Nostalgia for the Light (2011) (Thursday, January 5, 2012) (132)

I feel like watching Werner Herzog's The Cave of Forgotten Dreams should be a requirement for anyone watching Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light. Part of this is due to the fact that this film is one of the most Herzogian films not made by Herzog that I've ever seen. Furthermore, both films deal with the concept of researching and discovering the unknown past in similar ways. Both director's films look at physical and celestial things, but investigates the metaphysical along the way. They both look at the very small in a greater search for answers to the very big.

Guzman's documentary looks at the Atacama desert, a high desert in northern Chile, where, due to an unusual lack of any humidity, astronomers have found it to be an ideal place for observing the night sky and extraterrestrial bodies. In addition to this, it is also a bleak landscape where, due to it's salty soil, pre-Columbian human history for tens of thousands of years is evident. But this is not the only history that lies inches beneath the surface. During the 19th century, this area was the home of a massive mining industry that relied heavily on slave or indentured-servant labor. Most importantly it was also the home of several concentration camps for political rivals during the Pinochet regime. Thousands of people were "disappeared" to the desert, many of them were buried there for a time, until, it is suggested, their bodies were exummed and subsequently dumped in the ocean to cover the state murderer's tracks.

This film is a look at people who study several things and several points in history from the same place on earth. There are scientists who look up at the heavens through their telescopes and search for evidence of the beginning of the universe. There are archeologists who look at the pre-Columbian, prehistoric human record. There are political historians who look at the Pinochet era. Finally there is a group of women who visit the desert looking for human evidence of their lost or missing loved ones who might have been buried in the desert, even for only a short time.

The connections that Guzman makes from one person's testimony to another's is wonderful. He asks the astronomers about their thoughts on the desert itself, as a harsh, almost-extraterrestrial landscape and beautifully connects what they say to shots of women digging in the dirt for signs of human bone fragments. At one point he takes two of those women and sets them up inside one of the oldest telescopes in the area, brought there by German scientists in the late-19th century. The connection between old and new, celestial and terrestrial, known and unknown is powerful and elegant.

The film is shot on DV camera and looks more like a home movie, than a internationally funded documentary. Still, there is a homemade intimacy here that is very powerful. I appreciate that this is a very personal, human story of trying to wrap one's head around difficult matters. Of course, this is a movie that is trying to gather material about people who are trying to gather material, and I think Guzman is aware of the cheekiness of such a proposition.

The title, Nostalgia for the Light, suggests that we are all searching for some sort of light, either literal (as in the astronomers) or metaphysical (as in the women who look for their loved ones). There is also the suggestion by Guzman that seeing some of the old telescopes in this high desert is a return to the Chile of his youth, a nostalgia for the pre-Pinochet eden of his childhood. This is a totally wonderful and brilliant film that should be seen by anyone interested in great documentaries about ontological dilemmas and the human condition. This is easily one of the best films of the year, of any genre or format.

Stars: 4 of 4

One Lucky Elephant (Friday, December 2, 2011) (110)

One Lucky Elephant is a small documentary about David Balding, a circus owner in St Louis whose best friend and star is Flora the elephant. After working together for about 16 years, he decides he need to give her to an elephant sanctuary rather than keeping her working. This is apparently difficult, as she's an African elephant, a more violent species, and she has never really interacted with other elephants in her life, as she was taken for circus use as a baby (a very big baby).

David talks to a bunch of zoos before finding a sanctuary in Tennessee where Flora can live. There's lots of sadness as he give her up. Later he's told that he shouldn't visit her because that would hurt her transition to the new life (those elephants have long memories). This is particularly sad for him.

This film feels a lot like Project Nim, from earlier this year. There it's a chimp who is raised by humans and then has to be reintroduced to a chimp life. Both of these films rely a bit too much on the anthropomorphising of these animals and giving them deep human thoughts and feelings. I'm sure they do think things and feel things, but it's impossible to know what exactly. That we're sad when they are sent to a wild animal park, doesn't mean they are and always will be. They they get scared by new animals means more about their instinct to fear trouble than it does about their sadness of losing human contact. Besides, if we're so worried about how their lives end, why aren't we worried about how they begin - how they get to be in human culture and outside of their natural one?

The last third of the film is mostly about the obese Balding nearing the end of his life and feeling bad for his old, tusky friend. I think this is really boring and that this part should have been cut to make it a 45-minute short.

Stars: 2 of 4

Project Nim (Tuesday, July 5, 2011) (50)

Project Nim, a documentary by James Marsh (who made Man on Wire and Red Riding: 1980, both very good films), tells the interesting and heart-breaking story of Nim, a chimpanzee who was raised from two-months-old to age five by (human) grad students studying language and communications in chimps. Nim's raising was anything but scientific, but not entirely surprising considering the early-1970s era in which he lived.

At Columbia University in 1973, Linguistics professor Herb Terrace enlisted grad students (and his sometimes paramours), to raise the chimp, cleverly named Nim Chimpsky. Over the first three years of Nim's life, he had no fewer than five human minders and teachers, each one different in style and scientific method than the last. He was taught American Sign Language and was ultimately able to express his basic desires ("I want a hug," I want a banana," "I need to use the toilet"), though his ultimate ability to "cummunicate" his emotions or anything other than his wants was debatable.

Shuttling between humans who had very different ideas of the project, Nim was either closely minded or let to roam free and "be an ape". (One of his human minders, a grad student in psychoanalysis, apparently was interested in his masturbation and breast fed him from her own breast. Ew.) Ultimately, around age 4 he started acting like the chimp he really was the whole time, biting people who he perceived as threats and becoming less and less fun and cute. At this point the Columbia project ended and Nim's life as a post-experimental chimp began, moving from medical research labs to chimp jails.

This is a very interesting examination of the scientific method gone wrong, and how humans being humans are sometimes more animalistic than an ape being an ape. The film is largely unsentimental, although, there are several moments when Marsh relies on our connection to Nim and our anthropomorphizing of his plight to pull our heartstrings. I could have done without these moments (mostly because such things are so banal and shallow).

Still, there is a lot of interesting material that forces us to ask ourselves interesting questions. If humans are able to smoke pot, why can't chimps? Is it at all humane to test medicines on chimps if it will save human lives? At what point in a non-physical psycho-sexual relationship between a chimp and a human should administrators step in to block it? All very difficult and interesting questions....

Stars: 3 of 4

Cave of Forgotten Dreams- 3D (Friday, April 29, 2011) (26)

On its surface, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a documentary about the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in South-western France and the spectacular paintings/drawings on the walls. Herzog and and a small crew were granted rare access to the cave to shoot a movie... so he made a documentary in 3D, of course! He shows amazing shots of the drawings, speaks to scientists about the age of the cave and the drawings and what we know or can speculate about the people who might have created them.

Of course nothing as as simple as it seems with Herzog, a madman, genius and life-long rule-breaker. This film really is an examination of human perception, comprehension and existence as well as a post-modern evaluation of the filmic form and our experience with movies.

Clearly the most gaudy part of this formal inquiry is the fact that it is a documentary (probably the least profitable cinematic form) made in 3D (probably the most expensive, showiest format). At some level you can understand that if you get the access to the cave that Herzog got, it only makes sense to make as much with it as you can. We viewers will never get to visit the cave ourselves (access is extremely limited to a few scientists each year), so we should be able to see it in a hyper-realistic format like 3D.

But this begs the question: What is a a hyper-realistic format? Would any method be more naturalistic than this? Is anything that is shot on film and projected onto a screen (or played digitally) really going to be like it is in the world, or is our understanding of the verisimilitude of the style overstated? I think Herzog is showing us here that what we perceive to be a given reality is frequently far from the truth.

Similarly our understanding of the paintings and the people who created them is never going to be complete and, in the end, is only guess work, despite a tremendous amount of time and effort spent researching them. We will never know if what appears to be an altar with a bear skull on it is really an altar or just a random thing that one person 30,000 years ago might have done done day for no particular reason. Formality, here, is a haphazard thing and not something we should put too much stock in.

This is underlined, I think, at a moment when two scientists are speaking about one wall where a person put a series of hand-prints on the wall. We see the two women standing in the foreground and see the wall they're talking about in the distance. As the 3D was processed in post-production from a 2D print (as opposed to being shot in 3D with multiple cameras), part of the area between the women (that is in the background) that surrounds their silhouettes is partially brought to the foreground.

One could see this as a technical mistake, but I'm not sure Herzog would leave something as obvious in the film. I think he's showing us that this 3D view is not what it seems; it is as much a construction as the scientific theories that these women are talking about are. Everything we see in the world is affected by our own view of the world. The scientists who are researching this cave are looking at it from a 20th/21st Century point of view. They are in the space themselves with their own human psychology changing their hypotheses. Nothing is pure or exact.

At one point a scientist working on mapping all the markings on the walls says that after spending a few consecutive days in the cave looking at drawings of lions, he went home and dreamed about lions that night. Herzog asked him if he dreamed about the lion drawings from the cave or about real lions that he'd seen on TV or in person. The man responds, "both". This is a very important moment because what the man is describing is exactly what happens when you watch a movie. At some point in the experience, you stop noticing you are watching on a screen and your mind goes "into" the picture. The mediation vanishes and you are somehow not in the theater (or living room), but a direct witness of what you're watching.

The documentary form is a kind of mediation as well and Herzog reminds us over and over again that as much as we can study the cave paintings, we will never know what the people who made them meant or thought. There are a lot of plays with documentary formalism and he breaks several rules of technique. Herzog narrates the film, but is also a character in it (as he's done with many of his documentaries), you see his crew in many of the shots and he even says to us directly that they would be there and he speaks of the camera they use to shoot (I don't know for sure, but I think it was a standard HD camera that was later converted to 3D). All of these things are normally cut out of documentaries to make them seem more "pure", but Herzog leaves them in. He's reminding us that these things get between us and the so-called "reality" of the cave - the same way the great distance of time gets between us and the cave painters.

In another sequence Herzog shows two drawings that are next to one another and says that they were actually painted more than 5000 years apart. (The drawings are about 30,000 years old and the cave has been sealed by a rock slide at the entrance for more than 10,000 years.) He makes a comment about how the people who lived at the time the paintings were done had a different idea of the passage of time than we do. Time gets compressed for us modern people over the great span of years. After that much distance, we can only imagine what their "forgotten dreams" were - assuming they had any in the first place.

There is still a stunning proximity to these drawings and to the time and place where they were painted. Some of the drawings show now-extinct animals, like mammoths, cave lions and cave bears when they lived in what is now called Europe. It is really stunning to consider that these beings we learned about in paleontology class, always distant fantasies, honestly roamed the world at the same time as human species. Suddenly these things don't seem so far away, suddenly the things we have imagined about these species comes alive. Our dreams and imagination, the opposite of mediation, become science.

For me, this is a logical pair to Herzog's 2008 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, another film ostensibly about science, but really about human existence and the lack of knowledge we really have about our world and ourselves. These films can be seen on a very straight-forward level, as movies about specific places (Antarctica or the Chauvet Cave), but they can also been seen at deeper, more existential levels.

Humans are creative beings, we make paintings and movies, but the reasons for doing those things is not always clear when they are made and even less clear as our time passes. This film will become like the paintings, a totem from a forgotten moment of expression. We shouldn't put too much importance on it.

In Herzog's view, the world is generally a thankless, horrible place where misery is around every corner. For him, these drawings are as much about the futility of creativity, due to its formal elements and its necessary contextual relevance, as they are about the human hope for documenting the past and leaving something for the future. We have no idea who these people are and it is rather silly to get into trying to understand them, but the study of these people itself is an interesting thing to examine inasmuch as it reflects on us and our view of our own humanity.

Stars: 4 of 4

Alamar (To the Sea) (Friday, July 16, 2010) (75)

Alamar is such an emotional film that it's rather hard to explain it with words. It is more a story about the simplicity of natural beauty and the emotional connections we have to it and to other people (wow- that sounds pretentious!). It's more or less a documentary about a father teaching his son how to catch fish in his home waters on the Mexican Caribbean coast. Jorge had his son Natan after some sort of torrid romance with an Italian woman on vacation. Natan lives with his mother in Rome, but this summer is visiting his dad and learning how to do the work that his father and grandfather do to make a living and eat.


I say "more or less a documentary" because there is clearly some sort of script the guys are sometimes playing off of and there are some actions done twice and captured in two different camera angles.


But that is basically it. There is no real narrative her other than a series of vignettes with Jorge, Natan and Jorge's father out on a boat catching lobster, barracuda and snapper. They sell some to a local fish buyer and some they keep to make fish soup and fish tacos.


The peace and serenity of the film is rather overwhelming. Director/Writer/Cinematographer/Editor Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio does a beautiful job of setting a gentle and lyrical tone throughout the film. He is certainly helped by the amazing scenery and other-worldly colors of the tropical water and skies. But he keeps the action, the sounds, the movements small, letting the natural tenor of the world there take over.


There is a lot of silence in this film (there is a minimal small score that is used rather sparingly throughout and not much dialogue either). Much of what we see are rather mundane shots of guys on a boat holding a line or in their cabin sitting and looking at the water. This is super relaxing and poetic.


There is not much to this film, but its beauty and simplicity is powerful. Its a great father-son story (even a multi-generational father-son story) that shows how one very patient, loving man teaches is son small lessons in quiet ways. He lets the boy use is imagination for some tasks but also gives him firm instructions for others. The emotional qualities of the film are beautiful. I don't think the film is really trying to *say* anything - it's just a simple document of the lives of a few people.


Stars: 3.5 of 4

Act of God (2009) (Saturday, February 13, 2010) (222)

I was very excited to see this documentary when I first saw the trailer for it. It tells the story of lightning and people who have been hit by lightning and how it changes them. Visually it looked stunning with lots of dark landscapes punctuated by bursts of bright bolts. Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal does a wonderful job of showing mother nature at her most shocking and surprising (sorry for the pun).

Through the film we meet several people who have survived direct strikes or who were in groups of people that were hit and they are some of the few survivors while their friends perished. There is an interesting existential question asked here about why each person was hit and whether there's a greater meaning to the experience. We see some artists, including Paul Auster (OK - writer, artist - whatever), who talk about how the electric experience help to shape who they are today.

Unfortunately the structure of the movie is rather loose and episodic, so it gets rather boring as we move from one story of a lightning strike to another, to another, to another. There should be more big-scale form to the film that might make it more interesting. Lots of credit should got to cinematographer Nick de Pencier for the beautiful images, but, alas, that's about all that works well here.

Stars: 1.5 of 4 stars

Sweetgrass (Friday, January 8, 2010) (1)

Sweetgrass is a small documentary about sheep herders (shepherds, I guess) who take their sheep up to the mountains in Montana's Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, public land in South-Central Montana near Yellowstone National Park. It is basically the same people who were in Brokeback Mountain - but with no gay sex and with a bigger crew of cowboys. The film follows them for about a year (though it was apparently filmed over the course of three years, from 2001-2003) from a late winter snow, when the sheep are sheared of their winter fleece, to the summer in the mountains and then again to the cold of autumn.

We follow a group of about ten cowboys (and a few cowgirls) on their trips into the back-country and see how they interact with one another and with the animals. One old cowboy, who seems to be at least the spiritual leader, if not the actual boss, is the central player in the story as he gives bits of context as the movie goes along.

The style of the film is very straight-forward. There is no narration and no explanation of what is going (until at least the very end, when there are a few titles that come on to explain grand-scale shepherding in the American West and how public lands are used for private business). We see a rather point-of-view camera showing what the sheep are seeing at their level, or what the cowboys are seeing on their horses. The context of each scene is pretty self-evident, however, there is nothing framing the story, so it is rather structureless. There is a sense that things are happening in chronological order, but this is not explicit, so scenes are rather interchangeable, if not entirely haphazard.

The film is nothing if not brutally honest and frank, though, and we see everything these cowboys and sheep go through, including some rather gross things. There is an elaborate scene showing the birthing of lambs and the lengths the cowboys have to go to to make sure all the babies have a mother. One orphaned lamb is curiously put into what looks like a little lamb sweater. Then the shepherd tells us that this is because he has to have the smell of another lamb so an adoptive mother will feed him. It turns out the 'sweater' is actually the skin of a dead lamb from that same mother sheep. Gross.

Also totally genuine (and hilarious) are the portrayals of the cowboys, who are rough, angry, lonely and sometimes hilariously bawdy and crude. One shepherd launches into a five-minute diatribe at the sheep (as he sits alone on horseback while wearing a microphone) calling them 'sour cunts,' 'goddamn motherfuckers' and 'little fucking pieces of shit'. It's hilarious and goes on and on (and on) with his tantrum.

At another time, two cowboys sit by a campfire at night discussing what kind of animal it is that is sneaking into their camp at night and stealing sheep. One says, 'It could be a bear - or worse, a wolverine.' The other responds very slowly, 'Well... you know... there's only one thing worse than a bear... and that's a wol-verine'. This is the level of most of the dialogue in the film. That is, most of the human dialogue. There is a ton of sheep dialogue. Baaaaaah. Baaaaaaaah. Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Stars: 2.5 of 4