relief of his family). His wife becomes pregnant and then miscarries. His grandmother dies. His father dies, unexpectedly. And, finally, his wife becomes pregnant again and this time they carry it to term. Through it all, McElwee maintains the stoic poise of the cameraman's gaze, though his voiceover tells stories that belie the calm, and indeed there are periods of weeks and months in the middle of all this when he is uninterested in shooting.

McElwee declares himself "obsessed with death," and evinces an affect barely a notch above depression. The shtick veers close to the predictable precincts of Woody Allen and other familiar East Coast neurotics, who live lives of great privilege that afford them these indulgences. (I don't exclude myself from the judgment, though I've never lived in the East.) At one point McElwee even sits down with the camera to have a long talk with himself about death, fear, obsession, etc.

Yet somehow he transcends these problems. For one thing, he actually seems to know he's a little silly and avoids most impulses to dignify it. For another, he is surrounded by interesting people who care for him, and the details of whose own remarkable and unremarkable lives come to flesh out many of his most powerful themes. His friend Charleen Swansea is here again, for example—a regular in many of his pictures, even the subject of one. She takes him by a house where she once lived, or the house that is on the property now, a replica of the house she lived in built by a subsequent owner, and she relates the story of how her estranged husband killed himself in it by burning it to the ground and dying in the fire while she was away on a vacation, after they had separated. She is puzzled why the subsequent owner rebuilt it exactly. She has never set foot in the new house.

McElwee's genius just might be that he knows everyone has some story or complicated knot of stories like this. Our mothers and fathers die. We marry and divorce. Miscarriages and abortions happen, and children are born too. Sometimes children die. We move on. We stay put. One thing and another happens. And when the time comes to tell the stories, they are as vivid and moving as they are pedestrian. Ultimately that is the real beauty of Time Indefinite, the point that haunts me, makes me look at everything differently, and keeps me coming back to look again. Our lives are remarkable and unremarkable—every one—with stories that are at once unbelievable and all too believable.

The title comes from a biblical phrase used by a Jehovah's Witness who comes knocking on the door of McElwee's father's house to proselytize shortly after McElwee's father's death. He didn't know about the death, he's just knocking on doors and carrying the good word. Or maybe that should be the worrisome word, because he's full of the usual warnings of imminent gruesome apocalypse and God's salvation as the only way to survive. It is a lovely scene, with the gentle and humble man bearing his message (harsh though it may be), that we live all life in time indefinite, that nothing can be taken for granted, things change swiftly and often in cruel ways, and yet, even so (following McElwee's parallel train of thought), the beauty around us is manifest and overwhelming. I can't even recall him using the word grace but it is all over this picture.

Detail: Time Indefinite (1993)

0 Hoop Dreams (1994)

USA, 170 minutes, documentary
Director: Steve James
Writers: Steve James, Frederick Marx
Photography: Peter Gilbert
Music: Ben Sidran
Editors: William Haugse, Steve James, Frederick Marx
With: William Gates, Arthur Agee, Steve James, Emma Gates, Curtis Gates, Sheila Agee, Arthur "Bo" Agee, Earl Smith, Gene Pingatore

A couple of things about Hoop Dreams: First, perhaps most remarkably, it hasn't dated much for a documentary that somehow is already 20 years old. The story of two Chicago youths with a knack for playing basketball and dreams of turning that into their ticket to better lives remains, if anything, more poignant, compelling, and relevant than ever. This is accomplished partly by its willingness to slip into the syntax of classic Hollywood sports tales—for me, Breaking Away and Hoosiers come to mind immediately. Some of the best parts emerge directly out of the drama of important games with high stakes. Even more, it's accomplished by director and co-producer Steve James's willingness to settle on a story and follow it down its tortuous path. It's the story of any sports career. It's the story of any life.

Make that two stories: Arthur Agee and William Gates. The second remarkable point about Hoop Dreams is how short and incomplete it feels, even at nearly three hours. It focuses on Agee and Gates from when they are 14 and looking to use basketball as a leg up and a way in, both with talent enough to receive financial assistance from a Chicago private high school with a successful basketball program, St. Joseph. The picture follows the twists and turns of their high school careers and suddenly leaves us with only a few clues about their subsequent college careers. It's up to us to rush to Wikipedia to fill in what has happened with their lives since then, including whether or not they ever made it to the NBA. Hoop Dreams is so good at what it does it's virtually guaranteed most people seeing it will take the time to poke around for that information.



In fact, that's where the real spoilers are, so I will leave that information for you to discover on your own after you see this movie. Even across the four or so years that the picture covers it's difficult to guess what's going to happen next. Gates enters the program practically a star already as a freshman but is sidelined by injury for most of his junior and senior years. Agee does all right on the court, though never reaching Gates's heights at St. Joseph. Financial problems force him out of the school altogether in his sophomore year, after which he returns to the public school system. Ultimately, in a surprise to everyone including contemporary media observers, he gets a bite at a state championship when he takes his public school team far into the playoffs in his senior year.

Once again we are in the territory of "documentary gold"—events and moments that happen serendipitously in front of the camera, raising the level of what we see and experience to something nearly along the lines of great art. Hoop Dreams feels like a novel: sprawling, detailed, engrossing, surprising, structured, artfully balanced yet with ragged lines and vectors and wonderful small moments. That must be another reason it rarely feels dated. At the same time, James also manages to give a sense that these two young men and their families could have been anyone. James didn't just get lucky, or he got lucky simply by deciding to pay attention. He finds giant hopes compressed into the meat grinder of limited opportunity, poverty, and the specter of simmering racism. The wonder is that it seems so easy. Pick two, commit, and film. That's all he did.

That's not to deny the wonderful particularities of these two stories, however, which is what makes this movie, along with doses of luck in what was captured on film. Arthur's father Bo and William's brother Curtis are two key sideline stories, each nursing his own failure and unfairly seeking redemption for perceived (and misperceived) shortcomings by imposing an outsize dream on his son or brother. In one extraordinary scene, Bo shows up at a playground court where Arthur and his friends are playing. At that point, Bo and Arthur's mother Sheila have separated and not much has been seen of Bo. He is shirtless and loose, a little too loose, embarrassing Arthur when he attempts to compete. Then he wanders away and James's voiceover informs us that the playground has lately become a site of drug dealing. Later, Bo returns to the family, a recovering addict and full of God and himself, though sincerely humbled. Such fleeting glimpses hint achingly at the wells of pain going on just beyond what we see here.

Indeed, the powerful crosscurrents of the narrative remain a critical key to the visuals throughout, which operate as much as possible within the documentary fly-on-the-wall aesthetic of Frederick Wiseman, passively observing. But James urgently has a story to tell—make that two stories, make that eight, make that many, many, many—and that is why he injects his narrative voiceover. The narrative is what makes this film so powerful and special in the end, and enduring. That's why we rush to Wikipedia. We still want to know how it ends.

Detail: Hoop Dreams (1994)

0 A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995)

USA / UK, 225 minutes, documentary
Directors/writers: Martin Scorsese, Michael Henry Wilson
Photography: Jean-Yves Escoffier, Frances Reid, Nancy Schreiber
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Editors: Kenneth Levis, David Lindblom
With: Martin Scorsese

I'm not always sure what others mean by "essay-film," but I know my own sense of it favors both an individual point of view, and movie clips—projects like Los Angeles Plays Itself and this long love letter from Martin Scorsese, his salute to the movies of America in the middle of the last century. As such, it is necessarily deep-dipped in the medium itself. Scorsese's Personal Journey was made in collaboration with the British Film Institute and originally aired on UK television in 1995 (making its way to the US some three years later). Scorsese is the host, with lots of voiceover explication. Organized by digressive rumination, it comes armed with—and this is the important part—copious film clips. You are usually looking at scenes from movies, occasionally broken up by archival interview clips with great film figures such as Clint Eastwood, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Gregory Peck, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, and Billy Wilder. It is the medium on the medium.

I was flabbergasted to find out how much I did not know when I first saw Personal Journey several years ago, how much was simply unfamiliar. Yet even in those cases I was hardly prepared for all the daunting insight that Scorsese brings. The Band Wagon, Cabiria, Footlight Parade, 42nd Street, The Furies, Leave Her to Heaven, The Left-Handed Gun, Murder by Contract, My Dream Is Yours, The Naked Spur, The Regeneration, The Roaring Twenties, The Robe, The Tall T—some of them were vaguely familiar as titles. I furiously wrote down every one and immediately ported them to my Netflix queue. Those that are available anyway—a good many are not. I suspect I'm not the only one trying such an exercise, because many fall into Netflix's "very long wait" category.



The documentary is organized like a text, divided into three parts, each with its own set of chapters. Part 1 has sections on "The Director's Dilemma," looking at the competing forces of commercial consideration and artistic integrity that confront film directors, and "The Director as Storyteller," where Scorsese breaks down the developments of his favorite genres (Westerns, gangster films, and musicals), each of which gets a chapter. In Parts 2 and 3, he traces broader developments: basic origins, the coming of sound, then color, and then widescreen. In "The Director as Smuggler," which continues into Part 3, he explores trafficking in the socially taboo, including an impressively lucid discussion of film noir. Last, in "The Director as Iconoclast," he presents a kind of alternative canon, where the rules were broken, filmmakers made to pay a stiff price, and new standards created. Here you find discussion of films that surprise and don't surprise: Bonnie and Clyde, Broken Blossoms, Citizen Kane, Faces, The Great Dictator, Lolita, The Man With the Golden Arm, A Streetcar Named Desire, Sweet Smell of Success.

At the same time, all along, Scorsese offers a fundamental education on film, discussing the business of them and going in depth into what makes them a unique art form, at one point listing and showing wonderful examples of basic film syntax: close-ups, irises, dissolves, masking part of the screen for emphasis, dolly shots, tracking shots, cross-cutting. "I've always felt that visual literacy is just as important as verbal literacy," he says (in chorus with every film director ever). It's often a treat just to hear him explain things. I will say I have some misgivings that in his discussions of The Birth of a Nation and Elia Kazan he is silent on the controversies surrounding them. It did not surprise me with Kazan, of course. He's been clear on that elsewhere, and anyway I am beginning to soften to him too since a recent revisit to East of Eden, where Kazan's integrity on many levels is quite evident. Still, call me PC if you must, I think the vile aspects of The Birth of a Nation should be mentioned and confirmed in any discussion of it. It's a movie I respect, and enjoy, and despise in equal measures.

Another point that suggests how effective Scorsese is in Personal Journey: Scorsese's avowed favorite film genres, into which he travels so deeply, are probably my own least favorite. Scorsese compares them to jazz, as inherently and uniquely American art forms, pointing out the appeal of the Western to the enduring American frontier myth of the West, the gangster film to the burgeoning metropolises of the East with their constant flows of immigrants, and the musical to its obvious source, Broadway. He makes them sound interesting. His narrative makes films I know I don't like look vibrant and interesting—Murder by Contract, The Left-Handed Gun, The Searchers—and he makes me want to look at them again. Often it turns out I still don't like them. But I sure like the way they play in this documentary.

Scorsese's whole approach is at once so ambitious and so illuminating that I'm happy just watching him break it all down and following along where he rambles, wherever he wants to go. At nearly four hours it's way too short. He almost casually grapples with giant issues, and the insights can come thick and fast and from all directions as he clarifies things. He doesn't shy away from difficult and complex issues such as violence either. In that particular case, he turns to Fritz Lang to make the point. I recommend looking at it for maximum effect—with Lang wearing an eye-patch and monocle, sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette, speaking in rumbling tones with a thick German accent, and laying it out straight: "Violence has become in my opinion a definite point in the script. It has a dramaturgical reason to be there. You see, I don't think that people believe in the devil, with the horns and the forked tail. And therefore they don't believe in punishment after they are dead. So my question was ... what are people fearing? ... And that is physical pain. And physical pain comes from violence. And that, I think, is today the only fact which people really fear, and therefore it has become a definite part of life, and naturally also of scripts."

Detail: A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995)

0 Gimme Shelter (1970)

USA, 91 minutes, documentary
Directors: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin
Photography: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Gary Weis
Music: Rolling Stones
Editors: Joanne Burke, Robert Farren, Ellen Giffard, Kent McKinney
With: Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Tina Turner, Hell's Angels, Melvin Belli, Meredith Hunter

In late 1969, the Maysles brothers (Albert and David), with Charlotte Zwerin, had already made their reputation as iconoclastic documentary filmmakers on the strength of their extraordinary Salesman from 1968 and other projects. The Rolling Stones, just then about to assume the mantle of greatest rock 'n' roll band in all history, had returned to touring after an interruption of a few years that was due to drug busts, turmoil inside the band, and other breakdowns. Also, Woodstock had just happened. Thus, the elements were in place for a first-rate and very interesting concert film. Then events stepped in to help make sure it couldn't be anything else. The more you look at Gimme Shelter now, the more eerie and weird and unfortunate it all seems, which the movie exploits almost perfectly with its dense atmosphere of dread.

The two sides were remarkably in synch from the start. The Maysles team only knew they wanted to make something "more than" a concert film. Mick Jagger, speaking for the band, kept laying down terms the Maysles were already abiding by or happy to comply with: no acting, no recreations of scenes, no voiceover narration, and none of "that Pennebaker shit." So far so good,  except the Maysles knew the last one might be a problem, depending on what Jagger meant by it. They kept nodding their heads and saying no problem, and they kept shooting.



Gimme Shelter more or less starts as a typical enough concert film, with arrivals at airports, press conferences, recording sessions on the road, hotels and buses, and concert footage shot at the Stones' '69 Madison Square Garden show. In performance, Jagger carries on in iconic fashion, wearing a long scarf, cape, and star-spangled top hat. The sound is not very good but the images compensate. Mostly what makes the scenes work as well as they do are the audience reaction shots, which really bring the adulation and the fervor, a sense of what an event it was.

But the movie has already started to subtly enlarge its scope. Zwerin, who was largely responsible for shaping and structuring all the hours that the Maysles and their crews gathered on their travels with the Stones, already knew of course that this story ended in Altamont. It couldn't be ignored, so she worked with the Maysles to establish a thread early in which the Stones are brought in to look at portions of the film. Their reactions to it are in turn filmed. By this time they had already worked with Jean-Luc Godard on the 1968 documentary Sympathy for the Devil so they were evidently comfortable both with cameras and with strange experiments.

Going "meta" like this—"see the Stones, seeing themselves!"—is somewhat arch but it's also a nice way of foreshadowing what the filmmakers have got. As an event, Altamont was well known by the time the project went into postproduction, or at least the general shape of its disaster was. Altamont remains an epic cluster-fuck, the poster child for how to do an outdoor festival wrong on practically every level, capped off by the murder of a concertgoer at the hands of the Hell's Angels, who had informally been put in charge of security, which they provided—no surprise—the Hell's Angels way.

What the filmmakers got, of course, is the kind of thing now called "documentary gold"—a scene so raw, unfiltered, and real that it practically makes the picture essential viewing all by itself. In this case, it was the murder of Meredith Hunter. The army of camera operators the Maysles sent into that strange sea of 300,000 on that December day (trivia fans may enjoy knowing that one of them was George Lucas) somehow happened to catch the murder itself on film, which was subsequently discovered during the editing.

It's a pretty neat way to solve the problem of using an event without exploiting it, though it operates in a gray area. The murder happens swiftly, inside of a thick crush of people just 20 or 30 feet away from the stage. To clarify it for the viewer, it is dwelt on and looked at more than once, including in slow motion and with freeze frames. It has to be shown, arguably, because the context is everything—and because it is the single event that defines Altamont. But it's no simple case of peace-loving hippies assaulted by demented biker gang. Hunter had a gun and was holding it in his hand. He was not merely an innocent bystander but an active player in the violence erupting all around.

That context is crucial, and establishing it may be the single most important part of the film, documenting the turn—as many have pointed out before—from '60s fairy pop dreams of Monterey Pop and Woodstock to something far more grim and depressingly human. The scenes at Altamont are repulsive, taking the images of quaint hippie eccentrics we knew from before and making them impossibly grotesque. Naked people, stoned people, hairy people, with dead eyes and buckskin fringe—it looks like anomie made palpable.

The Stones' performance at Altamont caps it all off perfectly. This is not the riding high of Madison Square Garden. The band is hemmed in on all sides by the mob, which is no more than five or six feet away from them. The stage itself is barely elevated. The band is obviously scared—as they should have been, because the Angels had already assaulted Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane as well as many, many attendees. But they are attempting bravado to get through. It's not the usual scene of concert intimacy, when performers allow the audience close as they perform. This is more like a picture of kidnapping and extortion.

The best description of the Stones and Altamont is in a book by Stanley Booth called The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (released originally as Dance With the Devil). Gimme Shelter is best taken as an adjunct to that book, which is much better able to penetrate and explain the details. They are as complicated as they are unfortunate, and Gimme Shelter does very little to illuminate them if you don't already know them. Still, it remains one of the single most crucial documents of its era. It's not fun to watch but it will never leave you.

Top 10 of 1970
1. Gimme Shelter
2. Performance
3. Catch-22
4. MASH
5. Days and Nights in the Forest
6. Where's Poppa?
7. Goin' Down the Road
8. Woodstock
9. The Conformist
10. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

Detail: Gimme Shelter (1970)

0 Gates of Heaven (1978)

USA, 85 minutes, documentary
Director/editor: Errol Morris
Photography: Ned Burgess

I had better note how strange it was to sit down to watch and write about Gates of Heaven, a documentary about pet cemeteries, within days of the death of a long-time pet cat. As I feared, the context tended to confirm my impression of the worst qualities of filmmaker Errol Morris, even here in my favorite film by him, his first. He can often come across as a shallow ironist, falling back continually on an unpleasant mocking element that curdles the best here. In many ways we are in David Byrne territory (before even David Byrne had arrived there), with an insulated and smug complacency that too often misses and obtrudes the point.

The themes Morris attempts to smother in jocularity often entirely resist that—themes of faith, love, responsibility, some of the most profound questions we ask. The result is hardly unflawed, a movie that appears to be having an argument with itself about something we don't understand, like a feuding couple at a dinner party. Yet, in terms of form and in terms of filmmaking strategy, it brought things to bear that we are still seeing released every month in new documentaries.



To me, the parallel is The Passion of Joan of Arc. Both take basic syntactical elements of their forms—the close-up in The Passion, the documentary every-man interview in Gates—and abstract (and/or abuse) them into something greater and certainly other than they had been, altering the course of cinema, no less. Morris has much to answer for in documentaries since, but he opened doors wide with this. Even as it raises the power of the talking head shot to new levels by example and by implication, it also brings along an acute awareness of the self-consciousness that a camera inevitably intrudes in documentary interview situations, which points down the road to Ross McElwee and a new, personalized style.

Gates of Heaven doesn't know much of what to do with either of these fundamental elements, except to look at them, but that's all it had to do. Morris has elected a subject area he seemed to feel was slight by definition, the better to explore the nuances of the every-man interview. His next effort, Vernon, Florida, would abstract even further by focusing on marginalized, semi-coherent cranks around a small town that he could cajole into talking to the camera. (There's a taste of Vernon, Florida here in the interview with the old woman in a pink smock sitting in a doorway.)

What remains interesting to me is the collision between this early-pomo exercise in ironic affectation, on the one hand, and the homeliest of vital experiences in human affairs on the other: namely, deaths of loved ones, pet division. As with Bresson in Au hazard Balthazar (and/or as with my projections onto either or both), this is material that simply does not yield control easily, an area freighted with wide ranges of perception at primal levels.

It should be noted that, even across its relatively brief course, Gates of Heaven attempts to be many different kinds of documentary: there are investigative pieces about a California scandal related to a real estate deal gone bad, various interview studies reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis and a certain style of middle American businessmen culture, freak shows of pet owners, and any number of intriguing oddballs and happenstance event caught on film. It plays like a first film in many ways—raw, disjointed, in love beyond reason with certain of its own passages. That's the expectation to bring to it, I think.

I like it best when the material overwhelms Morris—he was on the right track with a pet cemetery idea, and he definitely had the right idea to make it as still and focused on the interviews as possible. The dignity of grief belittles its mockery, and the few glimpses Morris allows us of that dignity forces a flood of gravitas willy-nilly. He is otherwise so busy evading the profound questions he is implicitly raising—of life and death and love—that they are forced all the more on the viewer. What is appropriate to an animal's death? Why do we feel so deeply for them? What does it mean to place a corpse in the ground and mark it with a stone? Is it foolish and silly (and unsustainable)? Or is it one of the most profound things we do? Why do I want to laugh here? Why do I want to cry?

Gates of Heaven raises all of these questions and more, and then looks for answers to people it patently appears to think are inconsequential. Most of the people populating this film are obviously motivated by vanity or greed or both. They often contradict and undermine the points they are trying to make. The pet owners are petty and eccentric. But some of these characters manage to fight back too. Dan Harberts, a young man in his 20s in 1978, a college graduate, the son of the owner of the pet cemetery Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park, is one such. He is humble, full of common sense and perspective, and his guitar playing is perhaps the most memorable image people take away here.

Along the way Gates of Heaven opened up an avenue, a stance, whose emphasis was new in documentaries. Where Frederick Wiseman had used the increasingly portable, utilitarian technology to purify verite, Morris was leading the charge of an intruding, personalizing element, working explicitly with the power of the camera and the power of the talking head, a live wire of connection between image and viewer and a way to instantly evoke the tensions of real human interaction as never before quite so intentionally.

Top 10 of 1978
Appears the movies or I had heaven on our minds in 1978. Perhaps so, or maybe it was just a reasonably weak year, low point of the decade? Straight Time I only saw for the first time recently, then two genre classics. I really do not like the Vietnam sequences in The Deer Hunter, but the stateside stuff is so good. Inordinately fond of the Altman. And warming all the time to The Last Waltz, which still seems to me a little too Rolling Stone magazine establishment. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The stuff I didn't like so much was not bad so much as underwhelming in most cases. I do think Dawn of the Dead is overrated, which I know is sacrilege, but to me it plays more like a jokey action picture.
1. Gates of Heaven
2. Heaven Can Wait
3. Days of Heaven
4. Straight Time
5. Superman
6. Halloween
7. The Deer Hunter
8. A Wedding
9. Drunken Master
10. The Last Waltz

Didn't like so much: Animal House, Autumn Sonata, Dawn of the Dead, Interiors, The Tree of Wooden Clogs

Gaps: Blue Collar, Le chambre verte, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Perceval le Gallois, Pretty Baby

Detail: Gates of Heaven (1978)

0 Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

Chelovek s kinoapparatom, USSR, 68 minutes, documentary
Director/writer/editor: Dziga Vertov
Photography: Mikhail Kaufman, Gleb Troyanski
Music: Michael Nyman (2002)
Cast: Mikhail Kaufman

I'm no expert, but with the exception of the heroic graphic arts of the 1920s Leninist Soviet Union, I can think of few other artifacts that so vividly convey—propaganda or no—the brilliant optimism and energy of that unique time and place than Man With a Movie Camera. This delightful "Experiment in the Cinematic Communication of Visible Events" (and I can also think of few better or more pithy manifestoes on film than that deceptively simple "Communication of Visible Events") is an exuberant, timeless, and deeply felt and imagined classic film for one and all. Fortunately, the Russian film impresario Dziga Vertov's impossibly fresh meditation on life, freedom, beauty, work, and cinema has been enjoying another (always well deserved) resurgence of interest in recent years, appearing in the top 10 of the most recent Sight & Sound poll results and moving from #97 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? all the way up to #25.

It's not hard to see why. For one thing, the formal designations as "avant-garde," "experimental," and sometimes "documentary" are a bit misleading and do not begin to convey how perfectly charming and visually adroit the picture is. It is a feast of the optical, with as many stunningly beautiful naturalistic scenes as forays into fantasy, and a willingness to try anything, including freeze frames, stop-motion animation, and other special effects. Man With a Movie Camera seems different every time I see it, and I have been looking at it periodically for decades. I constantly notice new things and often react to much of it as if I'd never seen it before. This is possibly due to its determined lack of narrative, which offers few of the usual hooks on which to focus one's impressions, or possibly to the different soundtracks. Or perhaps, somehow, it really is a different movie every time.



It is certainly positioned well to exploit a certain weakness on the part of its audience, which persists to this day. We have been trained to take film in a theatrical / literary / narrative frame, but this dispenses almost entirely with that, focusing much more on cinema's (equally natural) lineage of visual arts and music. Which raises a very interesting problem. I suspect a good deal of the reason Man With a Movie Camera looks and feels so vigorous and contemporary is due in part to its current soundtrack by Michael Nyman, which was completed in 2002 and has a notable Steve Reich / Philip Glass vibe to it. It's not a problem for me, but it does raise questions about the limits of fiddling with a filmmaker's intent. But, as I say, I think its effect is remarkably good: with both of its cinematic hands, visual and aural, wrapped tightly around separate wires charged with powerful voltage. So effective is this, in fact, that even the menu screen for the Kino DVD, a simple design with music and images from the movie in an appropriate graphic setting, is itself instantly, unbelievably exciting.

The general arc of Man With a Movie Camera (because even in the formal absence of narrative we must have something) traces the course of a day, from morning to night, dwelling mostly in urban environments but otherwise ranging wide across the range of human experience, often programmatically: weddings, divorces, births, deaths, oppositions and dualities 'round every corner. A cameraman (Vertov's brother, Mikhail Kaufman, who also shot much of it) appears frequently, his tripod hoisted over his shoulder. There are many recurring images of him, and of eyeballs, camera lenses, and the twirling-arm motion of the time of someone operating a camera (a gesture that may live on still in games of Charades). In one scene, a cameraman doing that is seen reflected in a panning shot, likely shooting exactly what we are looking at.

It is entirely naïve of all potential for a surveillance state, even as it chillingly shows at one point a King-Kong-sized cameraman looming over a crowded city center. But I don't necessarily count that against it. Its innocence is one of its greatest charms, and it is flatly drunk almost purely on cinema itself, the acts of looking and seeing, finding ways to pay explicit homage to pioneers such as Eadward Muybridge and the Lumiere brothers, framing the production itself as a movie, with scenes of it being viewed inside a theater at beginning and end. It shows a film editor at work. It demonstrates the relation of moving pictures to still photography, showing single frames and then animating them. At one point we watch a scene being shot, with footage from that very shoot edited in. It is all artifice and construction, put to the end of bending reality itself. That is how ambitious this is. It is permeated with the fervor of a culture inventing and reinventing itself right before our very eyes.

Yet for all its fantastic qualities, there is a broad streak of naturalism to much of everything we see. In many ways it fits well, indeed is frequently slotted right in with, the so-called city symphony films of the silent era, which include Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis and Manhatta. We see people rising and dressing and grooming, we see weddings, a woman giving birth, a cigarette manufacturing assembly line and many, many scenes of work—there's a little room for commerce in this generally utopian vision, but much more for industry and work—we see piano keyboards and typewriter keyboards, crowds of people at the beach, many great shots of athletic competitions, we see urban dwellers exercising, at the beautician, sharpening a hatchet, rolling film.

It is dazzling and compelling, a romping hour-plus of visuals and music, that feels its way to climax by intuition, ending on a brilliant high note. It is 84 years later and it looks better than ever. This is one you owe yourself seeing, it's pretty much as simple as that.

Detail: Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

0 Stop Making Sense (1984)

USA, 88 minutes, documentary
Director: Jonathan Demme
Writers: Jonathan Demme, Talking Heads
Photography: Jordan Cronenweth
Music: Talking Heads: David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, Ednah Holt, Lynn Mabry, Steven Scales, Alex Weir, Bernie Worrell
Editor: Lisa Day

It's interesting to think about what one does with favorite bands. As a point of conversation I used to argue for the importance of always having one, or several: favorite locals, favorite performers, favorite within genres, favorite favorites. At some points, overwhelmed by so many choices, it becomes a pretty good problem to have. Many happy years can go by where the thought is basically on when a next album is coming out and/or a next show happening. Then one day something changes—the band breaks up, puts out a bad album, somebody says something stupid, a death—something—and it doesn't have the same allure anymore.

Talking Heads were like that for me, my favorite band from 1978 when I first heard the debut and then the follow-up. I stuck with them all the way to 1986 and True Stories, which was too rancid, and left a bad taste that's still there. Stop Making Sense was a high point of the good years, coming even as the band was visibly beginning to fracture and it was easy to wonder each time if there was going to be anything more. I saw the movie on its release and it was more than I could have hoped for, as was the album that followed the next year, Little Creatures, the last good thing they ever did. I actually saw Stop Making Sense a few times, and that was back when it felt more like an odd extravagance to see a movie more than once. Then it became a casualty of backlashing reassessments.


That itself raises questions I think are interesting about what we do with our favorites. Sometimes we slavishly follow along, pretend it's all of a certain high level, though we rarely listen to it more than a few weeks, or days. You see this in followers of David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and others. Bob Dylan, though he also has lifelong followers, represents more starkly the other avenue: rejection, loathing, and feelings of betrayal, which Dylan has actually managed to do many times, losing me for 10 years for example with the late-'70s turn to Jesus. Thinking about it, I have tended toward this second avenue a little more often, not just with Talking Heads but also Steely Dan. The Beatles took the choice away from me by breaking up. With the Pet Shop Boys I have clung to the first, slavish avenue (although with Fundamental even I have had to stop pretending the new albums interest me that much).

It was more than 20 years since I had seen Stop Making Sense (always in theaters) when I picked up the DVD and took a look again. But one more thing I should say about favorite bands—I realized I'm more talking about recording acts and records, where the relationship is largely conducted via recordings played at home. I have never seen the Beatles, Pet Shop Boys, or Steely Dan, and saw Talking Heads only once, in 1979, and it was not a good show. A whole other part of my brain is dedicated to performing acts (James Brown, Patti Smith, Wedding Present, Jesus Lizard, Walkabouts all high on this list) and it's like I have a different relationship with them. One of the greatest shows I've ever seen was U2 in 1983, but otherwise I don't give that band much thought. Their recordings are always at a certain listenable range but rarely compelling.

So when I say Stop Making Sense is the greatest concert film ever made, it's in something of a narrow way. It's a good show, but cluttered with camera crews and extra lighting crews, some light show stuff I think doesn't work even in the movie, and a whole shtick about starting it out by putting the band together one piece at a time. It's hard to know what I'd think if I were there. But what it does to see it in this movie—it's hard to describe. It's visceral and exciting and gripping—yes, this tired old smug art-damaged relic of the arch '80s. Everything that made Talking Heads great, and more specifically everything that made Talking Heads records great, is here. They are funny, creative, clever, they never stop trying, and the groove is set at constant lock-solid irresistible.

The picture from above is a good example. The image itself charges me up. It's from the opening, after the Dr. Strangelove lettering of the credits in silence, when David Byrne walks out on stage by himself with a guitar and a boombox, sets down the boombox, says, "I've got a tape I want to play," pushes the button, and begins the greatest 30 to 35 minutes of live music on film, adding members with each song: first "Psycho Killer" with Byrne solo, getting the obligatory signature song out of the way, then "Heaven" with Tina Weymouth (and Lynn Mabry offstage), "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel" with Chris Frantz, "Found a Job" with Jerry Harrison, "Slippery People" with Mabry, Edna Holt, and Steve Scales, and "Burning Down the House" with Alex Weir and Bernie Worrell. It is, in itself, a précis of the history of the band, missing only (and sadly so) some sort of cameo for Brian Eno.

It is also amazingly good. By the time "Slippery People" is full throttle, and the running in place and all the sheer physical exuberance takes hold, it's a locomotive engine at full steam, dense, powerful, thrilling. Mabry and Holt in kinda sorta jogging outfits are a great presence, pure energy and sexy, looking good, sounding good, following Byrne's lead on all the big goofy gestures. On "Burning Down the House," full band, a band that can flat play. Amazing version. That's followed by "Life During Wartime," probably the single best performance here, with Byrne running circles around the stage and the band just tearing it up. At the end of it, the smug Byrne who cannot help himself, approaches the mike and says, "Thank you. Does anybody have any questions?"

I'll give him that moment of triumphalism. He and all of them earned it for what just transpired. The remaining hour is afterglow, with many more high points from the catalog, including a turn for the Tom Tom Club. Jonathan Demme directed this movie but it feels less like a Demme film and more like a Talking Heads film, in the way that Swimming to Cambodia feels like a Spalding Gray movie—that transparency is Demme. So is the love for music and the visual latitude he is willing to give Byrne in staging it. I remain deeply suspicious of David Byrne and even to some degree of Talking Heads, which are the same thing in many ways—all that is a whole other subject. But it's not hard to set aside every bit of it when this movie plays.

Top 10 of 1984
I went to a lot of movies in 1984 so I'll give you 20. There was a lot of entertainment to be had, a lot of popcorn made and eaten, and that's what seemed to matter. It was a time when multiplexes were still a new thing and one could spend all day in them ducking from theater to theater. I lived in Minneapolis then and they were particularly good for getting out of the heat in the summer. Good times, good times.
1. Stop Making Sense
2. This Is Spinal Tap
3. Once Upon a Time in America
4. Paris, Texas
5. Streetwise
6. Stranger Than Paradise
7. Choose Me
8. Amadeus
9. Starman
10. Racing With the Moon
11. Gremlins
12. A Nightmare on Elm Street
13. Body Double
14. The Terminator
15. Blood Simple
16. Beverly Hills Cop
17. Ghostbusters
18. Romancing the Stone
19. Purple Rain
20. Broadway Danny Rose

Didn't like so much: Boy Meets Girl, The Cotton Club, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, 1984, Swing Shift

Gaps: Comfort and Joy, Heimat, Love Streams, A Passage to India, Where the Green Ants Dream

Other write-ups: Little City in Space

Detail: Stop Making Sense (1984)

0 Spellbound (2002)

USA, 97 minutes, documentary
Director/photography: Jeffrey Blitz
Music: Daniel Hulsizer
Editor: Yana Gorskaya

Spellbound is so formally effective as a documentary of the annual National Spelling Bee competition, sponsored by the E.W. Scripps company, a media conglomerate, and held in the late spring of each year in Washington, D.C., that one wonders why it hasn't been done more often. It focuses on the competition in one year, 1999, and well before the competition has begun hand-picks eight competitors to follow, traveling to their home towns, interviewing their families, friends, and teachers, and sketching five-minute portraits of each.

These choices were clearly not made randomly—among them are three of the final eight competitors, including the eventual winner, along with children of Mexican and Indian immigrants and children from poor and disadvantaged and from upper-middle-class and privileged households. Regions represented include California, D.C., Florida, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas. It's a real potpourri, and if the mechanics behind it show, the final result speaks for itself: an absolutely riveting portrait of a competition capable of suspending time the way any closely contested athletic competition can.


The winning formula is right there, obvious if implied: Carefully choose eight competitors based primarily on their chances of winning, and secondarily on demographics and certain elements conducive to storytelling, and do some location work. In this short feature fully half the running time is devoted to introductions, which is likely another clue to why this works so well. It feels deliberate, even as it is nimble. I think, for example, of TV's Survivor, which is all formula though its many reality-TV constituent factors are flexible enough to accommodate frequent tweaking. Survivor nearly always "plays"—anyone watching the first six episodes of any season will tend to care how it ends. But already there is a clue to the difference there: Survivor goes on (and on) across multiple episodes for hours and hours over a period of months, whereas Spellbound is only 97 minutes.

Which brings us to Jeffrey Blitz, the director and photographer of the original video footage that we see here. Spellbound is his first feature, and in the time since he has made another documentary (Lucky, in 2010, about lottery winners), a narrative film (Rocket Science, 2007), and has directed episodes of TV's The Office and Parks and Recreation (none of which I have seen). It's hard to know what to make of this resume exactly. He does not appear to me to be amply rewarded for Spellbound, but perhaps he works slowly and methodically, or is picky about what he does.

Part of me wants to say it is Blitz's passion that makes Spellbound so good, and that's true insofar as it motivated him to do the legwork of going into some depth with the eight competitors he featured. Part of it is also the clarity with which he saw the inherent drama itself in a spelling bee competition. But I suspect the biggest part of it was luck. He could not have known ahead of time, for example, that Angela, the bubbly daughter of Mexican immigrants in Perryton, Texas, would be required to go a mind-boggling 54 rounds to win her regional competition to qualify for the National. And there are set pieces here that could never be scripted (as the saying goes), built around competitors desperately flailing at words they obviously have never heard of, notably "wheedle" (Angela), "corollary" (Nupur), and "darjeeling" (Neil). They are amazing, indelible moments.

Blitz's instincts are not always on the mark. He clearly thinks he has found documentary gold in Harry, going so far as to open the whole picture on him in an out-of-sequence moment that is more alarming than anything else. To me, the high-strung kid from New Jersey is grating. But Spellbound otherwise quickly gets down to its business and wastes little time. In fact, the most remarkable aspect of it may be its structure, which patiently lays the groundwork of acquainting us with its characters, and then puts them through their paces with a steady but natural ratcheting of tension that is almost imperceptible. Its second half goes by in a tremendously satisfying blink, which stands up well to repeated viewing.

Phil has written previously about Spellbound, making an evocative comparison to 21 Up (a hint to Jeffrey Blitz I am almost tempted to forward along because it's such a great idea and now is the time). He might be a little more inclined than me generally to read political themes into it, although that's certainly an overtly calculated element of Neil's father, an Indian immigrant who spouts familiar platitudes about the impossibility of failure in America if one is willing to work hard. (In fairness, standing in his Orange County mansion which he built himself, he's not a little persuasive on the point.)

In fact, Neil's father to me is a good example of exactly what makes this film work. At first, he appears to be a nightmare of the pushiest kind of pressuring parent, drilling and drilling and drilling Neil on words (occasionally mispronounced, as "epitome," which Neil's father rhymes with gnome) (and Neil spells correctly). Neil's father concocts an elaborate strategy of studying patterns of spelling by word origin, and lectures Neil and the camera on the single-minded goal of success by winning. But in the end this man is not that cliché at all, coming off instead as a kind, compassionate, and infinitely supportive father during and after the competition.

Granted, he could have been simply playing for the camera. But there's very little that's simple or programmatic in Spellbound, and it's fascinating how Blitz takes on what appears at first to be an insignificant and narrow slice of nerddom, and burrows deep inside it, creating a vast world of complex and fascinating characters and motivations. I still have to wonder why it isn't done more often. Probably the gatekeepers insist that it's already been done, with this very movie, but couldn't you do reality-TV seasons with it? Wait, maybe that's a bad idea.

Detail: Spellbound (2002)