Blank City (2011) (Wednesday, March 8, 2012) (158)

There are few subjects I like more for documentaries than New York in earlier eras. In Blank City, French director Celine Danhier, looks at the downtown art scene, particularly the culture of filmmakers, in the East Village in the late 1970s and early 1980s -- one of the worst eras in the recent history of New York City.

Following on the heels of the experimental art filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Jonas Meekas, Jack Smith, Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow, a large group of drug- and alcohol-addled kids started shooting small movies with Super-8 cameras they borrowed, rented or stole. This is the same era and the same group of people who brought you bands like the Talking Heads, Blondie and the Ramones -- a very CBGB-based set who lived somewhere from Avenue C to Bowery and from Houston to 14th Street. The city was broke and dangerous and their films were weird and terrible and amazing.

Dozens of artists, actors and filmmakers from the era are interviewed with clips from many of their movies. Probably the most famous of those people are Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi and Deborah Harry. We see how the movement went from the so-called "No Wave" films, which were rather chaotic and improvised, frequently sexual and about the desolation that surrounded the filmmakers, to the "Cinema of Transgression" of Nick Zedd, Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch (don't worry - I don't know most of these people either), that was more hyper-political and in-your-face. We see how the movement died when the neighborhood started getting nicer again in the late '80s and some of the (better) directors (like Jarmusch and Susan Seidelman) moved on to bigger projects.

This is a really fun and interesting documentary about the very recent past that seems to have been buried as if it took place a century ago. There's a constant sense throughout that despite the fact that New York City was terrible in that era, it was also wonderful. As much as hipsters bitch about how nice and yuppified the city is now, even East Williamsburg is nicer than Alphabet City was then. We probably won't ever see another time when groups of artists could rent lofts to live in for $50 a month... and, sadly, we won't ever again see such an enormous and weird output of art

Stars: 3 of 4

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (2011) (Saturday, January 7, 2012) (133)

Cameraman is a biodoc about Jack Cardiff, the great early Technicolor cinematographer. The film shows how he moved up in the ranks of English cinema and, due to his years of experience as a camera operator, was selected to learn the complicated process of color photography from the Technicolor labs. He worked on several productions with The Archers, that is the great British filmmaking collaboration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger. He was a camera operator for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, partly because he was one of the only people on the continent who knew how to use the gigantic camera, and later went on to be the director of photography for the great A Matter of Life and Death.

Once Powell and Pressberger split up, Cardiff worked as cinematographer on such films as John Huston's The African Queen and Lawrence Olivier's The Prince and the Showgirl (the subject of the new movie, My Week with Marilyn).

This is a very nice tribute piece filled with wonderful clips from some of the greatest British color films ever made. It makes very clear how talented Cardiff was and how important he was to the development of color filming. There are lots of talking-head interviews, including Martin Scorsese, for whom The Red Shoes (another film that Cardiff worked on) was an important work.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (Saturday, December 24, 2011) (126)

This documentary looks at the life and work of Roger Corman, sometimes referred to as the "King of the Bs" (as in "B movies,"or some such variation) and how he has managed to produced and direct about 400 movies over a 50-year career. He's always been on the outside of Hollywood, working on incredibly small budgets, raising the exploitation genre to new heights.

There are wonderful clips from some of his best-loved films (The Little Shop of Horrors, and The House of Usher), some of his worst films (The Terror, The Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women) and some of his most odd-ball stuff (Teenage Cave Man), as well as tons of interviews with directors, actors, writers and producers who came out of the "Corman Film School," such as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, William Shatner, David Caradine, Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern, to name a few. They all have great stories to share about making terrible movies on low budgets.

There are some wonderful historical details shared, such as when Corman was distributing foreign films by Bergman, Kurasawa, Antonioni and Fellini for a period in the '70s, and how he managed to get Bergman's Cries and Whispers shown (for a short period) at a drive-in who was used to showing his movies. Producer Gale Anne Hurd has probably the most interesting line of the film when she says that with the rise of the Hollywood blockbuster and the marginalization of Corman, you look at some of the big-budget action/sci-fi/horror flicks in theaters today and you realize that they're basically Corman-style exploitation and that he could have done any of them better and much, much cheaper. It's probably totally true.

Stars: 3 of 4

American Grindhouse (Tuesday, July 26, 2011) (59)

American Grindhouse is a fun documentary about the history of exploitation flicks and B-movies, featuring interviews with contemporary directors who were either influenced by those pictures or merely grew up in their heyday. Made by Elijah Drenner, the movie shows rather soberly this wild and limitless group of movies.

We see how early filmmakers experimented with sex and violence, until the Hollywood Production Code forced such pictures out of the mainstream and into alternate theaters. Then we see how over time, these movies became more and more popular with a public eager to see skin and/or blood, until Hollywood pictures themselves started emulating these depraved or gonzo films.

There are dozens of interviews with film histories, Hollywood directors (John Landis and Joe Dante probably the two best known of this group) and grindhouse directors, now as old men. There are fantastic clips from some of the most terrible films, including Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and Blood Orgy of the She Devils. There's a wink with everything we see, as it is all so crappy, it's hard to take very seriously in any context other than a sociological appraisal of the culture at that moment.

One very interesting thing is to see how close some of these films are to experimental films by artists such as Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor and Jack Smith. It's clear that these filmmakers looked to grindhouse fare for inspiration, and this really underlines how bizarre and unconventional such films were (like pregnancy movies or the psychedelic bloody orgy movies).

John Landis probably has the best line of the documentary, saying that The Passion of the Christ is the best grindhouse film of recent years. It is indeed - great because it's terrible and offensive.

Stars: 3 of 4

Two in the Wave (2010) (Saturday, February 26, 2011) (186)

Two in the Wave is a very interesting and efficient documentary about the relationship between Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. They were both cinefiles who met at movie theaters of Paris in the late 1940s. They then went on to collaborate and edit Cahiers du Cinema, the supremely important French film magazine. By the end of the 1950s, they both began writing and directing movies, Truffaut first with The 400 Blows in 1959 and Godard a year later with Breathless.

Here director Emmanuel Laurent shows us how they both came from very different backgrounds (Truffaut from a working-class Parisian family and Godard from an upper-middle class Swiss family), how they had different philosophies of work. We then see how they ultimately split after the student protests and strikes of May 1968, when Godard became radicalized and Truffaut, who totally sided with the students and strikers, was more moderate.

Laurent effectively shows how for both of them, their major works were greatly influenced by other directors they had seen before them and by one another. There's a very effective analysis of how both of them loved how Ingmar Bergman shot women and they both used this sympathetic view in later films (and particularly as the final shots in each of their debut works).

There is also a wonderful chapter about how even after their friendship completely dissolved (after Godard sent Truffaut a horrible and insulting letter and Truffaut responded to him) the two both used Jean-Pierre Leaud, the boy star of The 400 Blows, as their go-to star in some of their major works. Leaud was rather torn between the two men who had at one point been father-figures and mentors to him (he was only 14 when he made The 400 Blows). Interestingly, through both of their work, we see Leaud grow from a boy to a man - in Truffaut's work he came back to play Antoine Doinel again as a grown up.

One thing rather weird that Laurent does in the presentation is that he has almost all of the story read in voice over by a narrator with clips of interviews of the men cut in. Meanwhile he also uses a very Godard/Truffaut-type woman (very sexy with very full lips) in transitional moments and has her reading their clippings from the '50s and '60s. She serves no real purpose but turns the film into a very Godard-esque half-fictional, half-non-fictional piece. She seems to come right out of Two or Three Things I Know About Her or something later and even more opaque by Godard. It's a bit of a risk, but I like that it makes the whole exercise a bit more funny and lighter.

I like that this doc is as tight as it is. It's a very clear telling of an important story - possibly the most important creative cinematic relationships of the era.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Best Worst Movie (Friday, December 31, 2010) (170)

Troll 2 is considered by many to be the worst movie ever made. It was a 1989 passion project of Italian fimmaker Claudio Fragasso and was never released in theaters, but became a cult classic on VHS and cable. This documentary shows the current state of cult fandom and how the cast and crew react to the film and the national success it is having now.

Most of the film follows George Hardy, a dentist in Alabama who was the lead in the film. He did the acting gig knowing only that he was working with an Italian director and figured it was going to be a serious movie. It was only after he got the VHS tape of the film and watched it that he realized how bad it was.

Hardy's story is similar to most of the cast. They did the film in earnest, knowing it was a horror piece, but thinking it might be OK. When they saw the final project they realized what they had done. Some laughed it off and forgot about it, some had to deal with it haunting their careers for years to come.

Fans today flock to midnight screenings of the film because it is so incredibly bad. It seems to be something like The Room or Birdemic... although the daddy of those (with Plan 9 From Outer Space the grandaddy of them). One thing this doc doesn't do well is tell us really what the movie is about... so as a neophyte, I have no idea what they're talking about. This is a shame, because I really don't want to rent and watch this film... ugh.

It is funny to see how most of the actors have grown to embrace the terribleness of the film, but some, like Claudio Fragasso, still think it's a serious, brilliant film. What's sorta uncomfortable is that audiences love the film and laugh at it, but they also embrace the shitiness of it. When we see Fragasso watching it at a screening with fans, it is not clear that people are laughing at him. This is sorta upsetting.

This is a fun documentary, though it probably should have been a short, as it really loses steam in the last 30 minutes. I think it would have been much better at around 45 minutes. It's something in the vein of Winnebago Man or The King of Kong. Lots of fun.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss (Thursday, December 23, 2010) (160)

This is an interesting documentary about Veit Harlan, a German director who was commissioned by Joseph Goebbels to direct several anti-Semitic, nationalistic films for the Nazis in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The most well known and powerful of these films was a melodrama called The Jew Suss, which advocated Nazi party tropes of Jews being untrustworthy, filthy criminals who killed, raped and stole.

With strong Nazi backing, the film was released throughout Nazi-occupied Europe in 1940 and further inflamed the already scorching anti-Semitic sentiment of the people. After the war, Harlan continued to make films, but was always haunted by his decision to work with the Nazis. He was twice brought up on charges of collaborating with them as a propagandist but maintained his defense that Goebbels threatened his and his wife's lives so he had no choice.

In this documentary, we see how not only did the shadow of that film haunt Harlan himself, but also his kids, grand kids, nieces and nephews. Director Felix Moeller tells most of the story by having Harlan's living children, grandchildren talk about him. We get a very interesting, sometimes contradictory take on his life.

One of Harlan's sons, Thomas Harlan (an accomplished filmmaker and writer himself), explains how much he's struggled with his father's sin and how he is now convinced that because Harlan had his wife act in The Jew Suss, he could not have been coerced into making it. Another son, Kristian Harlan, takes a more tender view saying that it might not have been as black and white as his father said it was, that he thinks his father could have fought back a bit, but probably had no choice but to make the film.

Most interestingly are the views of the grandchildren who are all very separated from the passion of the story. They never met their grandfather, but have had to live with his name and the shame that comes with it (in Germany, at least). To them, this is a very distant mistake that they have to deal with on a more basic day-to-day level. They generally have a more nuanced view of the story. (Also interesting is that Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane, and her brother and long-time collaborator Jan Harlan are Veit Harlan's niece and nephew. They speak here too.)

This is a very interesting story about sin and who pays for it in the next generation. Some of the children have gone on to defend their father, some have turned their back on him as much as possible and blame him for doing something unspeakable. The documentary runs a bit long, perhaps, and might have been more powerful if it was trimmed by about 15 minutes. Still, it is a fascinating story and a very interesting, effective treatment of the material.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Kids Grow Up (Saturday, October 30, 2010) (144)

The Kids Grow Up is an interesting documentary from Doug Block, and impressive just for its gigantic scope of time. Block presents a movie here that document's his relationship with his daughter Lucy from her birth through her going off to college. Block, a documentarian who has turned the camera on his own life and family before, always seems to have a camera running in his apartment.

Although the film shows lots of footage throughout Lucy's life, it primarily focuses on the last year that she is living at home, her senior year of high school. We see his ambivalence with her dating a French boy she met on a recent trip, we see how the two fight and she asks him to stop filming her, we see that when his wife begins to suffer from depression, he copes with the pain. Mostly, though, this is a film about the documentary format, a reflexive piece, a meta piece.

There is an unusual, unsettling aspect to the film that Doug is shooting almost everything we see, we hear his voice either through the camera's mic or through voice over, but we almost never see him on screen. He's both always there and never there. This is a very powerful examination of the "director as God" concept.

This is also about piece about the photographic form in general and how our memories of our lives are greatly shaped by photographs and videos we see of ourselves from before we have hard memories. I remember many events and places because I've looked at pictures of them over the years, but if you were to show me a new picture from the same place in time, I might not have any connection to it... because it would be new to me. Similarly, Doug's experience with his daughter is specifically tied to filming her (and I imagine her memories might some day be tied to footage like we see here).

This is a very intimate story - one that is normally a very internal family thing between a father and a daughter, but here it is done in public for all to see. This is also a bit unsettling, and reminds us of the violence of film making - that Lucy really doesn't have a choice but let her father film her, violating her privacy, whether she likes it or not (I'm sure Doug is a nice enough person that if she said "please don't make this movie and release it in theaters, he would listen"... but still, we see everything about Lucy and her family and that feels like a violation, no?).

There is something inherently dark about real people becoming the subjects of documentaries. Somewhere between their real lives and what we see on screen, they become characters who we can analyze and discuss, as if they were creatures of fiction.

But then there's also the issue that Doug films his daughter finishing high school and going to college, but never really experiences it himself. This is a sad thing, and one that Lucy comments on at one point. Clearly, this might be the only way he can deal with the situation, but it is still uncomfortable to see. At times we want to shout, "Doug - put the fucking camera down and hug your daughter."

In our digital age, I think it's interesting to ask whether all the pictures and footage we shoot every day to put on Facebook or Vimeo or Flicker really mean anything. Are we going to really go back and look at all of them? Are we just collecting experiences and would it be better to put the cameras down and really experience life? I don't know.

I am very interested in the questions this film raises for me. It is a movie about families and how they grow and change over time, but it is also a movie about movies. I think it gets slightly slow in the middle, but overall, it is very well done.

Stars: 3 of 4

A Film Unfinished (Monday, September 6, 2010) (115)

Yael Herzonski's A Film Unfinished is an interesting film, but not something all that fabulous. It is a documentary about a Nazi propaganda film that was shot in May 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto. Herzonski shows clips from that film and then adds to it journals and first-hand accounts by some of the Jews who witnessed the filming first-hand. She then also shows survivors of the Ghetto and the camps watching the footage and reacting to it. All of these documents help to show us how the people lived and how the Nazis clearly exaggerated simple situations or staged fake ones to make a political point. This is a documentary about a documentary.

One thing we see clearly here is how desperately hungry the people in the Ghetto were and how the Nazis rather brazenly brushed past this fact. Historians over the years have known full well that this Warsaw documentary was a propaganda piece and that much of what we see was not nearly the truth. What Herzonski's research shows - and especially what the interviews with survivors show - is that even basic scenes of Jews going to a restaurant for a nice lunch were also pure fabrications. The survivors joke about how nobody went out to eat at restaurants because there was just simply no food to be found in the Ghetto. Not only that, but the interiors were much shabbier than what the Nazi's present. One man jokes about how nobody would have had a vase of flowers on a table because they would have eaten the flowers!

I always appreciate a critical analysis of the documentary form - I think it's one of the most compelling topics in film theory. The idea that a movie exists as a "non-fiction document" is an absolute red herring, allowing lousy and lazy technicians get away with all sorts of formal transgressions from outright propaganda and polemic to simply cheating with framing. All film - all art - is clearly subjective and subject to any number of outside influences. This film shows how even accepting the Nazi film as a propaganda piece doesn't mean that we fully understand the truth on the ground entirely. She shows how there are deeper levels of meaning to any single image.

As interesting as this dissection is, Herzonski's film is not really all that interesting or compelling. I think most Holocaust films play too strongly on our human emotions and reactions and I think the director sometimes lets our natural visceral reactions rule over a stronger insight. Basically, I think most films about the Holocaust are intellectually cheap and emotionally easy. The digging into the truth about the original film is lightly interesting, but it doesn't go incredibly deep with further questions. This could have been an effective doc short and I think it doesn't pull off the significance of a full feature.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (Saturday, June 18, 2010) (79)

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno is a fascinating French documentary that opens simply enough with a voice-over by co-director Serge Bromberg explaining how this work came to be. He says he got stuck in an elevator one day with a woman who was the widow of the great French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot. During their hours trapped in one of those tiny elevators in French apartments, she told him about the reels and reels of footage her long-deceased husband had shot for a film that was never released. This charming, intimate and unconventional approach pervades the film, showing us how this film was being made and how it ultimately fell apart mid-way though.

By 1964, Clouzot was one of the greatest filmmakers in the rich traditional of French cinema and was heading into the winter of his career. He became obsessed with his next project, a film called L'Enfer ("Hell" or "Inferno"), about a young couple where the wife is outwardly sexual and flirtatious with both men and women and the husband goes crazy as he thinks he wife is cheating on him. The central creative point of the film is that Clouzot wanted to show the man's inner turmoil and growing madness in a vivid way onscreen by using optical tricks and visual distortions, not to mention bizarre music that would give the same impression.

In order to do this, Clouzot spent many months working with photographers and artists shooting op-art pieces as well as visual and sound distortions trying to capture insanity for an audience. He worked tirelessly with costume designers and the actors to shoot tests and experiments all in the hopes of perfecting what were new techniques in visual communication.

At one point he decided that the film, which was shot in black and white, would have segments of color when the man started going mad. To heighten the drama of these scenes, he would invert the colors, so blue water would become red. In order to do this, he would have to make up the actors in blue and gray clothes and makeup so they would look naturally pink and lifelike in the inverse. As a result, much of the color footage we see has a ghostly gray palette.

This documentary is mostly a compilation of these screen tests and amazingly beautiful experimental material as well as interviews with Clouzot's technical collaborators (photographers, sound mixers, assistants, visual artists, electrical engineers, not to mention actors and friends).

One element that doesn't work as well and feels a bit unnecessary is that Bromberg and co-director Ruxandra Medrea use modern-day actors reading the film's script and acting out the story as a way to tell us what is happening in the narrative of the Inferno. I get what they are doing here and why they do it (it's nice to know the general outline of the story as we watch it), but it's a bit confusing and seems to be beside the point of the documentary. I think these segments could have been left out without any damage being done to the end product.

Clouzot was not a New Waver - he was from a time before that movement, from a golden age of French cinema with Jean Renoir and Jean Cocteau. But this film would have shown (and the footage we see does show) how he was aware of what the "younger generation" was doing in Paris at the time and how he was pushing the envelope of of traditional filmmaking to answer these cutting-edge newcomers. His response is utterly non-New Wave (and his process was so traditional he sometimes couldn't communicate with younger tech people on set) and at the same time totally fresh and innovative. Th footage we see reminds me of the last act (the trippy light show) of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (made four years later).

Ultimately Clouzot got lost in his own obsessive-compulsive spiral - effectively being driven mad by a film about a man being driven mad. I think the two directors of this film also run a bit off-track in the madness of the footage and rather lose track of the totality of the piece. The third act here is a bit sloppy as we see the Clouzot film is falling apart. We never totally see what happens and what ultimately runs the project into the ground.

There is unquestionably some amazing visual footage here, but I would have preferred a bit more structure to the documentary. That could have taken a very good work and made it great. Then again, the exact same could be said for the Clouzot film itself.

Stars: 3 of 4

Waking Sleeping Beauty (Friday, March 26, 2010) (23)

This is a very interesting documentary about Disney animation from 1984 through 1994 - arguably the most important time in the history of the company and the era that created the entertainment behemoth that Disney is today. In the early 1980s, Disney animation was at its lowest point since the death of Walt in 1966. They had a string of bad movies that were not interesting to viewers and not making money. Around 1984 the board of Disney brought in Michael Eisner and Frank Wells to turn the studio around.

Up to that point, the company was making most of its money on the theme parks and live-action movies. Eisner brought in Jeffrey Katzenberg as the Chairman of Disney and the two of them developed a strong interest in re-launching the animation arm, the bedrock of the company's legacy.

The animation department was being run by Roy Disney, Walt's nephew. Roy and Katzenberg worked tirelessly, along with executives like Dick Cook and Peter Schneider to reorganize the creative process and come up with ideas that would be both appealing to people of all ages and make them want to spend money to see the works. They all worked closely together and almost all of them hated the others. There were a lot of big egos involved and they all were puffed up by their huge paychecks.

The film is really about the historical elements of the change (going from The Great Mouse Detective to The Little Mermaid to The Lion King) and the political forces that played in the background. Eisner famously didn't promote Katzenberg when Frank Miller died, which sent Katzenberg out the door and on to DreamWorks, now a major rival to Disney (animation and live-action).

As interesting as the story is (it really is a fascinating and engaging story), the film does not really do enough to bring the viewer in and interest them. There is only a small amount of animated material shown onscreen and almost no music (considering it's a documentary about animated musicals, I think this is a shame). More unusual, and frustrating, is that all of the interviews with the principle people are used as voice-overs and you never see a 'talking head'.

I think the point of this is that it is supposed to help focus on the old footage on screen. What it actually does it makes it more confusing because it's never clear if we are hearing an old or a new interview. If you had the visual footage along with it, you could tell if it was shot recently or 20 years ago. Disembodied voices are hard to follow or pay attention to. This is especially hard when you have to juggle the names and voices of a few dozen people without a face or other visual clues to fall back on.

Sadly, we see very little about how the style of Disney's animation changed in this time. They get so wrapped up in the history they forget to mention that a movie like Beauty and the Beast looks different than earlier 2D Disney fare, like The Black Cauldron. There is also not enough discussion of how Disney got to work with Pixar so frequently at the end of the 1990s and through the Aughts.

This is a very interesting, Shakespearean chapter in Hollywood history (almost King Lear meets Henry V), but it is not presented in the best way.

Stars: 2 of 4