documentary

Serenade for Haiti (2017)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

A lot of the best documentaries we have on difficult subjects “luck” into capturing an important moment by happening to film something seemingly innocuous just when tragedy or an unexpected shift occurs. I’m not sure Serenade for Haiti qualifies as that exact type of happenstance, since the Haitian capital it was documenting, Port-au-Prince, is constantly undergoing some kind of fundamental change, whether political or Natural. The film does find a very specific lens to view the city’s biggest upheaval of the past decade through, however, by watching it unfold through the profile of Saint Trinité Music School, a very insular community in the larger picture of Haitian culture. By following staff & students of the music school in the years preceding & following the city-destroying earthquakes of 2010, the film finds a hyper specific frame for capturing the way Haiti has dealt with the once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe.

Founded in the 1950s, Saint Trinité Music School was founded as a charitable Catholic institution specifically meant to improve the lives of Port-au-Prince children who live below the poverty line. Early conversations with the students before the earthquake reveal lines like, “We want to show that people from our class can achieve wonderful things” and “Music is our refuge,” establishing just how important the school is to the community. Its results are easily detectable too, as Serenade for Haiti contrasts the angelic sounds of its longterm students with the unsure needling of its younger hopefuls. The school takes on an entirely different meaning after the 2010 disaster, with music becoming an act of therapy for students struggling with post-disaster PTSD. Their refusal to directly discuss the horrors of the earthquake that destroyed their school, city, country, and families is very much reminiscent of the way New Orleans (a city with strong Haitian roots) gradually recovered after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, especially once the healing sounds of music & Carnival culture creep back in through the rubble & the silence. The physical school of Saint Trinité is destroyed halfway into this film, but the school itself somehow continues to thrive.

The visual craft of Serenade for Haiti makes little effort to match the angelic sounds of its music, outside a few glimpses of Carnival celebrations or vibrantly-painted historic murals. The most the film has to offer as cinema is an intimate look at a tragedy most people are used to examining from a much greater remove. There might possibly be a more informative documentary to be made about the grand scale aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake, but by profiling members of a single music school within Port-au-Prince before & after the event, the film offers an intimacy & a specificity a more wide-reaching documentary could not accomplish. The filmmakers behind Serenade for Haiti would have had no way of knowing the significance of what they are documenting when the film first began production, but they stumbled into a personal, up-close look at a historic tragedy in the process. More importantly, though, they also happened to capture the cultural perseverance that emerged in its aftermath, documenting through music a culture that’s unfortunately grown accustomed to massive violent upheavals as a routine of daily life.

-Brandon Ledet

The Joneses (2017)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

The subject/star of the documentary The Joneses, Jheri Jones, is introduced to the audience goofily modeling a one-piece swimsuit at 74 years old while favorably comparing herself to Madonna & Marilyn Monroe. The movie could use more of Jheri’s magic charm from this moment, which recalls the over the top fashion modeling Little Edie delivers in the classic doc Grey Gardens. Unfortunately, we only get it in glimpses as the film (somewhat understandably) focuses on the hardships suffered in her life, particularly in regards to her family. Jheri Jones is a trans woman & mother of four who transitioned late in life in rural Mississippi. Living with two of her sons & supporting her other two children in an almost equal capacity, Jheri bears a lot of weight on her shoulders. She finds tight social & economic restraints on what modern Mississippi living affords her as a working class trans woman with multiple family members struggling with disability. She’s absolutely fabulous as a personality, though, something The Joneses too often loses track of while it searches for the visual & emotional details of her hardships, often to its own detriment.

Because Jheri’s public gender transition is decades behind her, there isn’t much to The Joneses in terms of immediate plot. The film makes unnecessary attempts to build conflict around two central revelations: Jheri revealing her assigned-at-birth gender to her grandchildren and Jheri’s son revealing a secretive personal journey of his own to both his family & himself. The tension built in these conflicts is a distraction from what makes the movie special. The Joneses works better when it functions as a plot-free portrait of an American family living within highly specific circumstances, but universal commonalities. Flipping through The Joneses’ old picture albums or watching Jheri prepare an endless cycle of routine meals for her boys is far more interesting than the dramatic structure the film attempts to apply to their lives. You can feel the camera searching for tension in the family’s Confederate flag & trailer park surroundings, but none of it is ever as exciting as Jheri accidentally burning toast or the intrusion of a previously unseen house pet. The Joneses is at its best when it simply sits back to watch its titular family perform small acts of routine domesticity.

I’m not sure if the ideal version of this documentary would be a more investigative look at what it was like for Jheri to transition as a middle-age woman in modern Mississippi (something that’s only referenced in passing) or if it would be just a solid 90 minutes of her bullshitting & modeling her fashion for the camera. There’s nothing in the film’s domestic conflict that’s half as exciting as Jheri cutting jokes while wearing sunglasses & a fur coat, a testament to how endlessly charming she is as a personality. As such, I don’t think I actually enjoyed the New Orleans Film Fest Screening of the film itself as much as the Q&A with Jheri that followed, which I’m only mentioning here because I typically hate post-screening Q&A’s. I can’t recommend The Joneses as much of a transformative feat in documentary craft; if anything, the filmmaking style often gets in the way of the work’s best asset: its subject. As a work of progressive queer politics, however, it’s often endearing just for its patience in documenting a universally recognizable American family that just happens to have an adorable trans woman at the center of it. There’s a political significance to that kind of documentation the film should have been more comfortable with instead of pushing for immediate dramatic conflict.

-Brandon Ledet

As Is (2017)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Imagine being told the best band you’ve never heard before just played a mind-blowing concert nearby, but it’s okay that you missed it because there was an all-access documentary produced around the event. The documentary shows you all of the practice, fine-tuning and songwriting leading up to the day of that mind-blowing, life-changing, world-stopping concert, and then documents none of the performance itself, just the reactions of the people who were there in the audience. Would that leave you frustrated or satisfied? The recent small scale documentary As Is details the behind-the-scenes production of a one-time-only multimedia performance staged by visual artist Nick “Not That Nick Cave” Cave in Shreveport, Louisiana in 2015. The film documents all of the artist’s intent, production logistics, and cultural context in the weeks leading up to this performance, then stops short of documenting any of the real thing once it’s executed. It’s like watching the behind the scenes footage of a concert you weren’t invited to for a band you’ve never heard of before. It’s very frustrating.

Glimpses at Nick Cave’s visual creations is certainly the draw for this unassuming art doc. Cave is most well-known for his “sound suits,” costumes that essentially look like a Yo Gabba Gabba! character made out of brightly colored cheerleader pompoms. The construction of these costumes is very reminiscent of the similar traditional garb worn at Cajun Mardi Gras celebrations (Courir de Mardi Gras); the beaded blankets meant to accompany them in the one-time performance are similar to the beading of Mardi Gras Indian costumes. This Louisiana cultural context is entirely ignored by Cave, an “international artist” who acts as if he were creating these works in a void. Incorporating over 600 collaborators from the Shreveport area as beaders, dancers, musicians, and lyricists, he certainly interacts with the local community. He just treats that interaction like an act of charity instead of a cultural exchange by making a huge to do about how his show has elevated local visual art with high falutin’ NYC production values. He speaks of the cultural & religious undertones in As Is in such vague terms that by the time a gospel choir arrives to sing about how “He changed my life and now I’m free” it’s understandable to assume they’re praising Nick Cave, not God. Lip service is paid to healing the trauma of Katrina, homelessness, mental illness, and so on among the local people of Shreveport, but as the film goes on the whole show starts to feel like a complex ego boost for Cave himself and nobody else.

So, was As Is a once-in-a-lifetime art event that forever transformed Shreveport and sealed Nick Cave’s legacy as a charitable, soul-healing deity? It’s tough to tell, because this film does not invite the audience to see the performance for themselves. The gospel, zydeco, light shows, sound suits, and (appallingly muted) Big Freedia performances suggest that it could have either been a total mess or a work of genius. Without being given enough evidence to verify either way, it’s difficult not to turn on Nick Cave as he boasts at length about the transformative nature of his art and all of the good deeds he’s done bringing real culture to Shreveport (again, without acknowledging the immediate similarities between his work & long-established Louisiana culture). As Is might be a much more rewarding doc for anyone who actually witnessed its subject in person, but for everyone on the outside looking in, it’s a frustratingly incomplete work about the supposedly transformative accomplishments of a very vain man. At least the beading and sound suits are verifiably cool-looking; there isn’t much else to latch onto.

-Brandon Ledet

Bob Dylan’s Indifference towards Hearts of Fire (1987), The Press, and Life in General

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

The only reason to ever dig up our current Movie of the Month, the 1987 rock n’ roll melodrama Hearts of Fire, from its VHS format burial ground is to gawk at how baffling Bob Dylan’s presence is in the film. Cast as a washed up rock n’ roller with an attitude problem & Bad Boy sex appeal, Dylan is insanely wrong for the role. Every mumbling line reading of flirtatious cynicism & every moment of tough guy macho posturing plays like an unintended joke. Dylan consistently fails at the basic task of pretending like he cares about the young woman he’s meant to seduce or the hotel room furniture he lazily smashes as he sleepwalks through the whole ordeal as if he were a man twice his age. It appears as if Dylan’s presence in Hearts of Fire was entirely a marketing decision cooked up by his agent and the music industry legend himself had zero interest in fulfilling the project’s basic requirements. Dylan needed an image rejuvenation after his 80s gospel period pleased no one, but was entirely indifferent to any opportunities presented to accomplish that turnaround. He simply didn’t give a shit.

If you need any confirmation of Bob Dylan’s indifference to Hearts of Fire, there’s a BBC-produced documentary about the making of the film, titled Getting to Dylan, that should make his total lack of interest in the film crystal clear. 1980s press organizations were just as baffled by Dylan’s decision to star in the film as we are now, looking back. It had been decades since Dylan had appeared in weirdo art movies like Don’t Look Back and Renaldo & Clara, so no one could parse out why he chose to revive his nonstarter cinema career with a love triangle music drama where he plays a washed up rocker archetype clearly written for Mick Jagger. Determining the answer to this question was no easy task, since Dylan’s indifference to Hearts of Fire extended to his feelings on speaking to the press and, seemingly, being a living human being. It takes producers of Getting to Dylan almost halfway into their hour-long runtime to get their subject to even speak on what drew him to the project. His answers are, to be expected, mostly a series of cryptic mumbles. When asked what his favorite scenes in the movie involve, he shrugs, “I don’t even know the scenes in the movie, to tell you the truth. They’re all good, I guess.” The only time he seems like he cares about or even knows what’s going on in the movie is when he jokes that he’s being standoffish with reporters because he’s “getting into character.”

As easy as it is to have a laugh at Dylan’s indifference towards the press & his craft as a dramatic actor, Getting to Dylan does offer some insight into why he feels that way. The cynics & sycophants of pop media journalism are grotesque monsters in the BBC doc. First of all, although they’re professionally tasked to ask Bob Dylan questions about Hearts of Fire, they care even less about the movie than he does. While he’s sitting directly next to a stone-faced Fiona (the actual star of the film) he’s asked why he’s debasing himself with such lowly pop culture material when a writer of his talents could presumably have penned a better movie himself. Journalists use Hearts of Fire as an excuse to get close enough to the notoriously reclusive Dylan to ask questions about what the really want to know: the details of his heyday in the 60s & 70s folk scene. Dylan shrugs off the praise heaped on him by music journalists in the film, shyly making self-deprecating nonsense like, “I just write [songs] because nobody tells me I can’t write ‘em.” He shoots down grandiose statements about his work with mumbled repetitions of “Not really,” until the reporters who’ve desperately tried to get him on the mic the entire film ask questions that have nothing to do with his work at all, searching for tabloidish info about his family life & potential assassination attempts. The press is just as gross in their coverage of Hearts of Fire as Bob Dylan is aloof.

There’s nothing especially significant or revelatory about Getting to Dylan. The short-form TV doc is mostly amusing for watching the BBC attempt to cull together scraps of interviews & promotional clips for a movie its subject has less than zero interest in promoting. They have to meet Dylan more than halfway to produce something that resembles a finished product, which is more or less just desserts considering the way they chose to cover his involvement in the film. The most animated Dylan becomes in the doc is in an out of nowhere tangent where he (idiotically) complains that modern, synthesized pop music has “no roots” & “no foundation.” For that brief moment real life old fart Bob Dylan resembles the old fart he was hired to play in Hearts of Fire, a character who similarly turned up his nose at 80s pop & new wave. It’s kind of a shame he couldn’t translate that passionate distaste for modern music into an authentic performance in the film, but it’s still entertaining in its own way to watch him half-heartedly trash a hotel room & seduce a woman half his age with nearly inaudible mumbles and a profoundly stupid earring.

For more on November’s Movie of the Month, the Bob Dylan rock n’ roll disaster Hearts of Fire, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Love and Saucers (2017)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

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)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

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)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

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)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

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)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

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