documentary

Love and Saucers (2017)

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There was an audible wave of giggling in my audience with the opening line of dialogue in the documentary Love and Saucers. The subject of the doc, visual artist David Huggins, explains directly to the camera, “When I was 17 I lost my virginity to a female extraterrestrial. That’s all I can say about it.” It’s somewhat understandable that an audience would titter at the outlandishness of that claim and the movie that parses out the details of David’s stories is often content to find humor in its absurdity, but I was personally more struck by the confession’s supernatural terror. David Huggins is entirely sincere about his reports of hundreds of encounters with space aliens, which are mostly sexual in nature. His impressionistic paintings that illustrate these encounters are more art therapy than ironic kitsch, and you could hear the terror & the sadness in his voice as he recounts the stories behind them. There’s inevitably going to be a contingent of viewers who view Lovers and Saucers as a “Get a load of this weirdo!” line of humor at David’s expense, but the truth is that both the movie and the artist are tragically, horrifyingly sincere.

Huggins lives a mostly solitary life, holed up in his Hoboken apartment/art studio with piles of sci-fi & horror themed VHS tapes & paper backs providing inspiration for his illustrations. He proudly displays titles like The Day of the Dolphin, Sssssss, Teenagers from Outer Space, The Thing From Another World, and Son of Frankenstein for the camera, explaining why the sci-fi genre and the VHS format are so important to him. At 72 years old, he’s stuck in his ways: working a menial job at a nearby deli, keeping his stories of alien abductions private outside his family & follow paranormal enthusiasts, and painting Impressionist illustrations of his memories interacting, erotically, with the space aliens that have targeted him throughout his life. There’s a wide variety of species within these alien tormentors’ ranks, including the classic “greys,” a bigfoot-type “hairy guy,” the humanoid aliens David fucks, their hybrid offspring, and a voyeur mantis who enjoys watching their copulation. Whether or not audiences cosign belief in the creatures’ existence, David has to live & cope with that reality daily and there’s a tragic sense of terror in that isolation & grief.

Love and Saucers follows the same approach to oral history documentary filmmaking that Rodney Ascher employs in his docs about sleep paralysis & The Shining-inspired conspiracy theories. David is allowed to tell his own story directly to the audience with no editorial judgement made on his personal account of the facts. He’s an endearing man with an unshakable smile, so this is far from a portrait of a Henry Darger-type recluse. Still, his stories of repeat sexual encounters with an alien species have a distinctly menacing tone underneath them, one the film accentuates by intercutting them with images from David’s illustrations, like a nightmare intruding a wandering thought. The matter of fact way David explains things like, “This is my other body,” and the fact that his illustrations are genuinely fascinating works on their own leave the film with a sincere sense of heartache & menace. I understand the temptation to treat Love and Saucers & David’s accounts of his personal history with alien sex as a goof or a lark, but much like its subject’s art this movie mostly functions like a strangely beautiful nightmare.

-Brandon Ledet

Bound by Flesh (2012)

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The major shortcoming of Tod Browning’s Freaks is that its commitment to the horror genre ultimately requires it to betray its empathy for its “circus freak” performers. The majority of Freaks plays like a hangout comedy that just happens to be set in a circus full of amputees, little people, microcephalics, etc., an intentional plea to the audience to find the common humanity in the “ABNORMAL” & “UNWANTED” societal castoffs that work the film’s traveling sideshow. All of this work is undone at the climax when the titular “freaks” wordlessly creep up on & mutilate the physically abled erotic dancer who wrongs them, essentially playing the part of a Universal Monsters-style creature. Largely missing from the violence of this conclusion are the famed conjoined twins The Hilton Sisters. Daisy and Violet Hilton largely manage to escape the more nastily exploitative aspects of Freaks, only enjoying the benefits of its more empathetic opening half, but they weren’t so lucky in real life. From birth, the sisters were exploited for entertainment on public display, often suffering the worst side of show business without ever fully reaping its benefits. The documentary Bound by Flesh attempts to give The Hilton Sisters their full due with posthumous praise for their successes in sideshows, vaudeville, and Freaks, but unfortunately also falls short in fully honoring the value of their entertainment industry legacy in the way they deserved.

Leslie Zemeckis, longtime romantic & creative partner with “Mr. CGI” himself, Robert Zemeckis, has been quietly toiling away as a documentarian in recent years. She’s been directing a series lowkey profiles on long-forgotten female entertainers like burlesque dancers, tiger trainers, and of course, in Bound by Flesh, The Hilton Sisters. Even where her still-developing sense of craft as a filmmaker fails the legacy of her subjects, Zemeckis’s intent in glorifying the conjoined twin vaudeville singers is an unquestionably admirable effort. Essentially sold at birth to a pub owner, the twins were raised from day one to serve as entertaining curiosities for strangers & drunks. As babies, they were displayed for barroom patrons to prod in wonder at the flesh that connected them; their earliest memories were of being curiously touched by strangers for amusement. Their career was built from there, without their consent, by shuffling them from traveling road shows to amusement parks to wax museums as life-long entertainers. By the time they appeared in musical vaudeville acts as young adults, they had no real talent or skill besides being able to sing, dance, and play the piano & saxophone. They had plenty of peak-years struggles with crooked managers, sham marriages and constant emotional abuse, but the toughest times in their life didn’t start until they drifted away from the spotlight entirely and were left unprepared to function as autonomous adults in the real world, much less pull themselves out of financial ruin. Zemeckis does an okay enough job balancing enthusiasm for their onstage accomplishments with honesty about the abusive exploitation that fueled them, but the story being told is consistently more fascinating than its method of delivery. Bound by Flesh is a mediocre film about an incredibly fascinating subject.

One thing Bound by Flesh benefits greatly from is how well the Hiltons’ lives were documented in the public eye. Combining photographs with reel footage of their two motion picture appearances, Freaks & the (very) loosely autobiographical Chained for Life, finds plenty of visual stimulation to accompany its talking head accounts of the history of their lives in carnivals & vaudeville. One of the better side effects of those interviews is in getting a general glimpse of what 1920s carnival sideshows & vaudeville-era exploitation entertainment was like, even including footage of ancient amusement park attractions & attendees. I also appreciated the way its general look is informed by vintage promotional material for sideshow attractions. Much less effective is the employment of former Zemeckis collaborators Lea Thompson & Nancy Allen to vocally dramatize accounts from The Hilton Sisters’ point of view, as filtered through an old-timey gramaphone effect. The movie also disappoints in its lack of interest in the behind the camera war stories from the twins’ two feature film appearances, what they’re currently best know for, and in its gradual decline in enthusiasm when discussing their most tragic, post-fame years (for obvious reasons), despite stretching out coverage of that period of their lives as much as better-documented eras. If you can excuse the lackluster execution in some of the technical details, however, Bound by Flesh is a welcome exalting of a pair of performers who spent their entire lives on the wrong end of exploitation entertainment. There might be a better movie to be made about their lives as empathy-worthy tragedy, like the way David Lynch lovingly profiled John Merrick in The Elephant Man. Either way, Zemeckis’s documentary is worthy enough for the way it draws attention to the often-dehumanized Hilton Sisters and the ugly industry that displayed them as oddities for profit and then dumped them into obscurity with no resources but the limited use of their vaudevillian talents.

-Brandon Ledet

Witchcraft Through the Ages (1968)

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As a huge sucker for both cinematic depictions of witches and the surrealist horrors of beat generation author William S. Burroughs, I was always predestined to enjoy Witchcraft Through the Ages at least a little bit. An experimental work assembled by beat filmmaker Antony Balch, Witchcraft Through the Ages re-interprets the landmark 1922 documentary Häxan for the druggy counterculture crowd of the late 60s. Satanism has a long history with hippie culture thanks to folks like Anton LaVey, so it makes sense that Balch would want to revive one of the great early cinematic works that depicts the Devil in the flesh for the stoners of his era. The spirit of Witchcraft Through the Ages is closely aligned with the dark times of the 1990s when outlets like Turner Classic Movies “colorized” black & white films to appeal to young audiences’ disinterest in outdated formats. Balch similarly punches up Häxan by shortening its runtime, soundtracking its imagery with the weirdo jazz of Daniel Humair, and lessening its challenge as a silent film by employing Burroughs, one of history’s greatest voices, to narrate. With jazzed up dialogue in its updated intertitles and a 77min runtime designed to maintain even the most drugged out of attention spans, Witchcraft Through the Ages feels like Balch tricking young weirdos into eating their Landmark Cinema vegetables by emphasizing the already-present exploitation film pleasures of its imagery. Häxan already openly gawks at the visual stimulation of witchy & Satanic iconography; Witchcraft Through the Ages pushes those cheap thrills just slightly further to de-emphasize its more educational endeavors. The only shame is that with Burroughs on hand to enhance Haxan director Ben Christensen’s already potent imagery, it could have done so much more than that.

As blasphemous (to God and to cinema) as Witchcraft Through the Ages appears to be from the surface, it’s a surprisingly tame work. Burroughs’s narration sticks fairly close to Häxan‘s original narrative, just at an accelerated pace. He even opens the film with the detailed history of how ancient Egypt believed the universe to be physically structured, just barreling through the details, maintaining the gist but wasting no time. That history lesson, along with later challenges to how The Church & The State have long used accusations of witchcraft to control & oppress, fit right in with the writer’s usual pet topics (especially in relation to his Western Lands trilogy). The disappointing thing is that Ben Christensen’s original film is already a timelessly powerful work on its own, so it feels pointless to have someone as cosmically talented as Burroughs on hand if he’s just going to color within the lines. I can happily listen to the author rattle on about Inquisitions, “old biddies,” torture, The Devil’s children, and “showing respect for Satan by kissing his ass” for hours, but Balch should have been smarter in allowing Burroughs’s voice to pervert the material. Whenever Burroughs isn’t talking & Humair’s jazz is allowed to overpower the soundtrack, Witchcraft Through the Ages feels intellectually pointless. Any personally-curated soundtrack synced up with Christensen’s original film would have the same effect, maybe even doing less to undercut the already-present sex humor & skip over minutes of Christensen’s eternally demonic imagery. Balch seems content to split the time evenly between Hunier’s jazz & Burroughs’s voice, which is just as much of a mistake as guiding his narrator to stick to the original intent of the script. In many ways, Witchcraft Through the Ages is not nearly blasphemous enough.

Theoretically, there’s a better version of this movie that plays like a 77min poem. If Burroughs were allowed to run wild with narrated, on-topic witchy versions of his cut-ups experiments like The Ticket that Exploded as a counter-balance to Christensen’s presented-as-is imagery, Witchcraft Through the Ages would stand a much better chance as a worthwhile perversion of (the far superior) Häxan instead of just a fascinating footnote. As is, it already kind of works like cut-ups: the results of the experiment are often fruitless, but when all elements at play line up just right, it feels like a work of cosmic genius. I’m not sure if Balch’s respect for Häxan dictated that he maintain its intended, educational effect in this jazzy update or if this idea was just hastily slapped together without proper thought given to the exciting ways it could go rogue. Either way, Christensen’s witchy imagery & Burroughs’s authorial voice are undeniably more impressive as separate entities than they come across as in this post-modern collaboration. That doesn’t mean that Witchcraft Through the Ages isn’t a fun, fascinating watch. A frenetic, jazzed up runthrough of Häxan featuring William S. Burroughs is just an inherently exciting idea, one that leads to many stray moments of brilliance even in its surprisingly well-behaved adherence to tradition. A more chaotic, poetic version of this same collaboration could have lead to something much more transcendent, however, a cinematic version of real life witchcraft.

-Brandon Ledet

The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002)

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In professional wrestling, when a performer is incredibly talented in the ring but lacks the public speaking skills necessary to succeed in the business, promotions will usually pair them with a “manager,” a hype man who can do the talking for them. Paul Heyman currently fills this role for WWE champion Brock Lesnar, who looks like an absolute beast when he wrestles, but can’t match a fraction of the gusto conveyed by Heyman’s world class shit-talking skills on the mic. Movie producer Robert Evans could use a pro wrestling manager. A hotshot maverick who helped transform the cinema landscape as a Paramount Pictures executive in the New Hollywood era, Evans has an incredible story to tell, but few of the skills necessary to tell them well. In short, he’s an unlikable blowhard, one who barrels through his own boardroom war stories as if he’s vacuuming up rails of coke. His fast-paced, monotone voice-over delivery does no favors for his objectively fascinating anecdotes, besides maybe keeping them succinct. The history of Robert Evans’s professional life is a wild tale, but it’s likely one that should have been delivered by anyone else in the world besides the asshole who lived it, who’s so rushed & incomprehensible he borders on requiring subtitles to be understood. At one time in the 1970s, Robert Evans had everything he could want in the world, but to this day he lacks the one thing he needs most: a hype man, a manager.

The documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture makes the ill-advised decision of providing a platform for Bob Evans to tell his own story, read from his autobiography, despite his goddawful mic skills. Not only does this skew the truth behind what ends up being a great story anyway; it also constantly reminds you that it could not have happened to a bigger schmuck. It’s a testament to just how unlikely & compelling Evans’s E! True Hollywood Story is on its own merits that the documentary remains intensely watchable throughout, despite the giant asshole it’s meant to mythologize constantly getting in the way. Evans was the Vice President of a NYC sportswear company before being “discovered” as an actor poolside in LA. He’ll be the first to admit that he was only a “half-assed” actor, cast entirely for his looks instead of his skills, but the few roles he landed gave his business-minded brain an unignorable hunger for the movie industry. He used the publicity generated from his unusual entry into Hollywood to maneuver his way into a position as producer for Paramount Pictures. At the time, the studio was struggling for survival as the 60s were dying out & younger audiences were desperate for the New Hollywood adrenaline that was soon to come. Evans helped drive this Hollywood revival, developing a string of smash cultural hits that revitalized his studio: Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, The Godfather, Harold & Maude, Paper Moon, Chinatown, etc. According to Evans, he personally had to fight to make sure every picture survived, explaining to the studio why they needed Roman Polanski to direct, how Sicilian mobster films could possibly be a hit, and so on. You’d think he was the greatest genius of all time by the way he tells it, but that didn’t prevent him at all from succumbing to the downfalls of cocaine, lawsuits, criminal cases, and having romantic partners wooed by Steve McQueen that end all tragic Hollywood stories. He’s a lot more stingy with the details on those particular anecdotes, but they do color the credibility of his all-out success stories.

I’m being very hard on Evans here, but after listening to him philosophize about “dames,” “Pollacks,” and the differences between Sicilians & Jews for 90 minutes, I couldn’t help but think of him as tacky at best, a raging asshole at worst. The Kid Stays in the Picture is a special kind of vanity project that not only glorifies its subject as The Greatest Genius Who Ever Lived, but also operates as a sort of CliffsNotes advertisement for his autobiography by the same name. I suppose Evans is somewhat charming in his old-fashioned brand of assholery. At the very least, I appreciate the abrupt, ornery way the movie concludes with a “I’m still here, you fucks!” sentiment. Directors Brett Morgan & Nanette Burstein also do an excellent job of assembling archival footage & photographs, not only of Evans hamming it up for the press, but of backstage gems like Mia Farrow dancing in her Rosemary’s Baby costuming. Digital cinematography detailing Evans’s New Hollywood mansion unfortunately has a cheap, television-grade quality to it, but otherwise the doc has a fantastic collage-in-motion effect that matches its subject’s energy nicely. I especially admire the way it assumes the audience recognizes every film & celebrity referenced onscreen and uses their imagery for artistic effect without over-explaining their cultural significance. Really, the only problem with the film is Evans himself; he really could have used a hype man as a narrator to cut down on his monotone bravado. However, the story is too good to toss aside just because it details the life of a schmuck and a blowhard.

-Brandon Ledet

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the term “pure cinema,” now that it’s become both a critical cliché and an apt descriptor of the kinds of films that have been winning me over in recent years. Films like Neon Demon, The Duke of Burgundy, and Beyond the Black Rainbow have all hit the pure cinema sweet spot for me, centering their artistic merits around the marriage of sound & the moving image, carving out a mood & a tone instead of structuring their goals through traditional stage play & television style narratives. As often as I find myself seeking a pure cinema aesthetic in my film selections, however, I do have to admit that the term’s sudden ubiquity, along with other descriptors like “tone poem” & “mood piece,” has watered down its meaning somewhat. There’s even been a recently launched Pure Cinema podcast jokingly titled after the term in a tongue in cheek way. As current as the “pure cinema” concern & descriptor feel in a hive mind sense, though, the type of art it describes has existed nearly as long as the medium as film itself. Last year, I fell in love with the early “pure cinema” silent era horror A Page of Madness, which explores its tone & mood-based concerns in a flood of intense, seemingly narrative-free imagery. Later that decade, director Dziga Vertov was even more direct & intentional in his pure cinema ambitions. Frustrated with early film’s adherence to narrative forms of art that came before it, like stage plays & literature, Vertov attempted to make a film purely concerned with the art of the moving image. The result was 1929’s avant-garde “documentary” Man with a Movie Camera.

Filmed over three years in a range of Soviet Russian cities, Man with a Movie Camera is structured as a day in the life in the modern industrialized age. The film has a from dusk until dawn narrative shape to it, but otherwise tells no coherent story. It is a silent film without intertitles, a movie with “no scenario, no sets, no actors.” Vertov attempts to establish a “universal language of cinema,” in which narrative adherence to an A-B plot would only get in the way of its pure cinema aspirations of a director as an artist attempting to test & define the boundaries of his medium. As a documentary, the film is an interesting look at what Soviet cities look like in the 1920s. The advertising, transportation systems, and assembly line machinery of places like Kiev & Moscow are documented with a kind of historical eye, even if they’re filtered through avant-garde cinematography & editing techniques. Modern leisure is captured just as much as factory work too, with the movie often breaking to document barroom alcohol consumption and families bumming around on the beach. There’s very little humanism to its documentary style, however, as the film deliberately avoids focusing on or developing anything resembling a character. Besides stray moments when a woman hooks a bra or a man walks across a construction beam, Man with a Camera films people from dehumanizing heights, like watching the scurrying citizens of an ant farm. The cities themselves are also abstracted in this way, as the camera searches for geometric lines in its buildings, nurseries, park benches, and typewriters. This emotionally distancing abstraction makes the film difficult to focus on in its entirety, even with its measly hour-long runtime, but any five minute stretch of the work is fascinating to the eye in a formal sense and this is ultimately a film about form.

A more accurate title for this work might have been Man with Two Cameras. Vertov’s favorite subject to film seems to be himself, filming.  The movie is overloaded with shots of camera equipment, projectors, film strips, and even movie theaters. Everything from principal shooting to the editing process to the screening of footage is represented onscreen, suggesting that Man with a Camera is less about documenting modern city life than it is about navel-gazing on the subject of what is art & what is cinema. Sometimes it finally ​finds a specific subject for audiences to latch onto in these reflections, like when stop motion footage of a camera turns it into a personified character. Overall, though, the movie more effectively breaks down the camera and the man who operates to their function as just two more machines in the larger, industrialized picture.

It can be striking how modern that goal & aesthetic are in a 2010s context. I imagine this is the exact kind of cinematic artifact that Guy Maddin daydreams about & drools over while planning out his own work. Personally, though, my fascination with Man with a Camera‘s early experiments in tracking shots, overlayed imagery, and mimicry of the human eye’s perspective as it darts around erratically can only take me so far. The avant-garde horrors of this film’s predecessor, A Page of Madness, were much easier for me to connect with because there was a humanity in its central narrative, however vaguely defined. The recent documentary Cameraperson also sounds more immediately interesting to me for similar humanist reasons, despite being just as loosely assembled over the course of disparately documented years, locations, and personalities. Man with a Movie Camera‘s dedication to a pure cinema ethos is both visually & philosophically interesting to me in an intellectual sense, but I do think a little influence from literary or dramatic narrative tradition would’ve been helpful in making it more interesting as a film instead of an academic exercise. Dziga Vertov was definitely onto something, though, and it’s fascinating to watch him reach for the outermost boundaries of his medium, something I wish more modern directors would do now that television & video games are encroaching on & democratizing their territory.

-Brandon Ledet

Casting JonBenét (2017)

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Watching​ the highly stylized, editorial-free documentaries The Act of Killing & Room 237 a few years ago felt like witnessing the dawn of a new era in the medium. Instead of following traditional models that pack documentaries with talking heads interviews & Wikipedia-in-motion historical summation, Oppenheimer & Ascher’s films simply record oral history-style input from their subjects, free of judgement, and match the false memories, conspiracy theories, and outright fantasies of those interviews with striking cinematic imagery. I’ve only seen the impact of those two seminal works echoed in a few projects since – including the recent docs Beware the Slenderman & Swagger and Ascher’s own The Nightmare – but I still feel that their influence can only grow exponentially from there. The Netflix-distributed documentary Casting JonBenét is a clear addition to this new post-modernist documentary landscape. Instead of a typical true crime documentation of the mysterious disappearance and murder of the six year old beauty pageant contestant JonBenét Ramsey in the 1990s, the film exists as an abstracted art piece & loose collection of conspiracy theories surrounding the case. Its humor is uncomfortable. Its dedication to a style over substance ethos may seem immediately at odds with a documentary’s function of capturing “the truth.” Yet, the film’s loose collection of unsubstantiated claims & theories surrounding the Ramsey murder case seemingly reveals much more perception & impact on its immediate community & the hive mind at large than a straightforward, Dateline NBC-style documentary on the subject ever could.

Like The Act of Killing, Casting JonBenét builds its narrative around an insular community re-enacting a past atrocity from its own history. Colorado area actors & pageant competitors audition for key roles in a fictional feature film about the JonBenét Ramsey murder case: the police, the parents, JonBenét herself, etc. Some of the people auditioning personally knew the Ramseys at the time of the murder, some happened to live nearby, and some are only familiar with the case by way of national headlines & supermarket tabloids. Everyone has a take on what happened to JonBenét, however, and the movie blends reality with speculation by recording each & every theory they give voice to between audition takes of reading actual Ramsey dialogue from press conferences & police records. The interviewees documented here will both lay extremely judgemental criticism on the Ramseys’ parenting style (even supposing that they killed their own daughter because she frequently wet her bed) and claim the only reason the mother was considered a prime suspect was because of sexist scrutiny. Wild conspiracy theories about child porn rings and child beauty pageant prostitution are discussed in hushed tones. Claims that JonBenét’s nine year old brother may have killed her are harshly juxtaposed with actual nine year old boys simply being children. The overall result is oddly humanizing. The Ramseys, guilty or not, were ultimately ordinary people, as real and mundane as the actors who dress like them for this film’s interviews. National news coverage has a way of abstracting that truth, but it hits with full impact here while young girls dressed like JonBenét giggle & eat cookies between auditioning their terrified screams. There’s no actual photographs or footage of the real life Ramseys to be found in Casting JonBenét and the more I watched different interpretations of their press conferences mimicked & picked apart by various actors the more I realized I no longer have any idea what they actually looked like. The overall effect of that abstraction both points to how dehumanizing the court of public opinion is and questions how that kind of national curiosity & speculation could ever lead the public closer to the truth of what happened to JonBenét.

The most immediately striking aspects of Casting JonBenét are its gleefully inappropriate humor and its dreamlike imagery. Because it documents the wild conspiracy theories of so many Colorado weirdos the film often plays like a Toddlers & Tiaras-inspired riff on mockumentaries like Drop Dead Gorgeous and Waiting for Guffman. The film heavily leans into that flippantly​ comedic tone too, mixing one of the actors auditioning to play a sheriff discussing the details of his work as a dom in the BDSM community with the murder case speculations of his fellow interviewees. Besides Casting JonBenét‘s general humor in blankly voicing the outlandish conspiracy theories of anyone who wants to talk for the camera, the film also interrupts questions of whether a nine year old boy could crush a six year old girl’s head with footage of actual nine year olds splitting open watermelons with a heavy flashlight. The absurdist humor of that moment immediately dives into traumatic horror once it registers exactly what the melon represents, which is indicative of how the film’s comedic tone works overall. The film’s nightmarish, almost Lynchian imagery also takes a while to fully register and doesn’t reach its full crescendo until the concluding ten minutes, a The Red Shoes-style centerpiece that retroactively brings the documentary’s entire vision into intense focus. Absolutely insane shots of multiple Ramseys impersonators dressed alike and simultaneously populating the same sound stage recreation of JonBenét’s real life house setting not only allows for the film’s myriad of theories of what happened on the night of her murder to overlap & self-contradict; it also frankly just looks cool. There’s an open admission to the public’s morbid fascination with real life murder mystery at the heart of the film’s lyrical style over substance climax that both feels incredibly honest & oddly revelatory for a film that plays fast & loose with “facts.”

Early in Casting JonBenét, a young girl auditioning to play the titular victim in the documented fictional film about her real life murder directly asks her interviewer (and the camera), “Do you know who killed JonBenét Ramsey?” I’m not convinced that anyone truly does and if this documentary does anything exceptionally well it’s in exposing the slippery, intangible nature of that truth. The curiosity & slight terror in the young girl’s eyes as she asks that question, dressed like JonBenét herself, is also both chilling & easy to relate to. For all of Casting JonBenét‘s bells & whistles as a post-modernist work that bucks the rigidity of documenting the truth by deliberately blending reality with pure speculation, it’s an ultimately humanizing work. The film indulges plenty of transgressive humor & style over substance imagery, but it also democratizes the visage of the Ramseys in a way that reclaims their personas from public curiosity to once again become everyday people. That’s especially important for JonBenét in particular and I greatly admire the way the film contextualizes her as a real life little girl again, among its other more immediate surface pleasures.

-Brandon Ledet

Kiki (2017)

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By billing itself as a “spiritual sequel” to the landmark documentary Paris is Burning, the Swiss-American co-production Kiki smartly brought a lot of attention to itself & its political cause in an overcrowded media market where most low budget documentaries slip by without notice. It also set the expectation of what it can deliver to an impossibly high standard. Kiki is not as significant of a work as Paris is Burning. It’s not even close. Not only has the initial wow factor of what Paris is Burning managed to unearth faded with time, but the switch from celluloid film to digital media has significantly hindered the quality of imagery in this distant echo of an unofficial sequel. Still, as a modern check-in on the state of the NYC ballroom and voguing scene decades after that landmark work and a document of the heights of visual art being achieved within that subculture today, it’s a worthwhile addition to the classic doc’s legacy.

Paris is Burning documented the well-established “houses” & long term history of ballroom culture in NYC, a pocket of queer society fiercely dedicated both to artistic expression (mostly through fashion & dance) and self-preserving loyalty. Kiki focuses on a much more specific subset within that larger scene. Its title not only refers to the communal act of partying or hanging out, but also defines a subset of ball culture participants who are remarkably young and, unlike the older houses profiled in the previous film, unestablished. A large population of the Kiki world are underage PoC, abused or abandoned by their parents for being homosexual or trans. The “house mothers” who take them under their wing and help them prepare for ballroom & voguing competition are barely older than them, mostly in their early 20s, and that age range is largely what separates the “Kiki” scene from traditional ballroom culture.

What’s most exciting about Kiki as a film is in knowing that the ballroom scene does have this young blood flowing through its veins, keeping it alive. In a world where there aren’t many true countercultures left untouched by homogenized pop culture at large, it’s reassuring to know that the NYC ballroom scene is still as vibrantly punk as ever. You can see reflections of what Paris is Burning first documented in mainstream outlets like Ru Paul’s Drag Race today, but for the most part the culture had been left untouched & far from normalized. The aggressively defiant fashion, death drops, and openly expressed sexuality documented in Kiki is still punk as fuck and still a wonder to behold. The best moments of the film are when it merely documents & broadcasts the fine art achievement of the in-their-infancy houses like House P.U.C.C.I., House Juicy Culture, House Unbound Cartier, etc.

Although a respectable ambition, it’s the film’s overt attempts at political statement that drag down its overall value as an art piece. Kiki rightfully has a lot to say about queer and trans identity in modern America. Since it follows a younger set of subjects, it even has terms like “triggered” and “gender fluidity” in its arsenal to discuss these issues effectively. When it dares to flash back to images pulled directly directly from Paris is Burning, however, you get the sense that these politics might have been better served if they were allowed to crop up naturally while focusing on what makes this community’s highly specific POV special in the first place: ballroom culture. The issues discussed in the film are damn important, but by splitting its time between the less visually compelling political maneuvers that take place between the ballroom competitions and actually documenting the competitions​ themselves, the film ultimately feels a little weak and diluted, especially when compared to its spiritual predecessor.

Kiki makes some admirable maneuvers to improve on the Paris is Burning formula. It updates the soundtrack to a modern pop aggression provided by Qween Beat, deliberately puts its LGBTQ politics in the foreground of its subject, and goes as far as to include one of its interviewees in the production of the doc, correcting what many perceive as an exploitative element of Paris is Burning. Even with these positive alterations and additions, however, Kiki can never shake the feeling of being little more than an addendum or an epilogue to that superior work. It shines when it focus on the priceless visual art being produced in the ballroom subculture (sometimes even playing like a voguing-themed version of Girl Walk // All Day), allowing its politics to be passionately expressed in that display. When it strays from that task, however, it starts to feel a lot more like countless works we’ve already seen before. It’s horrifically upsetting that statements like “I am a person” should feel overtly political in a 2010s context, but I can’t shake the feeling that there are more interesting ways to say it than the way it’s handled in Kiki. Take, for instance, the way it’s expressed in the film it openly pays homage to at every turn.

-Brandon Ledet

Swagger (2017)

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Music video director Olivier Babinet borrows a deliberate style over substance ethos from his preferred medium and brings it to its most unlikely onscreen home: the documentary feature. With Swagger, Babinet profiles the lives & personalities of eleven school age immigrants living in French housing projects, some first generation and some second. He offers their musings on topics as wide ranging as love, death, pop culture, poverty, and the surveillance state as mostly raw information, free of context, only stepping in to add music video style visuals as onscreen flavor. Swagger is like a Rodney Ascher film in this way, broadcasting instead of editorializing, except that it focuses on humanizing disadvantaged communities living under the radar in France instead of exploring more trivial topics like The Shining and sleep paralysis. It’s an approach that’s sure to be as divisive here as it is in Ascher’s features, The Nightmare & Room 237, but if you’re onboard with the formula it feels like a new, exciting kind of postmodern filmmaking.

One of the more alienating aspects of Swagger is its lack of a narrative structure. The eleven children interviewed speak in meandering, conversational tangents with no real story to tell other than who they are and how they see the world. Some of these tangents include insightful information about their daily lives in the insular housing projects communities: how lookouts inform drug dealers of encroaching police scrutiny, how outlandish fashion affords them a sense of self identity, how they’ve never seen a “person of French stock” in their entire lives – living entirely among “blacks & Arabs.” Some tangents are much less informational, including musings on the Obamas, the Fast & Furious franchise, and a lengthy recital of seasons’ worth of American soap opera plotlines. When considered as a whole, the interviews offer a detailed portrait of what a school age immigrant looks & sounds like in modern France. That may not immediately seem like the kind of political documentary filmmaking that challenges cultural hegemony, but the way it humanizes and gives voice to a section of the population that’s usually ignored or vilified without a second’s thought is nothing short of radical.

Speaking of things that are rad, the most striking aspect of Swagger is the way it frames these kids’ musings in a music video context. They strut their fashion in slow motion as if the doc were an update of the historical piece Fresh Dressed. Drone shots of the housing projects and the nearby suburbs look too good to be real, with one especially smooth transition from the exterior to the interior of one of the kids’ bedrooms looking like MCU-level CGI. Nature footage of owls and bunnies contrast with an industrial dance sequence involving welding masks & The Robot choreography. In an opening Facebook post of a fashion-conscious selfie, one of the kids describes themselves as “too stylish for your eyes.” Babinet’s visual style lives up to that promise, framing Swagger more like a narrative feature than a digital age documentary (because of its subject matter it feels like Girlhood in particular). He often allows this imagery to overpower the interviews that populate the audio. In one particular sequence, he even turns the film into a glimpse of a sci-fi dystopian future, solely because the kids’musings took him there. Some audiences are going to be turned off by those choices early & often, but as someone who values a style over substance ethos in almost all cases, I find it to be a bold, satisfying vision.

The lack of a narrative structure at the center of Swagger is only amplified by the way Babinet refuses to rigidly segment his interviews, allowing the reaction shots of one kid to seep in to inform the dialogue of another. I think he finds an interesting common ground between his subjects in this way and Swagger ultimately does offer a modern immigration portrait, even if flashy & loosely told. Its main goal is not necessarily to inform. It’s likely no surprise to most people that these kids help their parents translate & navigate their official correspondence or that their large housing buildings are eyesores that lead to massive white flight (along with other factors like, I dunno, racism & xenophobia). If Swagger were more interested in that kind of informational diatribe it would likely have included talking heads interviews with adult activists, urban planners, historians, and so on. Instead, it chooses to allow the kids to speak for themselves without offering an editorial analysis on what they report. I don’t have a term to describe this documentary style yet outside Ascher-esque, since it is so new & so foreign to the way these stories are typically told, but its highly stylized, Anthropology-style reliance on oral history documentation has me excited for the future of the medium.

-Brandon Ledet

Doomed!: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s Fantastic 4 (2016)

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“How many movies did Roger Corman make that never got released? One.”

When the last failed attempt to competently adapt the Fantastic 4 comic book series for the big screen hit theaters in 2015, I foolishly decided to give all past attempts a chance and watched all four craptastic Fantastic 4 features that have been produced since the 1990s. The only film of the batch that was at all enjoyable happened to also be the only one that never saw an official release. The notoriously campy, 1994 Roger Corman-produced Fantastic 4 film is rumored to have been made solely so that co-producer Bernd Eichinger could retain the film rights to the intellectual property he later leveraged for a much larger paycheck with the 20th Century Fox Fantastic 4 production in 2005. Although Corman’s goofy $1 million Fantastic 4 production was shot, edited, and printed into a final, marketable product ready to be shipped to movie theaters across the world, it never saw an official commercial release. The details of these backroom shenanigans have always been a little murky, as the Corman film was intended to be dumped quietly into the void by folks behind the scenes, which is a total shame given that it’s a much more enjoyable work than the major studio Fantastic 4 travesties that have been released in its wake. Now, the documentary Doomed!: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s Fantastic 4 has arrived to promote the very existence of this lost VHS gem and to shed some light on the mysterious forces that sabotaged its would-be theatrical release.

As an informational experience, Doomed! doesn’t accomplish anything that couldn’t be achieved through a longform “oral history” article on a well-funded film blog. It’s more of a Wikipedia-in-motion style of post mortem on a superhero film that never officially saw the light of day than it is a Tickled-style exposé on the dark forces that greenlit the production just to sabotage its release. The interview pull quotes that appear as onscreen text and act as chapter breaks between talking heads awkwardly call into question why this even had to be a movie at all, instead of a series of print interviews & YouTube clips. It’d be foolish to expect anything more than that from a crowd funded documentary about a film only available on VHS bootlegs & less-than-legal YouTube uploads, but keeping those limitations in mind definitely helps soften any major criticism that could be lobbed at Doomed!. Stories about how the movie was fast-tracked into production, passed on by Lloyd Kaufman, filmed at a studio warehouse condemned by the fire marshal, and advertised in theaters with a legitimate trailer despite the apparent conspiracy to never release it all make for interesting anecdotes, but do little to distinguish the documentary as its own work of art. What makes Doomed! worthwhile instead is the pathos it manages to mine from the cast & crew who worked on the film, people who sank immeasurable time, passion, and money into an effort that was conspired to become a meaningless waste by design behind their backs.

In the early 90s most superhero media was considered to be kids’ stuff, with most Marvel films in particular, including early attempts to bring Spider-Man & Captain America to life, not really providing much hope that the landscape would change into the comic book-dominated nerd future we live in today. The success of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film changed that perception, however. Although folks working on the 1994 Fantastic 4 might have had reasons to be concerned about the limitations of working within Roger Corman’s direct-to-VHS era, with his quick-paced production schedule & indie-level scale of budget, they also had enough encouragement from the cultural zeitgeist at large that the film might be a huge financial success. A project hundreds of Hollywood nobodies sank all of their hope into as their big break into major A-list success, one that had explicit verbal assurance that it would reach a wide theatrical distribution and a trailer that screened before other major action films, never saw the light of day until it was bootlegged & ridiculed years down the line. The first sign the cast & crew had that the powers that be behind 1994’s Fantastic 4 might not have had total faith in their work was when Marvel legend Stan Lee publicly trashed the film at that year’s Comic-Con before production even wrapped. Everything from that point on is hurt feelings & dashed dreams. Doomed! is most essential as a document when it captures that sense if betrayal from those most hurt by the film’s cancellation. Like with a lot of movies sets, the crew had developed a tight-knit, familial sense of camaraderie during production and it’s a little sad to see them all look back bitterly on sinking together with a ship that was doomed before it even left the port.

If you want to see a great document of the cheap, wild production style of Roger Corman filmmaking, I recommend checking out Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel instead. If you want to see a great documentary about a passion project that becomes unruly during production and is sabotaged out of existence by sinister film industry types, check out Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau instead. Already-established fans of the Roger Corman Fantastic 4 movie (like myself) are likely to seek out Doomed! for its cool tidbits about how The Thing’s animatronic facial expressions were achieved or how, exactly, copies of the film were ever leaked out. Then again, those fans were likely to be the exact people who funded this documentary on Indigogo in the first place. If you’re already on the hook for Fantastic 4, this film works well enough in tandem with that would-be cult classic as supplementary material. Doomed! aims to achieve more than that, nakedly calling out for an official, decades-late commercial release for Fantastic 4 as a kind of victory for the folks who were wronged in the conspiracy of its initial non-release. Only time will tell if it’s successful in that respect. In the meantime, folks who aren’t already onboard with 1994’s “lost” Fantastic 4 can only look to Doomed! for a small, quietly sad story about a group of hopeful up-and-comers having their dreams built up and immediately crushed by a shared project that’s just beyond their control. Even if just for that one aspect, though, it’s still worth a recommendation.

-Brandon Ledet

Beware the Slenderman (2017)

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threehalfstar

One of the most common complaints that documentaries suffer is the accusation that they exploit their human subjects for artistic (and financial) gain. It’d be difficult to argue against that accusation in regards to the recent HBO Docs release Beware the Slenderman, which turns the real-life stabbing of a twelve year old girl into a midnight movie creepshow & a jumping point for internet age fear mongering. Although I could comfortably call Beware the Slenderman exploitative, it’s exploitation cinema done exceedingly well. The first hour of the documentary is highly effective as bone-chilling horror, opening with a Blair Witch-style dramatization of the titular “creepy pasta” the Slenderman in a heavily pixelated version of the woods. As the film tracks the legend of the Slenderman from online fiction to amateur video games to Tumblr fan art to YouTube mainstay, it makes some really interesting and genuinely unnerving points about the evolution of memes as a collective “virus of the mind” and the function of online folklore as “digital fairy tales.” It’s when the film instead focuses on the 2014 stabbing of a young Wisconsin girl that it veers into the more exploitative True Crime territory and loses track of its Candyman-esque fascination with the nature of urban legends. I definitely found one side of that divide far more satisfying than the other, but watching Beware the Slenderman navigate this confusing tonal clash and gleefully cross some ethical lines to get its point across made for a unique documentary experience.

Two twelve year old girls are taken into custody and tried as adults for stabbing their friend 19 times in the woods of Wisconsin suburbia. As there has been no decision made in their first-degree attempted murder trial to this date, a charge that could possibly earn them each 65 years in prison, the two girls’ story has, by design, no conclusion. All we know upfront about the stabbing is that the victim thankfully survived and that the accused have made no attempt to hide the fact that they are guilty. The crime is introduced in-film through media coverage montage and long-form interviews with the accused’s parents, which tells their entire life story to a backdrop of home video footage. The parents describe mostly normal childhoods outside stray sociopathic reactions to pop culture media (specifically the infamously devastating scene from the beginning of Bambi) and a gothy tinge to their daughters’ online activity. There’s a lot of frustration and empathy in those interviews as the parents struggle to make sense of children they thought they knew, an internet culture they completely underestimated, and the earliest signs of mental illness in otherwise normal-seeming childhoods. The problem is that they aren’t the only interviews the documentary is structured around. In a much sleazier line of inquiry, Beware the Slenderman integrates long stretches of the two girls’ confessions/police interrogations from mere hours after the stabbing. Watching two children describe the stabbing of a third child in cold-blooded terms is just about the most exploitative thing I’ve ever seen in True Crime media, but it serves the material well, especially in the way it deepens the creepiness of the film’s titular monster, the Slenderman.

Originally penned as a creepy pasta, but earning a full-blown urban legend status through online folklore, the Slenderman is a tall, lanky being with long arms, claws, and retractable tendrils. He is faceless, always wears a suit & tie, and is naturally drawn to young children. Adults see his attraction to children as a threat of harm, but children (especially bullied outsiders) see it as welcoming & protective. As one interviewee puts it, “Often in the adult world, we can forget how much it sucks to be a kid.” This modernized version of the Boogeyman or the Pied Piper offers alienated children the promise of protection & community. The scary part is that some kids truly believe he’s real, real enough for them to stab a friend 19 times to “prove themselves worthy” and to “prove the skeptics wrong.” By their logic they had no choice but to slay a human sacrifice for the Slenderman, explaining, “I didn’t want to do this, but I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.” Richard Dawkins is brought in as an evolution expert on the way memes spread & adapt. Brothers Grimm scholars attempt to contextualize the phenomenon in the tradition of fairy tale folklore. None of the talking heads are nearly as effective as seeing for yourself how the Slenderman is represented in online multimedia art and hearing what the fictional character’s devotees are willing to do “for him” in the real world. It may be a question of my general genre preferences with all media, but I think this documentary works best when it pursues this type of urban legend horror aesthetic instead of playing with the ethics of True Crime narratives.

I’ll admit that as an audience, my biggest hurdle with Beware the Slenderman was its length, not its ethical dilemmas. At two full hours, the film outwears its welcome a bit by the concluding 30min stretch, which started to feel as pedestrian as an episode of Dateline NBC. I’m always advocating for my horror cinema to limit its runtime, though, and it’s that genre distinction that allowed me to enjoy the documentary despite its occasionally objectionable sense of morality. Using the near-murder of a young girl by her peers for shock value or an audience hook is certainly questionable, especially if the ultimate purpose of your works to creep adults out with technophobic warnings about what children are getting into online. That’s not even to mention that the film liberally appropriates artwork from those same children for its imagery without pay or credit. I expect that kind of unethical alarmism in my horror media, though, and I really like the way Beware the Slenderman tried to make phenomena like the Ice Bucket Challenge, planking, and YouTube reaction videos into just as sinister of a force as CandyCrush is in #horror and Skype is in Unfriended. Before the easy fact checking days of the internet, people used to believe films like The Blair Witch Project, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Cannibal Holocaust were genuine documentaries, real life recordings of actual incidents. Beware the Slenderman works best as a continuation of that horror tradition by actually filling that role as a document of a real-life event. It’s a little overlong, a tad sensationalist, and mundanely sleazy in some of its True Crime touches, but it’s also a great horror film, especially for a documentary.

-Brandon Ledet