Many of the New York Film Fest films also screened in this year’s London Film Festival. But there are also many, like The Square that didn’t. And seeing dozens of films in a short space of time really does sharpen your awareness of where one is on this planet. Maybe it’s true now of most cities in the world but take away someone’s mobile and internet for just 2 days and they go into withdrawal spasms. The Square is a perfect example of what the new tools of mobile and internet video are best at: disseminating crucial info that doesn’t always hit the mainstream press. As one commentator noted in The Square, one of the mainstream media termed Cairo’s protesters as “so-called revolutionaries”. If there’s a criticism to be made of The Square (and after all it was being edited up to the minute and post-Sundance screening with all the changes taking place in Egyptian rule) it is that more factual background would help i.e. why the military is so much more powerful there than in other countries. As the director noted in her Q&A (but not in the film) many young men see the military as the only place where they can rise through the ranks and succeed.
Another political subject, Agnieszka Holland’s mini-series Burning Bush begs the question would a documentary about the subject not be more interesting? Everything looks fantastic, great to see all those Czech actors in parts other than Hollywood terrorists or Eastern girlfriends and every music cue just that bit too ‘on cue’. ‘Godfather’ of documentary film Frederick Wiseman offered what was to many an overlong (4hours) mixed blessing in At Berkeley (he’s finishing up his latest on London’s National Gallery). In his usual style he just lets the camera roll, allowing his footage to speak for itself with no music or explanatory titles. Shot over 12 weeks, he confesses that his style is “novelistic rather than journalistic”. And it is interesting enough to not seem like a long haul, but again, many of my colleagues found that it lacked focus. One interesting element is the issue of middle-class students being caught ‘between a rock and a hard place’ when it came to rising tuition fees (the entire campus is down to one lawn-mower) and minority group grants- a girl literally bursting into tears about her parents’ predicament. Another (arguable) idea was floated was that “America gives you a shot [at success]. It doesn’t promise you everything.” And you do have to live in this country to understand the complexity of that idea. That success is really ameliorated by being constantly competitive (and therefore aggressive to your competition) and dare it be said that no-one ever makes significant money in America without ‘kissing butt’. The upshot is most thankfully that Berkeley is teaching students to think outside the box. Hopefully that includes the box of American ‘successes’.
Sundance Special Jury Prize doc winner American Promise was 14 years in the making as middle-class parents Joe and Michele pointed a camera on their son Idris and his best mate Seun. If you ever thought that the ‘race’ issue had been solved post-Obama then think again (as was clearly debated too by students in At Berkeley). These kids are at the prestigious private school of Dalton (Manhattan). And they are the token non-white kids. As one teacher notes quite aptly, ‘no one ever thinks if putting white kids in a black school’. Is this doc too long too? Well maybe. And yet the subject is still so interesting that it almost demands Wiseman’s long form approach to impart even more information. The ADHD question of Idris is also an interesting one and how Afro-Americans are ‘wrongly’ more often misdiagnosed due to non accounting for cultural differences.
Claude Lanzmann’s documentary The Last of the Unjust is in a league of its own. If one were to suggest to one’s ‘date’ seeing this documentary on a Friday night it may seem like a laughable line from a Woody Allen movie. But at over just under 4 hours it is truly a riveting masterpiece. All the more because the questions it asks painfully resonate far beyond the subject of the Holocaust. As its subject Benjamin Murmelstein quotes the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer: “All Jews were martyrs but not all Jews were saints”. Murmelstein likens the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt and it’s cremation furnace to the paradox of Rome’s Coliseum- that without the Jewish deaths there would be no need for a camp nor its occupants. A Catch-22 if ever there was one.
A more ‘entertaining’ shall we say doc of the Fest is The Dog- the ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ story of John Wojtowicz on whose bank robbery escapade the Al Pacino film Dog Day Afternoon was based. And there is an unflappable logic to one point he makes when speaking of being criticized for trying to make money out of his crime e.g. standing outside the bank after his release signing autographs and photos. ‘How much did Warner Brothers make out of my crime’? That begs a whole bigger question.
When it comes to ‘real life’ it is great to see a mini-retrospective (2 films plus her latest, Exhibition) in Emerging Artists (Fernando Eimbcke’s Club Sandwich is also well worth catching) of now stalwart London Film Festival fave Joanna Hogg. Her films really do hold their own in a very tough crowded Festival field. And what’s more with a totally individual voice. Her camera lingers on the mundane of human interaction culminating in a solitary mediation of where one is on this planet. And of course in a quirky British bent. It’s a world away from Indy American cinema but it is the same world.
