Audient Authentic: For All Mankind

As I started watching the final film in Audient Authentic, which skirted right up to the 1990 cutoff for what I consider "classic documentaries," I had a pair of regrets:

1) "I wish I had chosen a film that actually takes place in the late 1980s, rather than the late 1960s and early 1970s, to get the full spectrum of life at the times the films were made."

2) "I wish I were not watching another movie about moon landings so soon after seeing (and loving) Apollo 11 last year."

Both of these regrets dissipated very quickly.

The 1989 film For All Mankind, for one, was a distinctly different document than Apollo 11. While that great film focuses only on the particular mission that resulted in the first moon landing, containing a whole bunch of footage of people watching the launch and other contemporaneous events, this one weaves all the moon missions together into one tapestry of the experience of going to the moon, as 24 different men experienced it. 

And once I got a handle on how smoothly director Al Reinert was accomplishing this, including a free-flowing narration from the men who experienced it themselves, irrespective of whether they were on the first or last mission, I stopped caring that the movie was not set in the late 1980s. (I turned 16 in 1989, so I did not really need to see what the world was like then anyway.)

Indeed I think I might have liked For All Mankind as much as I liked Apollo 11, which I gave five stars (though ultimately placed just outside of my top ten last year at #13). I hesitated just enough on the five stars for For All Mankind and ended up rewarding it "only" 4.5, I think in part just because it feels strange to give out five stars on a random Wednesday night after you've had a bad night's sleep. 

(But isn't that the nature of loving films, Vance? You never know when a five-star movie might strike? Disappointing.)

The point is the film is excellent. It wasn't possible to tell exactly how great the editing job is on this film, because you aren't given any kind of on-screen markers to indicate whether particular footage is from Apollo 8 or Apollo 17. There are certain details that give things away, like the rush to fix the on-board mishaps that led to disaster on Apollo 13 (in fact, Jim Lovell is one of those interviewed), as well as the famous moments of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon and the discussion of his legendary words upon making that giant leap. For the most part, though, Reinert is not interested in trying to keep us oriented and providing us a conventional document of times and dates and people. Unless you recognize a particular astronaut's voice, you don't even know who is speaking at any given time.

This is entirely the right approach, and it elevates For All Mankind into genuine art. Documentaries can develop a certain samey-ness due to particular approaches we have come to expect from them, like on-screen graphics, title cards, and talking head interviews. Many documentaries want to document, like a newspaper documents.

Reinert wants to document like a painter documents. He wants to give us the visceral and emotional experience of being in space -- the liftoff, the initial orbit of earth, the eventual thrust toward the moon, and the landing on the moon. These are things almost none of us has experienced, and only because these astronauts are men of science, sober professionals, do their words not come across like that guy on that video seeing the double rainbow.

We feel the double rainbow as we are watching For All Mankind. 

As this footage has been in existence for 50 years, we've seen most of it already. Like, I immediately recognized that above angle shot of the rocket lifting off from the launch pad that they used to use on MTV. (Of course, they also used the image of the implanted American flag on the moon.) But with a lot of it, I definitely felt like I was seeing it for the first time -- either because I was, or because the way Reinert mixes it all together bears the kind of mind-blowing experience of brand-newness. 

I think it's important that this is told as one continuous story from departing Earth to splashing back down on it, because it sustains a mood -- a mood that would be broken if you were constantly going to a talking head of Jim Lovell or Michael Collins (neither Armstrong nor Buzz Aldrin participated) or any of the other 11 astronauts who worked with Reinert. Their words don't need to be connected to their faces, because it is not about them. It is about any person who experienced what they experienced. Don't get me wrong, their words are an invaluable accompaniment to the images we're seeing, explaining how they were feeling in those moments, and things we could not have known just from the images. But they stay where they should, as a soundtrack reflecting on the narrative in the moment when it was occurring, never connected to an image of them in present day.

I also like Reinert's sense of playfulness. It's evident how joyous he finds the images of the men playing with objects in zero gravity, which mirrors how joyous they themselves found it. One interviewee talked about how just manipulating objects in zero gravity -- like, giving a flashlight the necessary thrust to make it travel languidly over to your colleague -- was such a distraction that they would almost forget that they had a job to do. We see all this and more. There are plenty of loving images of a tape player tumbling end over end as it spits out Frank Sinatra singing "Fly Me to the Moon." It almost seems like a disproportionate amount of time, except it completely isn't. If we mere mortals were in space, this is what we too would do. 

For All Mankind *is* for all mankind, in that it gives us mere mortals our only chance to have the experience these men experienced. Maybe some of us are young enough that we will, one day, experience space travel as well. Until then, we have For All Mankind.

                                                    **********************

As we have now reached the end of another one of my annual monthly series, I thought I'd close with a few words by way of wrapping it up. Just to remind you what I watched, here are the films in order by month -- and in chronological order by their release, which I managed to maintain from month one to month 12.

January - Nanook of the North (1922)
February - Man With a Movie Camera (1929)
March - Turksib (1930)
April - Why We Fight: Prelude to War (1942)
May - The Living Desert (1953)
June - On the Bowery (1956)
July - Primary (1960)
August - Dont Look Back (1967)
September - Gimme Shelter (1970)
October - The War at Home (1979)
November - Stop Making Sense (1984)
December - For All Mankind (1989)

I ended up tackling a good variety of subject matter, with no film seeming to duplicate what another was doing -- even the three music documentaries have distinctly different approaches and combinations of performance footage and supplemental footage. But I do feel like there were almost as many total randos as there were essential films. I set out for this series to watch films like Nanook, Movie Camera, Gimme Shelter and Stop Making Sense, and the series would have been worth it just to get those. But I felt like a lot of the time I was grasping at straws, chosing movies that I had never heard of (like Turksib and The War at Home) just to fill out the schedule. In short, I figured it would be easy to find 12 classic documentaries I had always meant to see, but I had to find some deep cuts just to get through the series.

On the one hand, that might have meant I've been doing a better job than I thought about keeping up with classic documentaries. On the other, it did make me despair slightly that there have been so many really essential documentaries that have been lost to time, either because they are no longer available, or because people don't talk about them enough for them to have been on my radar. I feel like there should have been more meat in the program and not quite so many side dishes.

That said, I liked all the movies I saw to varying degrees, and eight of the 12 films got four stars or more from me on Letterboxd. Only one received as few as three stars, which was On the Bowery -- one of the original titles I had targeted. I suppose some of the ratings I gave may result from what I have described as the high floor but low ceiling of documentaries, which is that most of those that make it out there to us are worth watching, but few are simply unforgettable experiences. But I did have at least one unforgettable experience by that defintion -- the five-star Man With a Movie Camera -- and Gimme Shelter, Stop Making Sense and For All Mankind all became instant favorites as well.

So overall I think it was really a worthwhile effort, and there's some satisfaction to knowing that I don't need to schedule another year-long series like this just to feel like I'm scratching the surface of classic documentaries. I'm a lot more well rounded in that regard now, and hope to keep on picking off solitary classics through the rest of my years watching movies, as I become aware of them.

Okay, in a few weeks I will let you know what I've got on tap for 2021. It should be good. 

Audient Authentic: Stop Making Sense

This is the 11th in my 2020 series watching classic documentaries from prior to the last three decades that I haven't seen, chronologically. 

I've just watched my third music documentary for this series -- and last, I assume, though I haven't yet chosen the series' final film -- but it's the first one that can properly be described as a concert movie. There are snippets of performance in both Dont Look Back and Gimme Shelter, but Jonathan Demme's 1984 film Stop Making Sense is chock full of it. In fact, there's nothing else but the concert. (Actually, an assemblage for footage from four different concerts at L.A.'s Pantages Theatre.)

As it turns out, concert movies make me drift off a bit. 

That's not to say that they make me sleepy, just that they don't fully hold my attention, even with bands I really like. Which might be why I don't watch all that many of them.

I think back to the experience of going to see a concert movie of a band that I consider one of my favorites of all time, Phish. I actually wrote about the experience here, when I went to see Phish 3D. (It's probably not worth going to the link, as I just noticed that several updates to blogspot have really thrown off the formatting on that particular post.)

The gist of what I wrote was that it was really hard to stay focused on the movie when it was literally just them playing their songs. Even though they were songs I loved, I needed a bit more of a narrative spine to remain fully engaged. I did notice that without that narrative spine, nor breaking away for interviews, there was no reason for me not to treat it like a regular concert -- in other words, to talk to the guy I was watching it with, if the mood struck us, and to go the bathroom if I needed. Which is something I would never ordinarily do outside of the most desperate of circumstances.

I didn't have anyone to talk to while watching Stop Making Sense in the hotel last Friday afternoon ... but that didn't stop me. In fact, I found myself carrying on several different chats on Facebook while the movie was playing, and I'm pretty sure I went to the bathroom at least once. 

You'd think this might have diminished my enjoyment of the film. It did not. 

Just because I wasn't watching every second of the movie didn't mean I didn't totally appreciate the experience that Demme and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne were bringing me. I credit Byrne specifically because the staging of the show was his concept, according to the credits. But really, the whole band was bringing the experience to me, enthusiastically, with incredible musicianship, great set design, and great costumes. (Byrne's "big suit" has become kind of a famous image.)

I don't like Talking Heads anywhere near as much as I like Phish, but I like Stop Making Sense a lot more than I liked Phish 3D. Talking Heads are one of those bands where I never bought one of their albums, but I'd be a great candidate for a greatest hits album (presumably one exists out there). There are probably a dozen Talking Heads songs I know and can sing along with, about half of which get played here. But I liked the sound of even the songs I didn't know.

At first I thought there was maybe nothing groundbreaking about this film, but then I realized, what qualified as groundbreaking was a lot different in 1984 than it would be today. This whole series, in fact, is about pioneering new forms of non-fiction storytelling, and Stop Making Sense certainly does that -- to the extent that you can call what it's doing "storytelling." 

The most groundbreaking aspect of it is something I probably wouldn't have noticed had I not read about it afterward. According to Wikipedia, it is the first film made using entirely digital audio techniques. That's probably more a convenience on the filmmaking side than an observable difference by the audience, but it was a significant enough part of the process to make it into the opening paragraph on Wikipedia. 

What I was more likely to notice was the techniques Demme and company used to get the cameras right up in the faces of the band members, something that was probably also fairly unusual at the time (though I think the Maysles brothers may have actually done a bit of that 14 years earlier in Gimme Shelter, if memory serves). I did actually wonder how they went from long shots to close-ups in the same song, yet you don't see the camera operators all over the stage, ruining the long shot. (I also thought it was probably something of an annoying price to pay for those who watched the show live, that there would always be a crew filming all over the stage.) 

Of course realizing that it was shot over four nights helps explain that. The close-ups were likely from one performance while the long shots were from another, but it's all blended so seamlessly that you really would have no idea. That does, however, probably mean that the band had to wear the same outfits each night, to create the illusion of one single performance. Fortunately, they'd have the days in between to launder them and remove the sweat stench.

Although all the Talking Heads stuff was, of course, great, I may have most enjoyed the mid-movie song "Genius of Love" performed by the Tom Tom Club, which has some Heads band members in it. In terms of sheer practicalities, the song exists to give Byrne time to do a costume change, but the musicianship in this particular song is just off the charts, and I found myself grooving along to this even a bit more than to the Heads songs.

Really, there's just great showmanship all over this thing. It may be hard to isolate Demme's role exactly here, and it's something I think I might appreciate better if I watched his other prominent concert movie, Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids from 2016. He also made a Neil Young concert movie in 2006. Though of course neither of those fit in the current series. Anyway, to the extent that this is a really captivating movie and someone had to oversee all the various choices that got made just as they needed to be, Demme deserves praise.

Captivating? In a movie I spent talking to friends online and playing my turns in Lexulous?

Yes indeed. All versions of captivation are not equal. This one captivated me visually and sonically, perhaps not in equal measure, but one more than made up for the other, alternating throughout.

Okay! We're on to the last month of Audient Authentic. I don't know what the grand finale will be, but I can tell you it will fall during the years 1985 to 1989, to put a capper on the faithful chronological sequencing I've kept going all year. 

Audient Authentic: The War at Home

This is the tenth in my 2020 monthly series devoted to watching "classic" (pre-1990) documentaries I haven't seen, in order through the decades.

I was a bit up in the air about what to choose as my second documentary from the 1970s. After scouring such things as the Wikipedia page devoted to the history of Oscar nominations for best documentary, I landed on Scared Straight!, the movie that probably gave us that term -- about prisoners scaring wayward teenagers away from a life of crime. However, despite the film's contribution to our vernacular -- and despite the presence of Peter Falk as the narrator -- I could not find it anywhere.

Instead of continuing through the list of those best doc nominees, almost all of which were unfamiliar to me, and waiting until I randomly landed on one I could find, I decided to take a different approach. Kanopy allows you to filter your search, though you kind of have to stumble onto it to do it the right way. Earlier in this series, I'm sure I was able to filter both documentaries and the 1930s, for example. This time, I could only do documentaries or the decade in question, so I decided to do the decade in question, knowing it would fix me on my choice better than the modern-leaning documentary category would.

And that's how I landed on ... another best documentary nominee.

The War at Home, a 1979 nominee for best documentary (in the Oscars that took place in 1980), details the history of Vietnam protests in and around Madison, Wisconsin, during about a dozen year period from 1963 to the end of the war. When first reading the description, I imagined it would be more specifically about the city of Madison and how its denizens reacted to the war. That's not entirely the case. While ordinary Madison citizens do factor in, this is, probably not surprisingly, focused primarily on the students of the University of Wisconsin. Many of whom would also be Wisconsonians (is that the right word?), but not all.

This is a really thorough document and I found it quite engrossing at first. All sorts of Madison residents -- the mayor, police personnel, campus security personnel, university professors, former students, ordinary citizens -- are interviewed, and there's plenty of archival footage of protests, some of which became violent and some of which resulted in deaths. For more of a casual history buff like myself (can you be a "casual buff?"), I did not think of the University of Wisconsin as being a hotbed of protest. We hear much more about places like Kent State, where four students were killed. But this university was the site of a truck bombing that killed one person, which was undertaken by a guy who shares my last name, Karleton Armstrong. He's interviewed in the film.

As the movie went along, though, I noticed myself checking my phone more, and becoming in other ways distracted. The sheer quantity of footage of students protesting eventually became a bit numbing, even as the film does a good job of taking us through the key turning points of the war, and how those resulted in the intesification of protests. Because there is not a lot of alternative footage, the sameness of it all caused me to lose focus. That left a film that seemed like it was headed for greatness mired in "quite good" territory.

I did think it was interesting to learn details about Vietnam I had not known, which were quite a few. I also thought this made an interesting entrant in this series in that it's the first documentary I've seen that relies heavily on archival footage. That would of course become a staple of documentary filmmaking, but it's not something I have encountered in this series so far. Not that The War at Home was one of the first documentaries to do that, I suppose, but it does it quite well.

Okay, I've got two more months in this series, both of which will feature films from the 1980s. One of them is already picked out, and the other might come from ... scouring lists of best documentary nominees.

Audient Authentic: Gimme Shelter

This is the ninth in my 2020 series Audient Authentic, in which I watch classic (pre-1990) documentaries that I have not yet seen. 

I have a bit of a funny reason for being interested in Gimme Shelter, the 1970 documentary from Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. Yep, we're into the 1970s now. This is the first of two 70s movies before finishing the series with two in the 80s.

The legit reason -- and a genuine reason -- the film is on my radar is because "Maysles" is one of the first names in documentary filmmaking. I've already seen Grey Gardens (1975), the brothers' best known film.

The funny reason is that the film gets alluded to in one of my favorite comedies of all time, The Cable Guy.

When Chip Douglas (Jim Carrey) takes the mic at the karaoke jam he set up at the house of Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick) -- with $10,000 worth of equipment he got into the house without a key -- he selects Jefferson Airplane's Somebody to Love as his song. Only it's not the album version. He engages in a bit of an intro about Jefferson Airplane performing at the Rolling Stones-fronted free concert at the Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969, the show where the Hell's Angels famously functioned as security, and several people died. Carrey does a couple riffs that I now realize are based on the actual movie Gimme Shelter. Pretending to be Grace Slick, he calls out "We just had a baby born on the left side of the party ladies and gentlemen. We need an ambulance over by the scaff-ol-ding." (Yes, he draws out and emphasizes the three syllables of that word.)

So yeah, these are references that swim around in my head on a daily basis. I am who I am!  

Considering that I had been a little underwhelmed by my first music documentary of this series, last month's Dont Look Back, I wasn't sure if this would grab me either. And the version I had to grab off YouTube (not finding it anywhere else) both was poor quality and featured Portuguese subtitles. 

I thought these would have a distancing effect, but instead, they combined with the "grubby" aesthetic of the footage to make the film a kind of raw and visceral experience for me. (Also, I think I'm more interested by the music of the Rolling Stones than of Bob Dylan.)

There was something sort of entrancing about the cinematography of this movie, both its actual look, and the placement of the camera. First, the look. As I was wondering how I would describe it in this blog post, I came up with the idea that the images had a "smudged" quality to them, like they had been drawn with cray-pas. You know, those wax- and oil-based crayons you used to use back in school. What was likely a budgetary limitation for the filmmakers has the appearance of a deliberate artistic choice with the passage of 50 years. (Happy 50th Gimme Shelter, by the way.)

The brothers themselves were the cinematographers -- Zwerin was on the editing, which more on that in a moment -- and the way they frame the images is hypnotizing. Way too close to their subjects turns out to be an incredible decision in this case, as half the time, the thing the camera is looking at is only half or even a quarter visible in the frame. I think of this one particular shot of the Stones in a studio environment listening to their song "Wild Horses," where one of the band members (I can't tell the three non-Keith and Mick guys from each other) appears with only half of his face in the frame, as you focus on his wandering eye that sometimes makes contact with the camera before looking away. The whole movie is like this -- the camera wandering, fixing on seemingly unimportant details that speak volumes, indifferent about how much we can see of what we're looking at.

The movie finishes on Altamont -- I suspect the last two-thirds are spent on it -- but before that, it captures the last few tour stops for the Stones. In one of these, a young Tina Turner performs a blistering set as well. I really felt transported back to that time.

The Maysles also do wonderful things with intercutting concert footage with images of them examining the Altamont footage after the fact, with radio DJs giving us a little bit of context and exposition, and even with phone calls between the Stones' management and potential venue hosts as the concert has to quickly be moved from Golden Gate Park in San Francisco just a few days before it's supposed to happen. While these are mostly moving chronologically, they don't all, and again, you've got an entrancing effect here. 

You can't use the word "intercutting" without talking about the editing, which was Zwerin's department (with Ellen Hovde). The look of the film is so scruffy that you would instinctively deny that it is strongly accomplished on the technical side, but I noticed at least a couple edits that blew my mind. There's one shot where Mick is approaching the stage from a side door, disappears into the crowd, and seemingly without an edit at all, the camera goes to him on stage, emerging from the shadows. There's stuff like that throughout the movie.

Back to the cray-pas comment, there's an amazing use of color in this movie. There are scenes of volunteers erecting the scaffolding and other staging needed to move the show at the last minute to Altamont, and it's against this amazing orange and purple sky that is almost something out of a fantasy movie. Hypnotic.

I think I could keep gushing but let's wrap up with the Altamont footage itself. In today's litigious times I doubt you could get away with including footage of so many stoned and drunk concert attendees without their permission, but back in 1969, it made for an illuminating portrait of modern youth. I could probably watch a whole movie of just the faces of the people in the crowd. (And if I didn't want to get further into the 1970s with my next pick in this series, I just realized I could watch the actual Woodstock documentary, which I haven't seen, which also came out in 1970, and which presumably includes lots of similar footage.)

It was tense and exhilarating, in a way, to watch as the Maysles captured so much footage of the actual clashes between Hell's Angels (who were drunk on the $500 worth of beer they were paid to be security) and concertgoers, without the possibility of knowing that this type of thing would occur. It was like they had a camera wherever they needed it, when they needed it, which is just a sign of their skill as filmmakers. Of course, footage shot for this event was also used to help determine that a particular concertgoer, who pulled a gun, was stabbed to death by an Angel, in what was later (rightly, it seems) ruled by the courts to be self-defense. There were three other accidental deaths and also four births, if you can believe it. We see the Stones trying to calm everybody down and Jefferson Airplane arguing with Hell's Angels because one of the band members was knocked unconscious by them. The Grateful Dead refused to play when they saw how the situation was deteriorating.

In short, the event was a trip, and so was the movie that captured and delivered it to us.

Here's hoping for as much luck with my next pick in this series in October, which is as yet undetermined. 

Audient Authentic: Don't Look Back

This is the eighth in my 2020 series watching classic documentaries as yet unseen by me.

So far in this series I've covered a pretty wide range of topics, from war to politics to ethnography, with even a nature documentary thrown in for good measure. From here on out, though, my subject matter is going to become a bit more focused, as three of the last five movies I plan to watch are music documentaries.

The first is the Bob Dylan doco Don't Look Back, directed by D.A. Pennebaker, who first appeared in our year-long survey of important documentaries as a collaborator in last month's Primary. Pennebaker is fully the auteur on this one and seems to take some pleasure in reminding us of that, as his name appears rather more often and more prominently than I would have thought necessary.

Pennebaker's trademark fly-on-the-wall approach involves no talking head interviews, though that doesn't mean it doesn't involve any interviews. The setting is a 1965 trip Dylan took to London, where he performed a number of shows at the Royal Albert Hall, spent time with a number of contemporaries who would become lesser luminaries (lesser to him anyway), and was hectored by the press. That last is the interview part.

Surely, some of the press seems impressed, so to speak, with him. But others seem rather dubious in their pointed questioning, at times asking him such things as whether he thought that any of his fans had any idea what his lyrics meant. Dylan is, for the most part, gracious about such questioning, or at least, not openly rude in his responses, though he does engage in a fair bit of a bemused "turn the question back on you" approach in answering their questions. You can see his well-known personality being forged here, as he cheerfully says he doesn't believe he should be described as a folk singer and that he "doesn't believe in anything," when asked about his religious views.

I definitely appreciate the tack Pennebaker takes on Dylan, but I think I'd have been more engaged with the material if I were more of a Dylan fan. I don't dislike Dylan, certainly, but I felt my eyes rolling a bit when "Maggie's Farm" came on at one point. Not a big fan of that particular song, which I find as sort of an embodiment of the kind of bratty punkiness that I don't love about Dylan. (I'm not going to be able to describe in satisfying language what it is that bothers me about him, so I probably won't try.)

I found myself fading from time to time, but then something would happen that snapped me back to attention. Overall I am positive on the movie.

I found it interesting to note that I actually like both of the other luminaries who appear here, Joan Baez and Donovan, more than I like Dylan. Heresy, I know. But I quite enjoyed spending time with Baez, and I was surprised to discover how much Donovan actually sounded like Dylan -- something that has never occurred to me about his work. To the extent that it has any structure at all, the film is sort of set up as a collision course between himself and Donovan, who is proferred as a figure of contrast with Dylan until they finally meet near the end. When Donovan performs one of his songs, at first I wondered if it were a Dylan impersonation -- which is interesting because I have never previously gotten that impression from Donovan's work.

Another thing I was fascinated by was the extent to which Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, reminded me of John C. Reilly. Not only could Reilly play him in a film, appearance-wise, but their voices are almost identical. I checked the internet and others have reached the same conclusions I have.

I know this is supposed to be some sort of landmark documentary, but I guess I needed to be around at that time to get a sense of how different it really was from other documentary portraits on offer. Certainly I am impressed by Pennebaker's ability to make everyone seem to "forget" that there is a camera there. This all feels very real and unvarnished, as no one appears to be playing to the camera or even really realizing it's there. Dylan comes off well despite the fact that it doesn't seem like he's trying to, though he's pretty ornery in certain moments as well.

In trying to get a sense of why the film is so respected, I went to Wikipedia, which doesn't give me very much. I mean, I myself respect it, but I don't think of it as the ninth best documentary of all time, which is how it was judged by a Sight & Sound documentary poll in 2014.

It'll be on to the 1970s in September as I watch another music documentary, the Maysles' Gimme Shelter.

Audient Authentic: Primary

This is the seventh in my 2020 monthly series watching classic documentaries, going chronologically.

And now, on to the 1960s.

Primary seemed like a good 4th of July viewing. To the extent that I even wanted to celebrate Independence Day this year -- it doesn't feel like a very good time to be an American -- at least it could help me look back to a time when American politics felt a bit more innocent. Then again, society on the whole was probably worse, considering that the racism that is afflicting us today was only bolder and more socially acceptable back then.

Anyway, let's not go down that road.

It makes for a good 2020 viewing as well, as it's an election year, and the 60th anniversary of this 1960 movie.

Primary is a bit of a primer, so to speak, for one of the first dozen or so documentaries I ever saw, 1993's The War Room. That went behind the scenes of the Clinton campaign, and D.A. Pennebaker was one of its co-directors. Pennebaker will get a full spotlight in the movie I watch in August. For Primary, he gets credit as a sound recordist, photographer and sequence editor. (Albert Maysles was also a camerman on the film.)

It's interesting to see how Primary is marketed now, as a document of John F. Kennedy's rise to national prominence. At the time it was made, it was equally an examination of both Kennedy and his Wisconsin primary opponent, Hubert Humphrey, the perennial bridesmaid who would also lose to Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential campaign. In fact, in a way, this is more Humphrey's movie, as he was willing to let director Robert Drew and his crew into very intimate spaces with him -- even inside a car transporting him between campaign stops in Wisconsin. He's the one willing to let Drew and company really peek behind closed doors, perhaps because he didn't have that much to hide with his glad-handing and folksy aphorisms.

Kennedy is by far the more remote figure here. In trying to provide parallel coverage of the two candidates as the narrative progresses, Drew has to settle for similar access to Kennedy that any other media had -- the candidate pushing through adoring crowds at events open to the press, for example. There's even some footage of Kennedy giving a speech where they just film the TV screen, a prototypical symbol of their lack of any real access.

Until the end, I should say. Drew and company do get behind closed doors with Kennedy when he is waiting out the results on primary night, as the various voting districts of Wisconsin are reporting their vote tallies. You do see some stray, unrehearsed comments here, though nothing that reflects badly on him.

Still, I couldn't help marvel over the similarities between him and Clinton in this respect. Although Clinton's campaign is to be credited for giving Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus such unfettered access in The War Room, the candidate himself did not appear on camera very much. It's almost as though Clinton modeled his own participation on his hero Jack Kennedy's involvement in Primary.

Primary is a useful way to get to know Hubert Humphrey, though. Before this I'd had no experience with him, and in fact, I had to google him to be reminded what his political fortunes were both before and after this. He seems like quite a likeable fellow, which I think may have been the take on him: a bit soft and folksy and unable to ultimately capture anyone's political imagination. (He was awarded the 1968 Democratic nomination for president despite not winning a single primary.)

That last parenthetical comment provides a good bridge to my other major takeaway from the film. Near the beginning, when speaking to a group of voters, Kennedy talks about how Wisconsin is one of the few states in which citizens' preferences are polled in this format. I had always assumed primaries dated back to the start of the union, or close to it anyway. As it turns out, that aforementioned chaotic 1968 election was the impetus for primaries to become more mandatory across all the states, in terms of the process of accruing delegates. By Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, primaries were still only held in 40 of the 50 states.

The footage of the candidates interacting with voters and radio show hosts was not, in itself, really groundbreaking for me to watch in 2020. Though it certainly would have been 60 years ago, and for that I credit the filmmakers.

If my ultimate takeaway from Primary was to be a little underwhelmed by it, that could be because the result of the film itself is a bit underwhelming. Although Kennedy wins more delegates than Humphrey, it barely seems as though the April 5th Wisconsin primary is even a turning point in the campaign. In fact, someone states -- possibly the narrator -- that all this work and campaigning will basically end up being for naught, as it will leave the candidates in more or less the same respective positions as before they came to Wisconsin.

I did like some of the filmmaking choices that told a different story, though, specifically the camera pulling away from Humphrey's campaign bus as it falls behind into the distance, and his campaign theme song playing out the end of the movie.

In August, I expect to be moving on to Pennebaker's Bob Dylan documentary, Don't Look Back.

Audient Authentic: On the Bowery

This is the sixth in my series Audient Authentic, in which I watch classic (pre-1990) documentaries I have not seen, in chronological order.

On the Bowery represents a slight change in the direction of this series in that it is not actually a documentary.

We don't think of documentaries as being staged, or if they are, there is a specific purpose behind staging that keeps it within the realm of non-fiction.

Lionel Rogosin's 1956 film is definitely, without a doubt staged, or at least, featuring "scripted" (partially improvised) dialogue occurring within a mostly natural setting. It's a movie about indigent men on the Bowery (the contemporary name for what is now called Skid Row in New York), and takes place mostly in the bars, sidewalks and flophouses in which they spend their time. The actors are playing themselves, using their real names.

Just when I hesitated about whether this was really an appropriate entry in this series, I noted that the world at that time gave this film its documentary stamp of approval. It was nominated by the Academy as Best Documentary Feature, and it won the top documentary award at the Venice Film Festival. The category is best described, I suppose, as "docufiction."

I would have become aware of the film when it had a BluRay release in 2012. At the time I thought it might have been a recovered film, or something of that nature, but according to Wikipedia, no, that was just a BluRay release. The poster I've chosen is obviously from that release, not something that was designed back in the 1950s. And though I liked the other available posters, this one spoke to me the most.

On the Bowery was also selected for preservation by the National Film Registry as a work that was "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant." And no doubt it was. But that does not mean it particularly connected with me, unfortunately.

I do think there's something quite profound about the shots Rogosin captures of actual homeless people sprawled across the sidewalks and pushing around their pushcarts. That would have been a radical project in 1956, to document that. I suppose that's the "docu" part of the "docufiction" that speaks to me as significant.

The "fiction" part was harder to find as much value in. A couple main characters go through a couple days of hard drinking, scrounging for money, and telling each other war stories in and outside bars. They are given and reject opportunities through the type of poor willpower that dropped them from grace to begin with. They flirt with types of recovery and then fall back off the wagon.

The biggest difficulty, I think, with really becoming engaged in their stories was that I was having trouble hearing them. I reckon the sound mix was pretty bad to begin with, and then the copy I watched on YouTube just drove the dialogue even further into the background noise. To make matters worse, there were Spanish subtitles on the screen. Instead of really focusing on the dialogue, I found myself kind of reminding myself of my lost Spanish, making matches between the English and Spanish words in the hopes of getting some synapses in my brain to start firing again.

I don't think On the Bowery was ever intended primarily to be some kind of great drama. These are not actors, but rather, really downtrodden men who happened to be able to hit their marks and string together some lines of dialogue in a credible fashion. I wish Rogosin had just opted to go full documentary and had interviewed the people, instead of having them try to execute some kind of fairly paltry narrative. As it is, it feels kind of like we're just skating around their issues rather than facing them head on.

That said, On the Bowery has been praised for its depiction of alcoholism, which has been a major factor in people becoming homeless since homelessness was first identified as a thing. I do think the way these men keep getting a small amount of money, and then keep blowing it in a bar, showcases a sad truth of why it's so difficult to make effective strides toward curbing homelessness.

In July, as the American summer and the Australian winter really take hold, I will move on to the 1960s in my steady creep toward 1990.

Audient Authentic: The Living Desert

This is the fifth installment in my 2020 monthly series watching "classic" (pre-1990) documentaries, in chronological order.

In May, I watched a movie that was on my radar for reasons I didn't even remember.

As I moved into the 1950s, I was all set for On the Bowery, Lionel Rogosin's 1956 look at down-and-out (i.e. homeless) people in New York's skid row. But because I'm going in chronological order, I thought I should first look to make sure there was nothing to watch before that in the 1950s.

So I consulted the list I've been keeping on Letterboxd every time I find a new candidate for this series, and saw the 1953 movie The Living Desert on there. I didn't remember putting it on there, and in fact, I went to the location where I'd culled a number of choices back in January, the Wikipedia page on the history of documentary filmmaking, to see if I could find it mentioned, since I didn't imagine it rose to a level of prominence to be featured in such an article. It doesn't appear there, so the mystery remains.

But I'm glad I decided to push On the Bowery to June and rent this from iTunes, because it made quite a nice way to wile away my last hour of work on Friday afternoon. If you can't occasionally keep one eye on a movie for the last hour-plus of your work week, when everyone has mentally packed it away for the weekend, what's the point of working from home at all? I expected to be able to keep only one eye on it, but pretty quickly, it had my full attention.

The Living Desert is Disney's first feature-length nature documentary, in what would ultimately come to be known as its True-Life Adventure series. I suppose it might have been on my radar since it won the best documentary feature Oscar in 1953, but I did not scour that list of winners for this series, and if I had, it would have produced a lot more candidates than I have now.

I should also say there is a very good chance I have already seen this movie. This is just the kind of thing they would have shown us in school -- in science class, I suppose, though who knows how careful they were about making sure the material they showed us fit the subject matter of the class in question. Then as now, teachers were undoubtedly looking for some way to wile away the end of their own work weeks, without having to plan a whole lecture.

Anyway, The Living Desert gave me a real sense of nostalgia for watching this and films like it back in elementary school and middle school, though I suspect by the time I got to high school they would have moved past this kind of thing. The basic setup of a narrator visiting multiple animals in the desert and whimsically dictating their thoughts and the little dramas of their lives, accompanied by a lively orchestral score, felt like something I got a lot of back then, but haven't seen in more than 30 years now.

I guess that's kind of a backward way in to talking about what this film is actually about. Indeed it is shot in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona, as the camera captures not only panoramic vistas and impressive rock formations, but intimate cracks between rocks and scrub brush. The subject is of course the animals of this "living desert," from arachnids and insects to mice and bobcats and birds.

I was frankly amazed at how sophisticated this is for a first foray into this type of filmmaking. N. Paul Kenworthy, a doctoral student at UCLA, had shot ten minutes of footage of a wasp battling a tarantula, which is this film's central action set piece. That's what got Walt Disney's attention and prompted him to commission the entire film, which Kenworthy also worked on, sharing DP responsibilities with Robert H. Crandall.

I'm not sure how they got their cameras in so close to these battles, but the battle between the wasp and the tarantula seems totally unaffected by the presence of onlooking eyes. And in case you thought they just set down the camera and hoped the creatures would walk into range, the camera actually moves to keep the action centered as it spills out of the frame. I'd like to watch a making of feature sometime.

Anyway, watching a wasp repeatedly sting a tarantula until it kills it -- the proof of the victory being that the wasp then drags off the tarantuala's body, with no small amount of effort -- has a sort of elemental fascination for me. I suppose this is not uncommon now as all manner of nature documentary would contain similar material; maybe I just don't watch enough of them. But they may have all been chasing The Living Desert in terms of sheer profundity of the footage captured.

And there are other great battles, like a bobcat being chased by warthogs, as seen in the poster above (finding its respite at the top of a cactus), and a small rodent trying to ward off the attack of a snake by continually flicking sand into its eyes. See, snakes have no eyelids, so getting sand in the eyes is a pretty good deterrent to prevent an ambush.

What I love also about The Living Desert is its era-appropriate wholesomeness and its also era-appropriate willingness to be corny. A lizard eating ants with little whips of his tongue is accompanied by quick trills on a piccolo, and two scorpions having a mating ritual which is scored to hoedown music. It's a very trademark approach to music for Disney from this period, which would have also been present in films like Bambi and Fantasia. (Those films are a decade earlier, of course.)

The narrator is probably the corniest of all, but I had to say I really appreciated the writing. Both can be attributed to a man named Winston Hibler, who both narrates and serves as co-writer with director James Algar. I laughed out loud a couple times as a particular turn of phrase perfectly captured the look on the face of a gila monster or roadrunner. Even though there are human traits, so to speak, being ascribed to the insect and animals in these scenarios, they are universal enough to seem as though they are probably accurately describing the drama at hand. The whimsy of the orchestral score is an indispensable element in conjuring the necessary mood.

As you can see my instinct is to keep going on and on about this 70-minute film -- I didn't even talk about the male turtles battling for a mate, and the drama of whether the overturned loser will get back on his feet before dying of sun exposure. So obviously I really liked this. In fact, as my 48-hour rental window still has a good 30+ hours remaining in it, I'm inclined to show this to my kids. My only concern is that since they didn't have that same experience I had of watching it in science class in the mid-1980s, the corniness will outweigh the nostalgia. Of which there will be none, I suppose. But hopefully the basic interest of watching small animals fight each other will win out.

Okay, it's on to On the Bowery in June if you want to watch along with me ... or even if you don't.

Audient Authentic: Why We Fight: Prelude to War

This is the fourth in my 2020 monthly series watching "classic" documentaries I have never seen.

When I watched Eugene Jarecki's 2005 documentary Why We Fight, I knew its name was a conscious reference to a series of documentaries dating back to World War II. I never had occasion to seek them out, though, until this series.

Why We Fight: Prelude to War is the first of seven such movies available on Kanopy. If it being the first weren't reason enough to select it as the next in this chronological series that has already made it through the 1920s and 1930s, then it being directed by Frank Capra certainly would have been. (It also won an Oscar for best documentary.)

I still haven't gotten up to the true feature length I'm seeking -- this is only 52 minutes long -- but I suspect I'll be there by the 1950s next month. At which point I will likely slow down and see a lot more movies from 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Propaganda films come in all shapes and forms. We tend to think of them as negative, such as those made for the Third Reich by Leni Reifenstahl, but they can serve a positive function as well, and that's the case with this (and, I assume, the other six in the series, which I might watch if it weren't such a drain on my Kanopy credits, and if I didn't get a sense of what all of them are probably doing from this one). The U.S. had already made the decision to enter World War II, and these government-sponsored films wanted to retroactively make the case for it, as well as convince an American populace with non-interventionalist tendencies.

Noting Capra's involvement, I had assumed that the government had just gone to Hollywood and conscripted the most successful director at the time. In fact, Capra seems to have been a far more willing participant, as he took up the mantle of specifically answering the function of Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which probably would have made a good selection for this series had I not already seen it. (Actually, I may have only seen select scenes from it, so it could have also been a good candidate for last year's Audient Audit.) According to Wikipedia, Capra was "daunted, yet impressed and challenged" by Reifentstahl's work.

As it turns out, Capra actually directed most of the films in the series, so I could have selected any of them if that had been my primary interest. It made sense to go chronologically, though, and this one -- released near the beginning of American involvement in the war -- gives the background for how the Axis dictators came into power. It intersperses actual footage and newspaper headlines with recreations of events where cameras could not have been present, but just as quick snippets of footage to provide context to the narration, nothing requiring any acting or potentially fictitious interpretations of events. We see/hear about political rivals assassinated and armies amassed. We see Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese generals firing up brainwashed crowds.

As a cinephile, I was, of course, looking to see if I could detect "the Capra touch" -- something that would remind me of the director of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, two of the hits Capra had already made at that time. Of course the film shares an earnestness and seriousness of political purpose with the former, and one could argue, the latter as well. And indeed, the underdog current to Capra's previous work helps with the thrust of these films, as America is characterized as an underdog under the oppressive heel of these European and Asian tyrants.

I suppose it wasn't likely that I'd find the kind of "escapist humanism" -- is that a good way to describe it? -- that I attribute to Capra's work on the whole. That's fundamentally inconsistent with this type of project. Though it does have Capra's plucky spirit, it does not necessarily seem like something Capra himself was uniquely qualified to bring to the film/these films. It's such a different type of project from Capra's feel-good Hollywood films that I don't feel like I really would detect hallmarks of the same director, and yet another director probably would have made them a lot less hopeful and more cynical, or simply never gravitated to the project in the first place.

As for the actual content of the film, it gives a showcase of some absolutely priceless historical footage -- not necessarily rare, but something that I don't generally see, or am less likely to find accumulated all in one place. Like footage of the bombings of various European cities and Pearl Harbor, the latter being the actual "inciting incident" (to use the screenwriting term) that got American into World War II. The footage of the marching armies of other countries shows quite well the type of determination the Allies were up against. I was also educated on parts of the lead-up to war that I didn't know about, or forgot. (The report I did on World War II in the sixth grade, or whenever it was, has mostly left me.) Also the film lays out the plans for world domination put forth by each of the Axis powers, the routes they planned to use on the map to invade adjacent and far-flung territories and turn them all an insidious color of black, meant to indicate their occupation. Chilling.

There was one particularly shocking image from the film that I'd never seen before, and it was about the idea of other countries breeding young brainwashed soldier from birth. The shot -- which could not have been recreated for fear of violating all sorts of morality standards -- shows a big "pile of babies" who appear to be accumulated together to receive some kind of innoculation or brain-washing agent. You can literally see like 40 babies stuck in the same ten foot by ten foot space, not actually smothering each other, but coming as close as you can, and all crying like the dickens for obvious reasons.

I tried to find an image online but ultimately failed. So I found the spot again in the movie and took this picture. Crazy, right?

I guess I didn't find Prelude to War "groundbreaking" in the form or anything like that, but it is certainly a vitally important historical document and I'm really glad I saw it. I reckon it played a significant role in turning public sentiment toward the war.

On to May and on to the 1950s, unless I find another thing in the 40s that screams out to be watched.

Audient Authentic: Turksib

This is the third in my 2020 monthly series watching “classic” (pre-1990) documentaries.

After starting this chronological series with two films in the 1920s – two really good ones at that – I had wanted to move further afield when I delved into the 1930s. It was not to be, in terms of year, format (silent vs. sound) or even geographical location. In fact, although the movie I chose was released in 1930, it is listed as a 1929 movie in some locations – in other words, the exact same year as the movie I watched in February, Man With a Movie Camera.

The problem with the significant documentaries of the 1930s, such as they are, is that very few of them are of feature length. I am rigid in one way when it comes to comparing films, and that is length. I can’t rightly judge a 12-minute film alongside a 100-minute one – they just aren’t both apples.

I had identified a film I thought I wanted to watch, Pare Lorentz’s 1936 documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains, but balked when I saw it was only 28 minutes long. Over the years, I’ve expanded down my definition of feature length to include something like the 45-minute masterpiece Sherlock Jr., but 28 minutes was just a bridge too far.

So I decided to use my very helpful library-funded streaming service Kanopy to give me some new choices. You can filter by category and by the year of its release, which gave me seven 1930s documentaries to choose from. Only two of them, however, surpassed that magic 45-minute barrier, both examples of early Soviet documentary. The longer of the two, the 58-minute Turksib, became my choice for March.

Director Viktor Turin’s film of the building of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway was indeed not released until May 24^th, 1930, making it a 1930 film by my definition. However, its Wikipedia page starts out by calling it a “1929 film,” which makes sense only in the fact that it was filmed in 1929. In fact, it was released before the railway was opened, and in the end portion, it plays very much like a promotional video for the railway, with a lot of flashing of the year 1930 as the time when this great event will occur. So I can see why a person might think of it as a 1929 film, even though it is not.

What’s more, the film was made in the very same part of the world as Man With a Movie Camera, further making it a less than ideal next pick in a series devoted to the full spectrum of available samples falling under the umbrella “classic documentary.”

I’ll try to do better form here on out.

Anyway, I enjoyed this film. It doesn't tell a whole lot of a story, but it shows a couple different far-flung regions of the greater Russia area and their vastly different climates, from the dry plains to the south to the frigid tundra of the north. We get a bit of a flavor for life in both locations (which also kind of reminded me of my first film of this series, Nanook of the North) and can see the nascent attempt to bridge the two between the titular railway line. We see local groups move from resistant to accepting and even begin to help out the effort. 

What I really liked about Turin's approach was his sense for a part standing for the whole. He had a great sense of how to establish his settings by focusing in on unlikely details, which also come in a succession that shows his great understanding for pacing and editing. He sets his camera up in really interesting locations as well -- sometimes under a train as it is going along the tracks, even. 

I don't know that this is a particularly notable or enduring document, but I found it to be assembled in a very watchable way, including maps that show the terrain to be covered, and a good ethnographic sense of the lives of the locals. And though it does become quite sensational in the end, as it previews the coming attraction about ready to open, that doesn't detract from the smart and even-handed approach to the material that precedes it. 

I feel like I could/should add a bit more, but it's been three nights since I watched it and to be honest, some of the details have already fled my brain. But I did really like it, so, good accidental choice for March.

And then, just for the hell of it, I also watched The Plow That Broke the Plains, as a bonus.

I enjoyed this to some degree, but I feel like it cheats a bit more in its approach to the documentary format. It too is trying to show an important regional change over a period of time, using some sort of similar maps as Turksib to show the swath of the U.S. that it considers to represent the great plains, and how they were tilled over time to become a great wheat-producing region. But in telling this history, it uses footage that was obviously shot only recently to represent, for example, a time of great production and profitability of the regional farming during World War I. Only World War I was actually nearly 20 years before this was shot, so you know it's kind of bullshit.

Still, it does give an interesting, if short, survey of the history of the farming of this region, until it was abandoned in the Great Depression. You do get a sense for a 20-year period, even if it relies on things like newspaper headlines and footage that you know is divorced from time to tell the story. Hamstrung a bit by that decision, the film is light on actual humans appearing on screen.

It also feels a bit too "News on the March"-style with its narrator speaking in that dramatic and exaggerated style known to the news reels of the era. It has the same promotional style of the last segment of Turksib, only made more on-the-nose and cheesy (for want of a better word) due the spoken rather than written word. It felt like something I would have watched in school in the early 1980s, a relic of earlier styles of imparting information to people/children, and who knows, maybe I did.

Okay, I've got some good feature-length candidates in the 1940s, I think. After I get these earlier decades out of the way, I'll slow my pace down and begin watching a couple movies per decade. 

Audient Authentic: Man With a Movie Camera

This is the second in my 2020 monthly series watching “classic” documentaries, i.e., significant documentaries from before 1990.

Man With a Movie Camera should have hit my viewing schedule long before now, if only because it was 2012 when I marvelled over it making the top ten of the Sight & Sound poll, making it the highest rated movie I had never seen. It’s closer to the 2022 Sight & Sound poll than the 2012, but I’ve finally now seen it.

I probably didn’t see it before now because I viewed it as a chore. I don’t remember who made a snide comment over how insufferable it was, but that comment lodged in my head and stuck there.

Well, whoever made that comment was wrong.

Really impressive stuff here.

If you are somehow not familiar with Man With a Movie Camera, it is Dziga Vertov’s 1929 experimental film whose title is kind of a literal explanation of what it is. There do not seem to be any guiding principles to this film beyond Vertov and his camera operator, Mikhail Kaufman, traveling around the Soviet cities of Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow and Odessa, filming the daily lives of average Soviets.

This sounds boring. It decidedly is not.

The filmmakers experiment with all sorts of different camera setups, the crazier the better, and they also film themselves in the act of filming, to shine a light on the process of filmmaking and its inherent challenges and acts of derring-do. There’s a third collaborator who plays an equal role in what we see here, and that’s editor Elizaveta Svilova, who is also shown on camera in the midst of plying her trade. She was Vertov’s wife. I’ve always known that editing was a business that seemed to attract women disproportionately to other behind-the-scenes film roles, but I had no idea that was the case as long ago as the 1920s.

And Svilova’s editing is, in a way, the star of the show. I was pretty astonished by the small number of frames – sometimes only one or two I would guess – Svilova would splice into longer scenes, or sometimes alternate small numbers of frames from the same two scenes in such quick succession that it created a strobe effect. It’s especially astonishing given the prevailing wisdom about filmmaking at that time, when an uninterrupted sequence that’s way too long was far more common than one that was too short. Not only that, she seems aware of the eerie effect this editing can have, as when a face is ominously edited into a longer sequence for only a couple frames, then vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived.

This is not the only way they’re playing with the capabilities of the moving image. There are a number of scenes here where images are superimposed over one another, which may have been accomplished by double exposure or some other technique. There’s a great stop motion technique in which a camera and its tripod appear to come to life, unpacking themselves from their box, beeping at an appreciative audience like R2-D2 (in the version of the score I heard, anyway) and then slinking off the side of the frame. There are also split screens, with several scenes appearing side by side, and even an effect that I most closely identified with Inception, where a building appears to be folding in upon itself. Whether Vertov influenced Christopher Nolan or the other way around, I’m not sure.

The actual content goes from mundane to enthralling. There are many people at work, in factories and such, but there’s also plenty of play, as people lounge on the beach or compete in sports. One sequence in which a woman is repeatedly making some kind of hand-folded object at high speeds was particularly memorable. There are people in transit, and people in stasis – in fact, a funeral is filmed. But so is a birth (and yes, you see the immediate aftermath in close biological detail). And then there’s a sequence of people signing marriage licenses in an office.

I wouldn’t say that I was in this film’s thrall at first. In fact, as I was developing what I would say in my head, I thought my perspective would be that the lack of a narrative meant that it was only necessary to see some of Man With a Movie Camera, to get the gist of what it was about. Getting up to get something from the fridge was not a cause for needing to pause the film.

But as it continued on, I found each sequence to be more essential, and often profound. The film is not structured narratively, but at least, for the most part, it keeps like parts together. If the whole thing was interspersed seemingly at random, it might start to feel tedious the way a Terrence Malick film can feel. But it moves from work to play to vehicles to machinery to sport, sometimes doubling back to revisit a previous topic, but never losing a sense of forward momentum in its structure.

The only thing that somewhat marred my experience was the fact that YouTube was playing up on me. I watched it through the YouTube app on my TV. It being periodically broken up by ads was annoying enough – it was quite a jolt out of the moment to suddenly be seeing an ad for Picard – but the real frustration came when the video would quit and say “Something went wrong.” This happened about five times. I’m not sure if it was a YouTube issue or my shitty internet, which was also lagging significantly, but the end result was that I needed to go back in and fast-forward back to where I had been. And since I couldn’t see what the timecode was when it crapped out, I mostly had to guess at this, sometimes repeating sequences. I was also jumping around between about five different versions of the video, as the one that had stopped working could not resume, or at least, could not resume straight away. These videos varied in quality and also, I believe, had different scores.

Then again, I think Vertov might appreciate the disjointed and disrupted way I watched his film. Man With a Movie Camera uses disjointedness as its central ethos, and it sure was a disruptor in early cinema.

I’m undecided on a movie for March. I had a candidate in mind but found out that it’s only 25 minutes long, and I’m trying to decide how married I am to the idea of a documentary being (approximately) feature length. My first two movies were over an hour long, but the most significant documentaries of the 1930s seem to be a fair bit shorter than that. Since you aren’t likely following along with your own viewing anyway, maybe I’ll just surprise you.

Audient Authentic: Nanook of the North

This is the first in my new 2020 monthly viewing series, in which I’m watching classic documentaries from before 1990 that I haven’t seen.

Welcome to the new series, and welcome to the movie that actually inspired it.

I had noticed Nanook of the North being available on Kanopy some time ago, and thought it was kind of funny that I had never seen it before, it being such a seminal film in the history of cinema, and in the history of documentary in particular. And it’s not like I only belatedly became aware of it. I’m pretty sure it was at least referenced if not fully discussed back in my Art of the Film class by my teacher, Mr. Brown. That was 1990, my senior year in high school, and the very year I think of as having gotten into cinema, in large part because of that class. That’s also why it’s the year I’ve chosen as the upward cutoff for movies I will watch in this series.

But indeed I had not seen it, and within six months of adding Nanook to my viewing list on Kanopy, I thought, “Why not make a series out of it?”

Hence Audient Authentic was born, and so, this made a logical first entry.

Before I started watching Nanook I thought it was a shame I had not waited two more years to think of this series, as it would have allowed me to watch Nanook in conjunction with the 100^th anniversary of its release. But the best time to put any good idea into action is now, so Audient Authentic couldn’t wait. At least I watched it on January 22^nd, which felt appropriate for a movie from 1922.

Another thing about seeing a movie from 1922 as my first movie is that it will allow me to tackle this series chronologically, at least potentially. While that has some tricks to it, like my ability to source the movies in question and not getting ahead of myself, I think it’s a worthy goal to try to start out that way and see how I go. I’ll attempt to progress through the decades and I won’t get to movies from the 1980s, for example, until the autumn. I know the second movie I have in mind will conform to this strategy, as it remains in the 1920s, but I’ll tell you more about that later on in this post.

First off I wanted to say that I loved Nanook. It’s a joyous celebration of the day-to-day successes (most often) and failures (rarely) of an Inuit man and his family. The rare failures also seem joyous as the title character always has a huge grin plastered on his face. Whether he was playing to the camera or whether this was an accurate representation of his true outlook, I don’t know for sure, but director Robert J. Flaherty certainly asserts it’s the latter in his opening text, as he interacted with these Inuits for long periods of time on multiple journeys to the Hudson Bay and northern Canada. The score also communicates the idea that this is all pretty joyous, though the music I heard was composed in 1998, so it can only be considered a very recent influence on the way a person watches this movie.

Despite my love for what I was watching, I gave Nanook “only” four of a possible five stars on Letterboxd. This could have something to do with my general perception of documentaries, which in the past I have tried to describe as “the documentary ceiling.” That idea was that most documentaries we see easily exceed a minimal level of quality, but only on rare occasions are they the kind of outstanding viewing experiences that stick with us throughout our lifetimes. My four stars for Nanook recognizes its importance in the history of cinema and its basic enjoyment as a viewing experience, but also, I suppose, suggests that it’s not a movie whose themes I am going to continue to examine over time, or whose filmmaking was particularly distinctive. It is a great artifact if not a “great” film the way we would assign such language to the consensus best films in the history of the medium.

The thing that may have surprised me the most about Nanook of the North is how much surprised me. I guess I figured that most of the ways Inuits live their lives would have filtered down to me over the years, but this was most certainly not the case. Among this film’s surprises:

Inuit people can fit multiple people into a kayak seemingly intended for one. My mind was blown straight off in this movie as Nanook’s family is introduced to us by them all steadily emerging, clown car style, from a kayak that seems like it’s only holding one person. By shrinking themselves into the kayak’s availability cavities, Nanook’s family could travel with him in his kayak. And not just one or two others, but three other people – one a full-grown adult – as well as a dog. It wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine they could fit, but that it showcased absolutely no sense of the type of claustrophobia that would cripple most of us in that scenario. Given how much time they spend in wide open spaces, I might have thought the Inuit would not like an enclosed space, but then again, they do spend time huddled together in small igloos, remaining in physical contact as they sleep to create more warmth. I suppose this is just an extension of that. However, it also makes for a really great way to start the movie. Kudos to Flaherty for thinking of it.

Inuit people sometimes killed their prey with their teeth. In a fascinating sequence that shows Nanook fishing, it also shows him subduing/killing his catches by biting them. You’d think a knife would be both available and a much more efficient way of doing this, but no, the teeth work just fine. I should say, in some research I’ve done since then, I’ve found that the word “eskimo” is considered derogatory because it is said to mean “eater of raw meat.” However, there can be no doubt that this is what the Inuit people actually do, as there is a later scene that shows them helping themselves to walrus before they can return it to camp and cook it, so hungry are they due to a general paucity of food options in their climate.

Inuit people can build an igloo spontaneously, in a matter of hours. I had always assumed there was something semi-permanent about an igloo, like, maybe the same family would live in the same igloo for years on end. As it turns out, if you are off on an extended hunt with your whole family and have no hope of returning to your more regular settlement, you can built an igloo wherever you are. Now, the film does not show the making of the igloo in real time, obviously, so I only had to get a sense for how quick the process might be. But it seemed like they could do it in only a couple of hours, which is pretty cool indeed.

Inuit people can also sculpt spontaneous art from the snow. This is not necessarily something I didn’t know, but something I was charmed by. There’s a moment when they make a little statue of a polar bear out of the snow. You’d expect something like that could be crude, but it was really good!

Inuit people chew boots. Some text in the film advises that sealskin boots can harden overnight, so Nanook’s wife chews his to diminish some of that effect.

Dogs can get igloos, too. If Inuit people can quickly build igloos, they can even more quickly build dog-sized igloos. If asked, I might have assumed the family pet would just huddle with them on the animal skins they sleep on. But perhaps it is more heat efficient for the animal to be protected in its own enclosure, and indeed, their pet gets his/her own igloo. Of course, the dogs that pull the sleds have sufficiently warm coats to just sleep outdoors.

I hope it goes without saying that I know this is not how Inuit people now, the present tense I used in the previous section of this post notwithstanding. But it's how they lived 100 years ago. 

Another scene I loved in the film involved them catching a baby white fox, and the way the fox playfully nips at one of the little kids who gets too close to it. I was worried they would eat that fox, so I was glad to see it survive intact – on screen, anyway.

So obviously I got a lot of nice and engrossing moments out of Nanook of the North, and I think it must have been a really amazing document for audiences who simply had no idea what this part of the world actually looked like. And even in 2020 it is opening my eyes to things I never knew about.

From a filmmaking perspective, I was perhaps most impressed about the pace Flaherty keeps going in this film. Some films from that era seem particularly indulgent and slow-moving, but Flaherty has a good sense for his viewers' attention spans, even though those attention spans would have been capable of so much more back then than ours are in 2020. He moves from segment to segment and gets the thing in at only 79 minutes, where I’m sure he would have had enough footage to make a film twice that long if he’d wanted.

I also really liked the title cards that narrate the action. While they are reflective of the sort of flowery style that was in fashion at that time, I found some of their descriptions to be more than merely flowery, sometimes crossing over into the poetic.

As a last comment, another pleasant surprise about the film is that I didn't find it to be patriarchal, condescending, or worst of all, racially insensitive. This was around the time D.W. Griffith was thoughtlessly diminishing the value of every racial minority he could find, and I'm pleased to say Flaherty did not learn from his example. The film finds these Inuits whimsical, but not in a way that I thought was uncharitable. His style suggests that he is energized by what he is discovering from them, not bemused by it, and that is indeed the right perspective to have for one of the world's first documentaries. 

Okay, off to a good start! Next month we’ll move forward only seven years to the highest ranked movie on the 2012 Sight & Sound poll that I have not yet seen, #8 on that list, Man With a Movie Camera. If, you know, you want to play along at home.

The Audient gets authentic

Hey! Welcome to the post where I introduce you to my new monthly viewing series for 2020.

I had a topic all lined up, maybe for as long as the past year, but recent events have changed my thinking on the subject, and now that one will have to wait until 2021.

I couldn't help but notice that my top 20 of 2019 contained four -- count 'em, four -- documentaries, those being Hail Satan? (#7), The Australian Dream (#12), Apollo 11 (#13) and Fyre (#19). To give you some idea how different this is from recent years, my highest ranked 2018 documentary was Whitney at #29 and my highest ranked 2017 documentary was Quest at #17. (And, I actually had no documentaries in my top 25 of the decade -- shame shame.)

There has been an explanation for this, and in fact, it involves Quest. Quest was the final film I watched as part of my association with HRAFF, the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, for which I vetted films for the 2016-2017 festivals. I didn't actually vet Quest, but watched it as the closing night film of the festival. And obviously really liked it.

But at that point it was too little, too late. I had already decided that I was not going to vet films again in 2018, as it added five (!) additional viewings per week from mid-August through late-January, and that was just too much for me. I was staying on top of the workload and still attending to my other viewing duties, but my wife was none too pleased with it.

The other problem was, an unexpected thing was happening -- or maybe, a thing I should have expected to happen but didn't:

I was starting to hate human rights documentaries.

And actually, what's more, I was starting to hate documentaries, period.

This won't do, not a for a cinephile. And yet you can't forcefully lift your aversion to something. If you're burned out on something, you're burned out on it, and only time heals that wound.

I think time may finally be catching up. And if so, I want to strike while the iron is hot.

So in 2020, I'm going to be watching documentaries. But not just any documentary. I'm still sick of the most common type of documentary I think we see nowadays, the prototypical example of which is a movie I have not seen. That prototypical example is called Chicken People, and it's about show chickens. That's right, chickens who compete in shows like their dog counterparts who compete in shows. Frivolous subjects like this just waste my time and yours, and even if Chicken People is actually a good movie, it offends my sensibilities as a person trying to rekindle his love of documentaries.

I'm not going to spend 2020 watching Chicken People.

In fact, I'm going to go into documentary's hallowed past and see the classic documentaries I haven't seen, the ones that really mattered, the ones that would either scoff at or laugh in the face of Chicken People. One per month, 12 in total.

I love the idea, but I do have to set some ground rules. Well, I guess just one. And that is, to figure out a line of demarcation between "classic documentaries" and "new documentaries."

I can't think of just one title that would function as a turning point, so instead, I'm going to look to my own life.

At first I thought of watching only documentaries from before the year I was born, 1973, but I decided that was too limiting. Part of my hesitation is that I already have a couple candidates in mind that are from later in the 1970s. So we need to look forward.

I probably didn't see a single documentary in the entire 1980s, or if I did, I'm not aware what it might be. I started really getting into film around 1990, and I probably saw my first doco soon after that. Something like Hoop Dreams comes to mind as a possible contender, but that was in 1994 and I know I would have started my documentary career before then.

So I've chosen 1990 as that cutoff, which is nice and even as the start of a decade. It'll also allow me to consider only movies that I wouldn't have naturally come across when they played in theaters, because I wasn't into that sort of thing yet.

As luck would have it -- "luck" -- this series also has a clever title that fits in with my preferred alliterative naming scheme. I'm going to call it Audient Authentic, which I slightly prefer over Authentic Audient. The latter makes it sound like I'm not usually being authentic with you. I hope I always am.

But I also think this gets in the idea that not only are these movies non-fiction, but they are non-fiction in a truly authentic way, when the documentary was seen as a serious-minded tool for revealing life's truths rather than a vehicle to put quirky stories into the world. I'm not saying every movie I watch will be a sober depress-fest, but I can guarantee you, there will not be the 1960s equivalent of Chicken People.

I've got a first title in mind that I plan to watch and post about before the end of January, and from there I'll bushwhack a path through the 20th century's best documentaries I have not yet seen.

I hope you'll join me.