Gerhard Richter - Painting (Sunday, March 18, 2012) (30)

It's possible that Gerhard Richter's color-field abstract painting are the best example of the physical work that goes into the creation of art, the formalism of a canvas. In her new documentary, Gerhard Richter - Painting, Corinna Belz, shoots the German post-modernist in his studios and in museums and galleries where he fights with the paint and the canvases to create his work.

As a process documentary, this is absolutely amazing. We see how Richter takes a blank white canvas and adds big swaths of color, seemingly at random, then takes Plexiglas trowels of different lengths to smudge the paint. He then covers over one layer with another, then scrapes again to reveal the hidden and random color fields beneath. Finally he applies paint directly to the edges of these massive knives and goes over the surfaces another time, removing and adding color at the same time.

It is never clear to us when he is done with a work or at what state he is in. At one point an assistant jokes that it's better to not comment on anything because he'll take a positive remark as a sign that the picture is bad and will start over from the begging, thus wasting everyone's time.

We get small glimpses of his mindset and his approach to his pictures, but he remains particularly sphinx-like about what he does and how he knows when pictures are done (I guess he has to keep some secrets).

There is a wonderful small moment as he looks at old family snapshots and comments that he has no memory of the scenes or the people in them (his parents) and can't actually account for the surrounding areas, beyond the borders of the image. It's such a wonderful overintelectualized and particularly East German view of the world. A fetishization of the banal and bleak. Still, it offers an interesting prism through which to see his work. He makes pictures that we can see, concentrating on composition and relationships of shapes and color. Any other content for him is noise and irrelevant.

The best moments in the film come when the canvases he works on fill up the entire screen and we see him moving across it scraping with his Plexi-ledge. Frustratingly, Belz includes moments of his representational pictures that seem to confuse the story and become noise for us. Still, this is an excellent example of some of the best moments in the recent trend in artistic process docs (there have been dozens, including recent ones on Louise Bourgeois and Richard Serra).

Stars: 3 of 4

Khodorkovsky (Wednesday, December 21, 2011) (120)

Khodorkovsky is a documentary about the Russian oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly the richest man in Russia and one of the richest people on the planet. This shows his rise to billions, his run as an influential man in Russian and World politics and philanthropy and his ultimate fall, after crossing president/emperor Putin.

As with all oligarchs, he gained his wealth quickly as the former communist state sold off it's industries to a handful of individuals for little or no money. Khodorkovsky, a chemist working in oil extraction, got lucky and was given (well, basically given) the oil fields in Siberia. But things got tricky as he started to diverge from Putin and move to the left (or is it the right...? Russian politics baffle me). He was more interested in more government transparency and the progressive opposition. In 2003 his company, a main rival of the national gas service, was taken over by the government and he was jailed for tax evasion (probably a trumped-up charge). He's been in jail ever since.

The story is told mostly through television footage, interviews with Khodorkovsky's former colleagues and a series of stylized black-and-white animated segments (for the parts where there is no archival footage). I happen to dislike the look of the animation, it's all a bit too modern and stylistic for no reason. The third act of the film, where Khodorkovsky is in jail and interviewees are discussing his reason for not fleeing the country before he was arrested (which he could have done very easily), is a bit long and dull. I think at 111 minutes, the film is about 20 minutes too long and would have held together better if more was taken out.

There is a wonderful metaphor at the tail of the film of the suburban subdivision for billionaires outside of Moscow, where all of these heads of companies lived next to one another with gates around them and watch towers above safeguarding them - or imprisoning them. Nowadays many of the residents have been arrested for various political reasons, and the houses are largely vacant, aside from the servants who still live in them, keeping food in the fridges is if their bosses could return at any moment. There's a wonderful and evocative existentialist notion... I just think it takes too long to get there.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Wednesday, October 26, 2011) (93)

I think the content of and idea behind this film is slightly better than the net result. This is a documentary about the Black Power movement told through footage shot at the time by Swedish television crews in America. I have no idea why, but apparently the Swedes were totally obsessed with the movement and several black leaders went to Sweden to speak and raise money for their cause at the time. Weird. This brings to mind all sorts of interesting ideas of how a domestic issue or art is best analyzed by foreigners who have more perspective on the issue. It's hard to imagine an American crew treating the players involved and the history herein similarly. Still, there are aspects to this film that don't totally make sense, like why the director, Goran Olsson, feels it's necessary to have contemporary black American musicians comment on their views of '60s-'70s black leaders or the very footage we see (a bit of a mise-en-abime nightmare, really). What do I care what Talib Kweli or Questlove think about Angela Davis or Stokely Carmichael? And why not, say, other civil rights leaders, still alive today? Why not get Jesse Jackson to talk about his views of the more militant faction of the civil rights movement? The film raises as many questions as it answers... though it's still well done and interesting.

Stars: 3 of 4

Autobiography of Nicolae Caucescu (Saturday, September 10, 2011) (

OK - so I admit that I have a never-ending boner for anything Romanian these days, but this is such an amazing film it's hard not to be totally bowled over by it. It's 3+ hours of found footage of Commerade Nicolae Caucescu official films (with some home movies thrown in for texture in a few places) cut together as an "autobiography". As a theoretical piece it's one of the most interesting pieces in a long time (at least since Alexander Olch's The Windmill Movie, an autobio-doc made by a third party). It brings up important questions about what makes an "autobiography" and what makes a "documentary". The suggestion here is that Caucescu's persona was a creation of the Party, therefore his autobiography would be a creation of texts (films) of him in an official capacity. The suggestion is that there was no there there with him from a psychological point of view, so his autobiography is simply a superficial view of him looking at stuff (mostly of parades). This totally brings to mind Kundera's assertion that commies loved parades and how fabricated they are themselves. (Who walks down streets to music and choreography... and then who would think they're anything but concocted simulacra of reality?) It is a marathon in length, but I think that's part of the point as well: aside from the formal qualities of contemporary Romanian narrative pictures, only a megalomaniac could create an "autobiography" that was so long.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

L'Amour Fou (Friday, May 20, 2011) (33)

L'Amour Fou, or "crazy love", is a documentary ostensibly about the relationship and partnership between Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge. It shows how they met in the late 1950s, fell in love and then worked together for the next 40 years. The film was shot after YSL died in 2008 and just as Berge is about to have all of their belongings crated up and sent to auction in 2009.

The problem with the film is that it's a bunch of information about Yves Saint Laurent, Berge, their art collection, their auction and their relationship, but there is no sensible structure, so we don't know what to make of what we see. On the surface this seems like it could be a bio-doc, or a double bio-doc (a bi-bio-doc?) about who YSL and Berge were and how they created the House of Yves Saint Laurent, what it did and what its legacy is. We actually get only a smattering of history, finding out that they met through YSL's mentor, Christian Dior (although it's not clear how Berge knew him), and set up a new couture house later.

Major facts about YSL, like how he popularized (or invented?) pret-a-porter lines and pant-suits, are alluded to in passing, but never really underlined. There are a few interviews with a few women who worked with them, but they're never identified and their recollections are trivial.

Bizarrely we see a lot of footage of art handlers packing up works of art and sending them to New York, then London and then to Paris for the auction of their stuff. There seems to be a fake poignant moment when Berge is watching their stuff be sold for gigantic prices (a total of $484 million ...in the midst of the worst economy in recent memory) and his face is somewhere between sad because he's giving up his stuff and happy because he's making so much money with it. This doesn't really lead to anything and we don't really know enough about his relationship with the art to know how he feels.

I can't say this movie teaches you much about YSL, Berge or the auction of their stuff. It's a prefect example of how documentaries need a script or an outline in order to make sense. This doesn't seem to have either and as a result we bounce from one house to another (it seems that they had three homes together, in Paris, Marrakesh and Normandy), from one time period to another and from one anecdote about collecting art to another. We never learn what motivated YSL in his designs, what motivated Berge to be a fastidious manager, how they worked together while loving one another, why they collected the art they collected and how they came to purchase it all. We sometimes get the suggestion of answers to a lot of these things, but nothing direct or specific.

Stars: 1 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

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

Videocracy (Sunday, October 24, 2010) (140)

Videocracy is an Italian documentary about how Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi controls his country and his power through the garbage he puts on television and the greater media that surrounds his terrible reality shows. It is pure political polemic of the most bitter and cutting variety. It doesn't really work totally as an effective documentary (or polemic), but there are some amazing moments in it.

We see some of the history of Berlusconi's reality shows and how he came to power. We see how he made Italian women want to be "velinas" or TV game show models - like Vanna White, but more mindless and with less clothes. We then see how he keeps his friends in the entertainment industry close, like Lele Mora, a super-agent for TV stars - especially those who want to go from Big Brother to music recording. Finally we see Fabrizio Corona, a major Italian paparazzo and how Mora and Corona and the television stations keep the gossip and celebrity nonsense swirling in the atmosphere, ultimately helping to keep Berlusconi popular with the people.

In many ways, this is a bit of a glimpse at what America could be in 50 years. Politics is basically taken over by demagoguery and the only entertainment is absolute garbage gossip. People are generally unhappy, but they don't really fight it because their minds are so numbed by the situation.

Director Erik Gandini clearly has a beef with Berlusconi and basically calls him a criminal and a murderer several times through the film. He uses a voice over narrator who sounds like he's spitting acid when he says the prime minister's name. I think some of this political hatred should have been modified as what we get is much less effective with it in there.

This is a fun movie if you are interested in Italy (and don't like Silvio Berlusconi), but it is not one that is incredibly important. It's basically a very good 60 Minutes story - or really, three stories - but with a lot more animosity.

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

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

Old Partner (2009) (Thursday, May 27, 2010) (227)

Old Partner is a very sweet and small South Korean documentary about an old man who lives on a poor rural farm and has a 40-year old cow who still helps him tend his crops. The man deeply loves and trusts the animal and does not want to believe that his old friend might die soon.

There is not much in this movie and it is very slow moving, but it is delightful. The man smiles all the time and has a generally positive view of the world. It's another interesting view of life in South Korea outside of the major cities (along with Treeless Mountain from last year and the break dancing documentary from a few years ago, Planet B-Boy), which is frequently very poor and desperate. Director Lee Chung-Ryoul does a very nice job making a peaceful movie about a peaceful man. It might be a bit too slow for some, but I liked it OK.

Stars: 2 of 4

La Danse - Le Ballet de l'Opera de Paris (Saturday, November 2, 2009) (176)

Frederick Wiseman has made a career of very interesting documentaries with a clinical, dispassionate style. In this film he spends a few months with the Paris Opera Ballet company showing an 'all-access' look at the troupe's creative and administrative process. This is a long film, to be sure - 160 minutes long - but it does not drag much and keeps our interest throughout pretty well.

Wiseman's style is consists of setting a camera in a room and recording what goes on in front of it. There is no commentary and no particular 'director's voice'. It is documentary filmmaking in the Maysles model. It is as pure a document as one can imagine.

Much of the film shows the dancers rehearsing their routines with their choreographers and creative directors. We see at least six different numbers (maybe more - I might have lost track of a few of them) from their early stages through their final productions on stage. The rehearsal spaces, in the cupola of the old neo-Baroque Paris Opera theater, are themselves something wonderful to behold. But more than that, it is fascinating to see how the choreographers work on the most subtle movements of the dancers to change the entire tone of a work.

In addition to the artistic side, we also see the business and management side of things. We see Brigitte Lefèvre, the creative director and force of nature that has her hand in every part of the company from casting to fundraising. She's a tough lady, but clearly brilliant and totally respected by everyone we see (of course they have to respect her on camera because they would be cut if they didn't). In one scene, we see the development committee talking about an event for the 'American Friends' of the ballet, organizing events for the $5,000 and $25,000 donations. (Unintentional laughs result from a comment about Lehman Brothers executives giving money. Ooops!)

Wiseman gives us a glimpse of almost every small part of the production and every small support department. We see a guy vacuuming the boxes and cleaning the aisles of the orchestra, we see the costume designers working on upcoming shows, we see the cafeteria where administrators and dancers eat lunch side by side, we see the union labor discussions. It's all rather fascinating.

What I find especially interesting is the fact that this movie, which really has no particular 'point-of-view' and no directorial 'voice', feels rather strange because of it's nonchalance. That is to say that the film works as a mirror on the current documentary films and how nearly everything I have seen recently has a specific slant - and much of it being outright polemic. When faced with a film like this one, the *unbiased*, document-ness of it feels rather uncomfortable. Am I that corrupted by contemporary directors and their opinions?

For me, this is as much a formal exploration as it is a cinematic experience. The film is basically one scene after another with very little (other than some general chronology) linking one moment to the next. I think one of my frustrations with it is that ends rather abruptly - but it would be impossible to know how else to end it, I guess. It is as if the film is counting upwards with scenes - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. - moving easily from one thing to another. That it ends, say, on 25, rather than 20, is totally fair.

It does bring to my mind similar frustrations I had with Christo's mega-installation The Gates in 2005. That was also a formal exercise, I think. It's scope was breathtaking, but it's execution was sometimes mysterious and hard for me to follow. I had trouble with the fact that the individual gates were different in size and strangely varied different in distance from one to the next. This might have been part of a greater scheme, but to me, it felt too random and unfulfilling.

I get the same general feeling from this film. I recognize it as a beautiful work of art, but there are some editing and pacing decisions that don't totally make sense. But they don't make sense on a more fundamental level than a spot level. That is, I think there might be a big design that Wiseman has for the structure of the picture, but I can't see it and don't know what it is. I can say that I want to know more about the precess and the thinking behind the film - and hope there's more to learn.

I think this is a very beautiful and interesting movie. It might be a bit too long for casual viewing, but it probably is not a film that should be casually viewed. It is might be a bit too serious - but that's the point, I guess. (Like saying a war movie is too bloody or too violent.)

Stars: 2.5 of 4