Tanzania Transit

2018, Netherlands/Tanzania, directed by Jeroen van Velzen

I came across this when searching for the film Transit; it's a documentary filmed aboard long-distance trains in Tanzania, and the filmmakers manage to get exceptionally intimate access to the key players, ranging from a woman who's the definition of a survivor to a preacher/scammer preying on those a little further down the pecking order than himself. It's very engagingly filmed, with camerawork that gives a sense of an expansive rather than enclose world on board. 

American Animals

2018, UK/US, directed by Bart Layton

Voyage à travers le cinéma français

2016, France, directed by Bertrand Tavernier

For anyone with even a passing interest in classic French cinema, this is a treasure -- Tavernier is an exceptional guide to the (French) films that marked him, while also setting them in their broader cinematic history. In addition to clips from pictures ranging from the iconic to the obscure (such as Jacques Becker's early film Dernier atout), there is some wonderful interview footage -- including a memorable sequence when director Henri Decoin performs a note-perfect impression of Jean Gabin, with whom he worked on two impressive films.

13th

2016, US, directed by Ava DuVernay

Ava DuVernay’s documentary about, primarily, the ways in which black Americans have been systematically criminalized by the political/social system, with emphasis on the ways in which this has been used to subsequently disenfranchise vast swathes of the black population. It's a very effective assemblage of interviews, archival footage and, especially, statistical data, often depicted in imaginative and striking fashion, and underlines the ways in which the legacy of slavery is still very much with the United States when it comes to the daily lives and (restricted) political participation of the country's people of colour. The various talking heads are generally informative, and occasionally surprising, none more so than Newt Gingrich bluntly discussing the failures of policies past. 

I Am Not Your Negro

2016, US, directed by Raoul Peck

I had seen several of Raoul Peck’s earlier films, most notably his diptych focused on Patrice Lumumba, but his prior pictures, however interesting, didn't fully prepare me for the richness of this film, a remarkable work of both documentation and reconstruction that uses James Baldwin’s own notes for an unfinished project as its backbone, interspersed with carefully-selected footage of Baldwin himself. Entirely appropriately, the film is often deeply concerned with the ways in which filmed images were and are perceived by both blacks and whites, a theme to which Baldwin returned with some regularity in his writing (both fiction and non-fiction). If one or two moments are perhaps a little on the nose – images of the events in Ferguson, for instance – that may also say a good deal about how little has changed in the decades since Baldwin was writing, which lends his words a hauntingly prophetic air. As well as hearing Baldwin’s words quoted at length (his texts are spoken by Samuel L. Jackson), there is extensive archival footage of him in full flow, most notably from an appearance on the Dick Cavett show, in which Baldwin eviscerates a Yale professor, and there’s equally electrifying film of an appearance at an Oxford debate. The very idea that a late-night show might engage in discussion of that caliber is, of course, an impossibility in 2017. 

Natan

2013, Ireland, directed by David Cairns and Paul Duane

Natan is as much essay as strict historical document, partly no doubt because of the challenges of presenting a subject who has been either written out of history or, perhaps even more complicated, re-written within history. It's a challenge not made easier by the apparent lack of cooperation from a latter-day guardian of a precious trove of rare documents, too.

Central to the essay, obviously enough, is the person of Bernard Natan, the entrepreneur and innovator who transformed the fortunes of Pathé-Natan in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but the film also engages with the broader history of the French film industry in the pre-war era, French antisemitism both before and after the Occupation, the problems of academic scholarship and the nature of historical memory -- as exemplified, among other things, by the fact that Natan's name has disappeared from the very building where he worked in the 1920s.

Natan's story is in a sense both unique and routine -- Natan's particular path through life is fascinating, from his arrival in Paris in the early 1900s to his success as a film producer, but his ultimate downfall owed a great deal to the simple fact of his Jewishness, an inheritance that was used straightforwardly to condemn men, women and children irrespective of the details of their lives in France in the 1930s and 1940s.

Though Natan himself was a complicated figure, who probably engaged in a certain degree of financial sleight of hand in his business dealings -- something to which the country was especially sensitive in the aftermath of the Stavisky affair -- as the film makes abundantly clear, he was singled out for his origins, and even battle wounds in the Great War could not ultimately grant him standing as a Frenchman. Everything that could be flung at him was -- his Jewishness, rumours that he acted in early pornographic films, suggestions that he had somehow taken advantage of Charles Pathé (no stranger to complex business operations and holding companies himself).

Cairns and Duane stitch together a remarkable amount of material in barely an hour, and I occasionally wanted more in one direction or another, though that may reflect the limitations of the available materials. They spend a good deal of time debunking -- thoroughly and necessarily -- the gossip about Natan appearing in porn films, including footage from a variety of stag films of the period, which has the slightly unfortunate effect of leaving that as one of the more dominant mental images from the film.

By contrast, the beguiling sequences of behind-the-scenes footage from the soundstages of Pathé-Natan provide a remarkable window into early sound film in France, very vividly underlining Natan's importance to the period (and they give those scenes a moving gloss by adding a layer of imaginative reconstruction in which we see Natan watching the work in his studio from on high). Indeed, these extracts emphasize just how outsize his contributions were and thus just how thoroughly the historical record was re-written by those who, at least for a time, controlled the levers of power in France. There's also an exceptionally affecting moment where the film makes use of more recent technical innovations to restore Natan's voice to its actual timbre, rather than the deliberately ridiculous version circulated at the time of one of his trials -- a fine tribute to a man so instrumental in pushing the French industry to embrace the coming of sound.

The film suggests an avenue, too, for the viewer to channel his or her anger at the destruction of Natan as a man and a memory -- pushing further to research and restore his importance to his industry, seeking out further testimony from that period of remarkable creative ferment, correcting a historical record far too skewed and too-little examined. In that spirit, one could hope, for instance, that Natan's name gets a mention at the screenings of Raymond Bernard's remarkable, and recently restored, Les Croix de bois at Cannes this May. If that occurs, it will at least in part be due to the efforts of Cairns and Duane to grant Natan his due.

Let the Fire Burn

2013, US, directed by Jason Osder

A very fine bit of reportage that's the more extraordinary for drawing exclusively on materials made at the time of the events narrated -- the efforts of the Philadelphia city authorities to deal with the black liberation group MOVE in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the decision to bomb the members of move out of their home in 1985. The bomb started a fire that killed eleven people and burned down more than 60 houses around the MOVE property, and a great deal of the film deals with the commission that the city established in the aftermath of the tragedy to assess what had occurred. Although apparently obscure on the national scale -- I've been startled to discover how few people are familiar with even the basics of an incident where a city bombed its own residents -- the events surrounding the gathering confrontation MOVE were exceptionally well documented by Philadelphia media at the time.

Osder does a fine job of stitching together footage of legal depositions, commission testimony, and news footage from both 1985 and earlier confrontations with MOVE (particularly a 1978 incident in which a police officer was killed) into a compelling narrative. While the city authorities are clearly in the cross-hairs, Osder makes no attempt to portray MOVE as an especially sympathetic bunch: having these folks as neighbours was a constant headache (sometimes literally, as they liked to berate people using loudspeakers), but the film poses profound questions about our ability to tolerate difference, and ultimately about our ability to recognize a common humanity. There is but a single instance where someone from one side of the conflict appears capable, as the confrontation spiralled, of making that connection; as a member of the commission noted at the time, it's something of a beacon of hope though ultimately so unusual that it looks more like the exception that proves the rule.

A Story of Children and Film

2013, UK, directed by Mark Cousins

A little of Mark Cousins can go a long way, though here his observational style generally works very well.  While some of his connections between films about children seem extraordinarily flimsy, on other occasions he juxtaposes unusual combinations to very insightful effect -- flipping from the Chinese film Yellow Earth to ET, for instance, or, in one exceptional passage, melding reflections on Spirit of the Beehive and Frankenstein with the extraordinary Latvian short film Ten Minutes Older. The extended essay opens with what seems like a useful framing device, calling on van Gogh to suggest the value of examining one subject over and over in great detail to see what a constant reworking might yield. Unfortunately, but consistent with his own style, Cousins adds a second, much more personal frame too, with his nephew and niece filmed at play one morning and providing a kind of template for subsequent reflections. The double framing seems redundant, and ultimately quite distracting -- you want to see more of his wonderful clips, including his own comments thereon, rather than his family. That, in the end, is where the real treasure lies, and there's an excellent website featuring material on the films featured here.

1

2013, US, directed by Paul Crowder

Though overall it's a fairly unquestioning advert for the modern iteration of Formula One -- the criticisms of the FIA are restricted to the past -- there's still some stirring archive footage here, since the focus of the film is primarily on the 1950s-1970s, and many of the iconic figures from that era (when they've survived) appear on camera. It's chronologically rather awkward, however, with an abrupt jump from the early 1980s to the death of Ayrton Senna in 1994, as a bookend to the narrative about improvements in driver safety, and while the footage of the events at Imola is undeniably poignant, this is a rather surface treatment compared to the 2010 film Senna.

The Act of Killing

2012, Denmark/Norway/UK, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

A troubling film on many levels: most obviously in terms of its content, which includes interviews with members of Indonesian death squads from the 1960s, and their relationship to the paramilitary forces that seem to play a major part in Indonesian politics today. But also discomfiting for the questions it raises about the documentarian's role and the context in which the film was shot. While there is some effort to provide the historical context of Indonesia in the 1960s, we gain virtually no insights into the processes that led to the rather extraordinary collaboration between Oppenheimer and his subjects except to deduce, from the tone of the back and forth, that they know one another quite well.

The men re-enact some of the worst of their atrocities, initially in the most straightforward way possible, taking us to the actual locations and demonstrating how they, for instance, strangled a person. Subsequently, though, they engage in full-on dramatizations: scenes of actual interrogations as filtered through the participants' imaginations, and quite consciously taking on the stylings of Hollywood movies. At times, the participants make reference to the fact that they are, themselves, making a film, and it's not always clear where Oppenheimer stands in relation to that process. 

In many ways, the Hollywoodization of the atrocities is entirely apt, for many of the death squad members got their start as movie ticket gangsters -- selling black market tickets to movie-goers -- and in one especially chilling sequence, Anwar Congo shimmies across a street in the present day, remembering his younger self emerging, ecstatic, from an Elvis Presley flick, before crossing the street and resuming the brutality in an interrogation center just steps from the movie theatre. Last year, while doing research on the American movie industry in Africa, I saw files on their efforts to expand the Indonesian market in the 1960s, and one wonders to what extent Hollywood was at least aware of, if not complicit with, the gangsterism surrounding its business activities. 

God Speed You! Black Emperor

1978, US, directed by Mitsuo Yanamigachi

Surely one of the key films in any discussion of the documentarist's bond of trust with his or her subjects, for Yanamigachi appears to have been fully accepted into the Japanese biker gangs that he depicts for us, whether they are shown engaging in strikingly extended internal debates or engaging in (generally fairly mild) disobedience. As with another unusual Japanese documentary, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, that position of trust creates some dilemmas: at times, the gang leaders hit more junior members, or otherwise attempt to control them, and while it's not quite at the level of the physical assaults in the later film, you do wonder whether the filmmaker had thoughts about when to intervene and when to keep filming. As a depiction of group dynamics, it's absolutely fascinating, with extended debates on the gang's self-regulation, while the cultural differences highlighted by the almost collegial relationship with the police give the film great anthropological interest for the non-Japanese viewer (and again recall The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, where the protagonist calls the police on himself, and treats the officers with the utmost respect).

How to Survive a Plague

2012, US, directed by David France

It's hardly unexpected that How to Survive a Plague provides a moving, often angry account of several central years in the efforts of AIDS activists, especially those of ACT UP, to transform official attitudes toward HIV/AIDS from 1987. Archival footage and talking heads interviews, the latter introduced gradually as the film evolves, take the viewer back to a time of increasing desperation for those afflicted by AIDS in the 1980s, particularly gay men (there are only occasional references to other affected groups, and to the international scope of the scourge). What's more surprising, though, is the genuinely fascinating insight into the workings of the movement, which self-documented to a striking degree: the film could function as a primer for any activist group, particularly those dealing with the difficult transition from initial, energetic participation to increasing professionalization. The tensions are never sugar-coated -- some of the most electric footage in the film is from around the time when the Treatment Action Group, or TAG, was striking out from Act Up, with angry denunciations and a sense of betrayal vivid on the faces of some speakers (the window into organizational dynamics reminded me of Patu!, the New Zealand documentary about anti-apartheid protests in that country).

Senna

2010, UK, directed by Asif Kapadia

It's more than a little strange to watch a film that's essentially focused on the inevitability of someone dying -- not as a plot point or as the natural end to any biography of a deceased person but as an actual event that takes place in front of our eyes. The fact that I'd seen this same event in real time in 1994, a collision so fast and jarring that you immediately knew nothing good could possibly come of it, even before the screen filled with emergency vehicles and the race at Imola was (temporarily) halted, didn't blunt its effect here, not least because the film creates such an intense impression of Ayrton Senna as a vibrantly alive young man, albeit a young man who seems constantly to be questioning his own goals and reflecting on his (extraordinarily comfortable) life. I'd forgotten just how eloquent and interesting Senna could be -- though as the film makes clear, Formula 1 is not short on figures capable of compelling commentary -- and certainly had no recollection of his expressions of religious faith, which seem at odds with the technological and commercial image of his chosen sport.

Perhaps as a result of the degree of cooperation from Senna's family, Senna doesn't probe too deeply into controversial subjects -- Alain Prost comes across as the relative villain of the piece, at least on the track, but even in a sport with a degree of inherent recklessness it's at least possible that Senna's motivations and behaviour in some of his duels with the French driver crossed the line into heedlessly dangerous territory. It's hard, for instance, to imagine either driver suggesting that they trusted and respected each other in such confrontations -- unlike the memorable encounter between Gilles Villeneuve and René Arnoux at the French grand prix in 1979, when their cars repeatedly touched as they vied for second place.

Welcome to Nollywood

2007, US, directed by Jamie Meltzer

As with Mascarades, I watched Welcome to Nollywood primarily to conceal my complete ignorance from a fellow conference panelist next month. Jamie Meltzer's documentary is an enjoyable entrée into the Nollywood world, focusing on a couple of polar opposites while giving the broad facts and figures for the industry as it stood in 2007. At one pole, there's Chico Ejiro, king of the quickie, who had churned out around 80 films by the time Meltzer caught up with him, and who boasts of being able to shoot a film in as little as weekend. At the other end of the scale there's the extraordinary ambition of Izu Ojukwu, whose artistic ambitions are on an entirely different scale, and whose film Laviva, which is extensively documented here, turns into a kind of Nigerian Apocalypse Now, both for the subject matter -- the chaos of war -- and the massive cost and time overruns. The Laviva story is fascinating, though it does unbalance the film to some degree: while there are a few more ambitious Nollywood directors out there, it's pretty clear that Chico Ejiro is the more representative director -- making films on the fly, getting them quickly to market, and moving on so fast he can't remember the plots of some of his films.

Standard Operating Procedure

2008, US, directed by Errol Morris

I couldn't help feeling that this was a major missed opportunity. Sure, it reawakens the outrage that many of us felt as photos of abuse and apparent abuse appeared from Abu Ghraib, and suggests that the photos were evidence of a much more systemic set of attitudes to Iraqi prisoners. However, Errol Morris's unrelenting focus on those photographs contributes to lack of accountability further up the line, because we cannot see those people committing or ordering criminal acts, as opposed to what we can see in the photos of lower-rank personnel. By limiting the consideration to the examination of the pictures we see, there's little sense of what went on outside the frame because that evidence would take a very different form. As an aside, although I've generally enjoyed Morris's visual style in the past here I found the shots of his interviewees were often distractingly unflattering, whether through choice of close up/angle (Lynndie England comes off particularly badly) or background (which does no favours for Janis Karpinski, for instance).

Fire in Babylon

2010, UK, directed by Stevan Riley


A terrific portrait of the fearsome West Indies cricket team of the 1970s and 1980s, set against the backdrop of the cultural and political ferment from which bubbled forth reggae's global rise and the raw-edges of The Harder They Come, Fire in Babylon is a little lacking in broader cricket history, never mentioning, for instance, the deeply controversial "Bodyline" tour of the 1930s, which soured Anglo-Australian relations to an astonishing degree over the use of physical intimidation (by England). As the film tells it, the lethal West Indies fast bowl attack was developed as a response to Australia's fiery tactics, accurate enough for the short term, but an irony indeed when seen in the context of vociferous Australian objections to such intimidation in decades past.

Such tactics were a major innovation for a Windies team still emerging from the colonial shadow, ay a time when they were often dismissed as fun-loving calypso cricketers. As the film tells it the 1976 tour of England marked a major turning point in Caribbean identity, including for those in the diaspora who had endured two decades of unwelcoming treatment in the alleged mother country. Indeed, the team's performances seem to both feed off that broader awareness and contribute to it, most often in brashly joyous ways.

For the sportsmen themselves there was clearly much more on the line during the period, most notably during that 1976 tour of England, during which the athletic young West Indian players made England look, quite literally, like a bunch of old men - surely sowing the seeds for a major change in training and conditioning by cricket players. The players weren't just making a sporting point: England's captain, the South African-born Tony Greig, made a spectacular, if likely inadvertent, miscalculation when he commented that he intended to make the West Indies "grovel" during the course of the series. That he made his comments at a time of great unrest in South Africa - the Soweto Uprising began during the tour - only reinforced the sense that the West Indies were playing for rather more than sporting victory, and even in the interview 35 years on there's an icy tone to Viv Richards's comments when asked about Greig's ill-chosen words. It's one of the highlights of the film, giving a glimpse of the steel for which Richards, who played without a helmet, was known.

Poster art credit: Bose Collins

Chippers

2008, Ireland, directed by Nino Tropiano

A compelling documentary on what might seem a small phenomenon, the Italian chip shop owners of Ireland, Nino Tropiano's film nicely opens links to much bigger questions of emigration and integration, with many of his subjects remaining far more connected to their ancestral villages in Casalattico, in the interior of the Italian peninsula, than to their new home. Although the film doesn't explore the theme to any great extent, it also functions an interesting corrective to the idea that Ireland was only a place to emigrate from; clearly, for some, the grass was greener there than in their home countries.

The film doesn't claim to tell the full story of the Irish chipper - there's no mention of Beshoff's or Burdock's, two of the most famous of Dublin chippers, both founded by Russian immigrants - but it fleshes out the extremely tough realities behind an order of post-pub chips, and the challenges of passing along a family business at a time of great change in Irish society (where "authentic Irish-Italian" chippers are increasingly staffed by new migrants from neither of those countries). Chippers is also something of a tribute to the efforts of Barbi Borza, very much the centre of Ireland's Italian community for many years, and an enthusiastic amateur historian; it's through his good offices that Tropiano gets his access to the community, though the corpulent Borza, no great advert for the virtues of chipper food, sadly passed away in early 2007 before the film was released. Perhaps appropriately, though, he was on his home turf of Casalattico at the end of his life.

Patu!

1983, New Zealand, directed by Merata Mita

A fascinating film both for its content - an account of protests against the 1981 South African rugby tour of New Zealand - and for its insights into the documentary form, Patu! retains an exceptional immediacy even thirty years on from the events. There's a shocking fury onscreen in many scenes, encapsulating anger at apartheid South Africa and, as the film progresses, at the New Zealand government, which seemed to be prepared to do more or less anything, including turning parts of the country into a fortress as well as sending police riot squads into action against their fellow citizens, to facilitate the tour. As such, the film provides a compelling insight into the sheer levels of force that a country needs to deploy to calm a restive population: the comparison with South Africa itself appears at every turn, duly underlined by the filmmakers.

Merata Mita, a key member of New Zealand's small film industry who sadly died in 2010, doesn't attempt to provide a two-sided account of the events: her film is designed as a corrective to the narrative peddled by the New Zealand government and much of the mainstream media, which tended to present the protesters as unpatriotic troublemakers and denied them a voice. She weaves together an extraordinary variety of on-the-fly footage to create a sense of the very real political and social stakes at the heart of the protests, with filmmakers like Roger Donaldson and Alun Bollinger contributing their skills as camera operators.

There are inevitable gaps in the documentary record, although Mita generally allows the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions rather than providing an over-arching narrative; that said, the use of sound effects that don't always seem to stem directly from the onscreen events certainly heightens the emotional impact of certain scenes. Much of the film is rough and ready, as befits the shooting conditions, but it has exceptional value as a historical record - an insight into the dynamics of protest almost from the beginning of the anti-tour movement, with some of those featured onscreen, like the roots/reggae band Herbs, remaining influential today.

The film is available for online viewing at the (excellent) NZ ON Screen site, which has a terrific collection of New Zealand television, short films, and some full-length features. 

His & Hers

2009, Ireland, directed by Ken Wardrop

Ken Wardrop's first documentary feature delivers on the promise of shorts like Farewell Packets of Ten and Undressing My Mother, developing a fascinating portrait of life in the Irish midlands with emotional depth and striking visual skill. Like most of his short films, the subject matter is inspired by his own family history, particularly that of his mother: the film is a series of vignettes from numerous women, each narrating a minute of two of their own lives, with the film moving from birth to death in a brisk 80 minutes.

Men are absent from the film in physical terms, but their presence hovers constantly - even persistently - offscreen, for almost all of the women talk about brothers, fathers, sons, husbands, partners rather than about themselves. Indeed, at times it's as though the women exist only in relation to the male presences in their lives - even after those men have left - which tends to suggest a rather traditional view of Irish women. That is often reinforced by the ways in which Wardrop films women exclusively confined to their homes or gardens, as though there are no other domains in which they might define and articulate themselves (few of them speak about work, for instance, and most of them refer to household tasks). It's not clear whether Wardrop is implying that Irish society itself doesn't allow for more varied female portraits - perhaps that's the question he's asking us to ponder, since the film is free of explanatory paraphernalia.

Wardrop's cinematographers, Michael Lavelle and Kate McCullough, do extraordinary work, finding constant surprises in otherwise ordinary Midlands homes, shooting rooms in a style that splits the screen as we look through two doors simultaneously, or through windows to the world beyond. That visual playfulness nicely underlines Wardrop's witty cuts from one story to the next, and the rich vein of humour that persists almost to the end of his film.

Rain of the Children

2008, New Zealand, directed by Vincent Ward

An unusual film in which director Vincent Ward returns to the territory of his first feature, In Spring One Plants Alone, a documentary which he began filming when he was just 21, about an elderly Maori woman, Puhi, and her adult son. At the time of the original film, Ward was primarily interested in Puhi for the ways in which she represented a continuation of traditional Maori life. Raised in a very rural area himself, Ward spent almost two years in Puhi's community as a young man, and he re-uses much of his older footage here, as he links Puhi’s hardscrabble later years to the extraordinary story of her youth, a story which he says he sensed but did not understand as a younger man.

Puhi was linked to a charismatic Maori leader, Rua Kenana, who led a group of Tuhoe Maori as “chosen people,” one of many such groups which developed in the wake of nineteenth-century missionary activity; Rua‘s group considered themselves to be lost children of Israel. Puhi, who was born around 1900, married one of Rua’s sons, who was killed when their community was raided by colonial police. Puhi was also believed to carry a curse, one which trailed her and her descendants, and Ward’s film is ultimately an attempt to understand the nature of these powerful beliefs. Many of the contemporary Tuhoe interviewed by Ward struggle for words when trying to convey the nature of their beliefs about the curse, though none deny that there is a form of curse, and Ward probes repeatedly as he tries to deal with forms of belief outside his own experience, while also relating some of Puhi’s struggles to more Western views of mental health.

The film is a blend of footage from the late 1970s, modern interviews, and re-creations of events from the early twentieth century, and at times it is very successful in conveying the realities of Rua’s self-appointed mission, while also serving as an extraordinary window into the Puhi’s modern life, a life which involves phones and cars and yet which seems, in other ways, barely touched by modernity (it would be interesting to see the full original film to get a better sense of Ward's original preoccupations). As a search for explanations, however, it's not always completely successful - at times, you feel as though Ward is repeating the same questions both to his interviewees and to himself without ever making much progress in his own thinking - but it is a heartfelt attempt by a Pakeha New Zealander to grapple with the complex belief systems of some of his Maori compatriots, and a compelling meditation on the nature of history itself.