Heroes and Heroines

Heroes are central characters writ large—characters of magnitude who challenge what people consider normal and thus seem to contest the rules of the universe. In 1955, Rosa Parks did this in Montgomery by refusing to yield her bus seat to a white person, an action that helped precipitate the civil rights movement. Conscientious objectors who risk torture and imprisonment by refusing to kill and those who choose prison for racial equality, as Nelson Mandela did, are all plainly the stuff of heroism. In documentary, the hero will often be someone obscure whose special qualities mean they will struggle to accomplish something. The dramatic tension you generate comes from getting us involved with this person (or people) and making us care whether they prevail. Human qualities, principles, and will come under test, and we watch a trial of strength. From this we learn something, and the values by which we live may be a little changed, renewed, or vindicated.

What do you want your audience to make of your central figures? What are you saying through them? What do you want to say about human nature, human folly, or noble human aspiration?

The Event-Centered Film

The stages of the event become the vertebrae in the film’s temporal spine. Expectation and its predictable or unexpected stages provide the sense of forward movement. Once the event has gained momentum you can afford to plug in side-bars like ribs along the spine, knowing that the audience is always ready for the story to revert to the event’s next stage. These digressions might be sections of interview, pieces of relevant past, or even pieces of the imagined future.

Some events, such as a marathon race or a political rally, move fast or have many facets unfolding simultaneously. Leni Riefenstahl’s dark classic, Olympia (1938, Germany; Figure 18-2), relays the Berlin Olympic Games in this way and with seductive virtuosity places Adolf Hitler, godlike, at the center.

FIGURE 18-2 The beauty of sports as seen through a National Socialist sensibility in Olympia. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Olympia-Film.)

When multiple strands of narrative happen simultaneously, you may need several cameras. I once directed a unit among several covering a pheasant shoot, and my team concentrated on the gamekeeper. As always, plan your shooting around what is predictable because you need to anchor the film in its event’s stages. Knowing you can deliver these liberates you to record the unexpected along the way.

The Process Film

This type of documentary chronicles a sequence of events during which something is produced or accomplished. Ordinary events such as making a meal, building a shed, taking a journey, or getting married can become fascinating if you treat them as archetypal or metaphorical. Process films are usually modular with each event or unit, having a clear beginning, middle, and end. Usually they follow chronological sequencing but can use parallel storytelling by cutting between multiple events. A father may be at work in a factory, for instance, while his daughter is in school getting the education that allows her not to work in a fac tory. As each sequence advances by steps, the characters and their predicaments develop in a linear fashion.

David Sutherland’s three-year study, The Farmer’s Wife (1998, United States; Figure 18-3), chronicles the effects of relentlessly growing economic pressure on a Nebraska family farm couple. The process in question is slow starvation. Blow by blow and in extraordinary intimacy we see what Darrel and Juanita Buschkoetter must endure to stave off bankruptcy. The worst casualty is their marriage. During the six 1-hour episodes, Darrel doggedly works multiple jobs while Juanita holds the family together, finishes college—and this is the series’ development—and matures from girl to woman. It’s through her strength of character that they pull through and survive—hence the series title. Culled from 200 hours of footage, the film’s essence lies in many poignant, lonely episodes that play out as sustained interactions. Each is filled with tension, and many are real dramatic experiences such as you hope for in the theater.

FIGURE 18-3 Strength and faith to survive in The Farmer’s Wife. (A David Sutherland Film. Photo by John Schaefer © WGBH.)

Emile Ardolino’s He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’ (1983, United States) shows the dancer Jacques D’Amboise teaching New York schoolchildren how to let go and dance; it gives careful attention to the methods and encouragement that he lavishes on his students. He also gives a class for adult nondancers which includes a brave New York cop hoofing it with the rest. Everyone revels in their new ecstasy of movement, and you can see why. Though it deals with a series of processes, you hardly notice because it makes such masterful use of montage and rhythmic editing. This is a film about dancing that dances—form and content perfectly matched.

FIGURE 18-4 Werner Herzog and the boat he hauls up a hillside in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams. (Photo by Maureen Gosling.)

Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982, United States; Figure 18-4) chronicles the shooting of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a fiction feature about a real-life opera impresario who contrived to bring a river steamer over the Andes. Through Herzog’s own struggle to get a steamer up a jungle mountainside, Blank reveals Herzog’s dictatorial obsessiveness and how a cherished project can become more important to its director than the physical dangers faced by hisworkers. The objectives and values revealed by the process become metaphors for the ruthlessness that often lurks under the guise of making art.

The Journey Film

Journeys promise change and development. Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1989, United States; Figure 18-5) sets out to follow General Sherman’s destructive journey during the American Civil War and then, growing bored with its self-imposed task, switches to a parallel and more personal journey by its director. In a witty and extended bid to end his status as a single man, McElwee encounters old and new girlfriends on the road. At the end, starting a promising relationship, he finds that the General is still with him but as a cautionary metaphor. Shot solo using 16 mm film and embodying many hoarse, late-night confessionals, McElwee’s wry and self-reflexive movie triggered an avalanche of imitations—not one of which matched the tone or sophistication of the original.

FIGURE 18-5 Sherman’s March, a road movie of encounters between a man and all the women he might marry. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/McElwee Productions/Guggenheim Fellowship.)

Luc Jacquet’s March of the Penguins (2005, France; Figure 18-6) shows the epic journey that emperor penguins make in the Antarctic in order to breed. Some do not finish the journey, find a mate, or manage to guard their chicks, so the film has a dramatic tension that made it immensely popular. The struggle to survive has such anthropomorphic resonances that the film exemplified “family values” for some. Apparently, the French version had a set of voices speaking as if for the penguins (which sounds truly awful). More conventionally, the English version uses the omniscient, voice-over narration beloved by the National Geographic Society, which coproduced. The film is gripping and worth study for its editing alone, which orchestrates much mass action and movement culled from a year of shooting. Luckily penguins do similar things and all look alike, so you get extraordinarily detailed coverage of each stage of their long and arduous journey.

FIGURE 18-6 Shooting The March of the Penguins. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/BonnePioche/Buena Vista/APC/Jerome Maison.)

Jorge Furtado’s 13-minute Isle of Flowers (1989, Brazil) was once voted one of the most important short films of the twentieth century. By following the brief life of a tomato, it starts at the growing site, follows its being made into sauce, and then watches its dregs finishing up in the municipal dump. Because tomatoes here are metaphors for human beings, the film shocks audiences with its message about the despicable way we treat each other. Another film to see for its virtuoso montage.

In Lars Johannson’s The German Secret (2005, Denmark), the filmmaker chronicles his wife, Kirsten Blohm, crossing Europe in search of the Nazi father (as they think) whose identity her mother refused to discuss until near death. Amazingly, 50 years later there are still people alive along the route who remember the beautiful, haughty blonde with the strangely neglected child (Figure 18-7). Piece by piece, the two establish the truth, which shapes up to be far from what they expected. Her hopeful, occasionally funny, and often vividly painful journey delivers only partial liberation from a heritage of doubt and anger. This is a tender and masterful film full of intimate reflection and intense, sustained encounters.

FIGURE 18-7 Mother and daughter in The German Secret. Who was my father? Why won’t you tell me? (Photo courtesy of Lars Johansson.)

The Historical Film

Strictly speaking, all film is history because as soon as it’s recorded every frame is history. Film ought to be a good medium for historical films but is not always so. More than most story forms, histories must often digress to build their tributary chains of cause and effect. Imagine a film about a plane crash in which all six of an airliner’s safety features failed. You have a known outcome, but your film must spend most of its time explaining what each safety feature is supposed to do, how it failed, and how its breakdown contributed to the disaster. Here time is a minor player in the tale of causality.

Even the makers of screen history themselves aren’t always satisfied, as Donald Watt and Jerry Kuehl have pointed out.² Many history films, they say:

• Bite off more than they can chew.
• Commandeer specific images as backdrops for generalizations.
• Are inherently unbalanced whenever archive footage is lacking for important events.
• Fail to recognize that the screen is different from literature or an academic lecture.
• Are often dominated by unverifiable interpretations.
• Try to sidestep controversy as school textbooks do.
• Fail to enlighten their audience about strings attached to funding.
• Suffer because their makers wanted to build a monument.
• Suggest consensus opinion and paper over vital disagreements.
• Fail to acknowledge that historians find what they look for.

To this we can add that the screen history, by its realism and ineluctable forward movement, discourages contemplation and often glides over anything it can’t illustrate. Historical meanings are in any case abstractions, and the screen is inherently better at showing the concrete.

We should be cautious when a film uses omniscience to obscure its sources. The all-knowing narrator guiding us through tracts of history is worrisome, especially in those History Channel series that use archive footage to cover vast thematic and factual territory. In Britain, Thames Television’s The World at War of the 1970s and, in America, WGBH’s Vietnam: A Television History in the 1980s both echo the textbook emphasis on facts rather than questions and issues that arise today. Even Ken Burns’ The Civil War (1990, United States; Figure 18-8), which counterpoints contemporary accounts and photographs, seems overwhelmed by the repetitive minutia of its period.

FIGURE 18-8 The American tragedy captured in the groundbreaking history series The Civil War. (Photo courtesy of PBS.)

Some screen histories succeed, of course. An openly critical one-off film like Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds (1974, United States) argues by analogy that the American obsession with sports provided a deadly and misleading metaphor for the tragically mistaken U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Here the viewer is on a clearer footing and can engage with the film’s propositions rather than go numb under a deluge of suspiciously uninflected information.

Eyes on the Prize (1990, United States), a PBS series from Blackside, Inc., chronicled the development of civil rights in America and managed to tread a fine line between historical omniscience and personal testimonies that were imbued with commitment. Though crew members were carefully chosen for racial balance, you are never in doubt that the film speaks on behalf of black people so egregiously wronged in equality-proclaiming America.

The War (2007, United States; Figure 18-9), directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is an oral history whose excellently chosen witness/participants tell their stories with multiple voices and viewpoints. Unlike Burns’ earlier, seemingly more linear and event-bound histories, its voice is free from patriotic hubris. The series adds up to a fervently non-nationalistic, antiwar perspective, a timely corrective when embedded journalism presents so many fighting “heroes” during the good-versus-evil simplifications of wartime.

FIGURE 18-9 The War—as close as you’ll get to the realities of trying to stay alive in battle. (Photo courtesy of PBS.)

The Biographical Film

Following a single character through time is a variation on the hero’s journey paradigm of the folklorist Joseph Campbell.³ Point of view plays a significant part, since the central character’s sense of events is often in tension with those around him or her. The progression in which the main character grows up, develops, and meets test after test also generates the kind of momentum that easily allows sidebar excursions along the way.

Stevie (2002, United States; Figure 18-10) is a biographical film about an antihero, an abused boy to whom its director, Steve James, had been a Big Brother a decade earlier. Tracking down the shy rural kid he’d once known, James finds Stevie moving on a downward path through a fog of alcohol and petty crime. During the period of filming Stevie graduates to child molesting and goes to prison. Unjudgmentally the film helps us understand that Stevie was a victim himself until he sexually abused a young girl relative. Once roles are reversed, the abuse gets kicked forward another generation. By the end of this subtle and sympathetic film you understand in detail how so many lives get ruined. There’s not much cause for optimism here but a lot to understand.

FIGURE 18-10 An abused boy becomes an abusing adult in Stevie. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Kartemquin Films.)

Errol Morris’ The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003, United States; Figure 18-11) gives the former U.S. Secretary of Defense a self-serving platform in his old age. From telling of his apprenticeship presiding over U.S. policy in Vietnam, he now dispenses pearls of wisdom for reducing future warfare, such as: “In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.” Along the way he magnanimously admits to a few mistakes. Morris gives MacNamara such a long rope that he is hoisted by his own petard.

Taggart Siegel’s The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2006, United States; Figure 18-12) profiles a third-generation Midwest farmer. As a young man, he took over the family land, foreswore agribusiness chemicals, and turned his farm into a thriving commune growing vegetables named Angelic Organics. If that didn’t rile the farming neighbors, then driving his tractor in a feather boa and frolicking with very young girls did. He was fire-bombed as a devil worshiper.

FIGURE 18-11 The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. (Photo courtesy of Fourth Floor Productions.)

FIGURE 18-12 Bees at play in The Real Dirt on Farmer John. (Photo courtesy of Slava Doval/Angelic Organics.)

Playfully shocking and great fun, the film darts around in time during its self-presentation by this dada agriculturalist. Its apex is the point where he lost the farm before making a comeback.

Poetic Time

FIGURE 18-13 Soil erosion in an early ecology masterpiece, The River. (Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.)

This category is seldom event- or character-driven and more likely to pursue imagery and metaphor in exploration of an observation, mood, or belief. All the best documentaries have poetic elements, of course, but too few rely mainly on powerful imagery. Some are discussed in Chapter 5, Documentary Language, the most memorable being Land Without Bread (1932, Spain), Night Mail (1936, United Kingdom), The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936, United States), and The River (1937, United States; Figure 18-13). Humphrey Jennings, “the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced,”⁴ made documentaries during World War II while his country was under siege, notably Listen to Britain (1942, United Kingdom), Fires Were Started (1943, United Kingdom; Figure 18-14), and Diary for Timothy (1945, United Kingdom). Their use of emotively loaded imagery and sounds resonated for people at the time but won’t mean much to younger people today. In Fires Were Started, Jennings mixed appallingly vivid firefighting footage with firehouse scenes using rather stilted improvised dialogue.

FIGURE 18-14 Making Fires Were Started, an early dramadoc that brought together grim firefighting footage with dialogue scenes improvised between the firemen. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Crown Film Unit.)

The common denominator—perhaps a very significant one—is that all these filmmakers shot silent and put imagery first. They composed sound separately and later and based it on inspiration provided by images. How you do things determines what you end up with.

More recently, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi or Life Out of Balance (1982, United States; Figure 18-15), about the rape of the environment by humankind, is realized through music allied to imagery that is original and from archives and that has no relation to time progression. When it first appeared, its premise about humanity causing environmental catastrophe seemed romantic and apocalyptic, but time has proven Reggio prophetic.

Some biographical films I specially admire are difficult or impossible to find. Orod Attapour’s Parnian (2002, Iran; Figure 18-16) profiles an ill-fated family of Tehran archaeologists. Both mother and son suffer from an incurable wasting disease that is killing the mother. The father cares for them while they probe Iran’s rich history with obsessive, desperate energy. Every image in the film carries rich metaphorical overtones, and every sequence and every image has an

FIGURE 18-15 Koyaanisqatsi or Life Out of Balance—an apocalyptic vision that time has vindicated. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Institute for Regional Education.)

FIGURE 18-16 In Parnian, a young archeologist suffering a wasting disease taunts destiny (frame from the film).

analogical relationship to others. Skillfully the film implies, like the Persian poetry that plainly influences it, a wheel of life binding us to those who lived and suffered before us. We too must live and suffer as they did, and so we lead the way for those who will follow. Compressed into its austere half hour is a whole vista of time, repeated destiny, decay, and renewal.

Vincent Dieutre has structured his poetic first-person narrative Lessons of Darkness (2000, France) by his thoughts, memories, and feelings. He is a gay man falling out of love while journeying between three European cities and finding solace in the erotic solidity of the men in Caravaggio’s paintings. The narrative weakness in any poetic film is likely to be that it for-goes the dramatic tension and momentum of plot for the intensity and resonance of imagery and moment. When we are in masterful hands, as here, this is no sacrifice, but in those of lesser ability it can produce work that is wandering and arbitrary.

Time Reordered

A common rearrangement of time is to show an event and then backtrack to analyze the interplay of forces that led up to it, as in Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996, United States). The film opens with the tragic sight of three murdered 8-year-old boys and then focuses on the trial of the three local teenagers accused of killing them in a satanic ritual. The film casts doubt on the validity of the evidence, rather as the filmmakers did in their earlier Brother’s Keeper (1992, United States), which told of some reclusive rural brothers accused of mercy killing a sibling. Both films examine the arguments for and against each allegation, deconstruct them and their key events, and then invite us to draw likely conclusions. Berlinger and Sinofsky’s films are interested in character as much as facts, and this takes their films further than the conventional investigation.

The Personal Film

Four distinguished films probe family secrets and find surprises and heartache behind “successful” lives. Each film develops along the line of new information as it surfaces. In My Architect (2003, United States), Nathaniel Kahn recreates the father he hardly knew by building a picture of the distinguished and elusive architect Louis Kahn. Mostly he does this through the generous women whom Kahn made use of while leveraging his career. Here is a ruthless, driven man who used whomever was willing in his single-minded pursuit of architectural innovation. The consequences emerge through those who maintain or critique his architecture, the women who loved him, and the son who searches to define and hold him.

FIGURE 18-17 A family harboring molesters in Capturing the Friedmans, or a miscarriage of justice? (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/HBO Documentary/Notorious Pictures.)

Andrew Jarecki’s controversial Capturing the Friedmans (2003, United States; Figure 18-17) follows up the arrest of a respectable Long Island teacher and one of his sons for alleged sexual crimes against children. The film gathers all available family perspectives, looks at the 8 mm home movies of the archetypal suburban family at happy play, and finds in the end that all is mystery and nothing adds up. So often, families are strangers to each other.

In Doug Block’s 51 Birch Street (2005, United States), as mentioned in the previous chapter, a son begins searching out the truths behind about his parents’ long but blighted marriage, hoping to reach his father after his mother suddenly dies. In the writing she left behind, he is astonished to discover that the mother he had felt so close to had maintained a secret love life. The father he always found remote suddenly marries his secretary of 40 years earlier, then emerges as warmer and far more understanding of his wife than Block had ever imagined. The miracle—which no documentarian can ever forget—is that truth does indeed set people free, as the film shows.

Where the previous three biographies analyze lives largely completed, the next film crackles with misplaced father/son hopes and resentments whose roots go back decades. Mark Wexler shot Tell Them Who You Are (2005, United States) hoping to get closer to his famous Hollywood cinematographer father, Haskell. Few films have explored the psychic wounds between generations more nakedly, painfully, and obstinately, and seldom do family relations seem more irreconcilable.

Each of these four biographies begins from some basic questions that, pursued through a labyrinth of ambiguous discovery, unfold like a detective story. Following clues and pursuing hypotheses, their protagonists lance at layers of protective myth and stereotype. Family members hold partisan views, each fixed in subjectivity, and nowhere is this truer than of children in relation to their parents. All four films reveal their main characters’ development over time, and these emerge through multiple perceptions, but it is the hierarchy of discovery that determines the films’ structures. Though all pursue a crooked course, high intelligence and sophistication make each seem to have taken the only path possible.

The Walled-City Film

Societies, institutions, and tribal entities define their boundaries, close in upon themselves, and develop self-perpetuating codes. Films profiling them are often impressionistic, since boundaries usually contain many simultaneous activities. Juxtaposing these by theme, mood, or meaning can imply polemic using the light hand of montage. The 10-hour PBS special Carrier (2008, United States) aspires to be the mother of all such endeavors, although its subtitle (“One Ship, Five Thousand Stories”) may seem more like a warning. Conceived by Mitchell Block and its director Maro Chermayeff, it draws on 1600 hours of superb filming during 6 months’ residence aboard the nuclear-powered U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz. Each hour-long episode handles a theme (“controlled chaos,” “show of force,” “rites of passage”), and each is bookended with title sequences redolent of recruiting films. Most episodes are diffuse, high on testosterone (the average age aboard is 19), and punctuated with upbeat songs that seem suspiciously like narrative aids. Even so, the series is worth seeing from beginning to end as a thorough study of a military society riddled with contradictions and conflicts. Sailors of both sexes and all ranks are remarkably candid, and the series’ connective tissue becomes the evolving personal stories of 15 central characters. We come to see a rare camaraderie that for many compensates for the turmoil and pain wrought by dysfunctional family origins. Most suffer excessively because of long periods of separation from their loved ones, as do the families they leave on land.

The sheer enormity of the series in relation to its enlightenment leaves you feeling ambiguous. Unintentionally, I think, it glamorizes military life and celebrates the gunboat diplomacy for which the Nimitz was built. The unspoken issues—why America chooses military might over social justice, adequate health and education, and a modern infrastructure for its citizenry and why military might makes ideological enemies rather than beats them—remain outside the pale. As with many documentaries, you are left wondering what restrictions the filmmakers accepted—or imposed on themselves—as the price of entry.

Most of Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries—at long last available on DVD—are walled-city films, most notably two of his earliest—Titicut Follies (1967, United States) and High School (1968, United States). The Titicut Follies is a revue presented by the staff and inmates in a Massachusetts prison for the criminally insane. Wiseman makes it function as a backbone for the film and also a grimly nihilistic metaphor. When there are no interviews or narration you cannot retreat from scenes that are grippingly horrific, as if retrieved from the eighteenth century. In stark, Daumier black-and-white imagery we see the inmates’ degrading spectrum of daily experience—from induction, psychiatric evaluation, nakedness, forced feeding, to burial. In one sequence, a seemingly sane Hungarian tries desperately to extricate himself from the institution’s nightmarish embrace. In another, a psychiatric doctor with an ash-laden cigarette on his lower lip rams a feeding pipe down a half-dead prisoner’s nose. Each digression from the ongoing revue is so engrossing that the revue itself becomes a mocking commentary. Wiseman and his cameraman Bill Brayne lead us into a living hell and at the same time define what observational documentary means.

Two films by Nick Broomfield—Soldier Girls (1981, United States/United Kingdom, with Joan Churchill) and Chicken Ranch (1982, United States/United Kingdom, with Sandi Sissel; Figure 18-18)—qualify as walled-city films but differ significantly in approach from narrated and observational approaches. The first looks at women soldiers in basic training, while the second is about the women, their relationships, and their customers in a brothel. Both explore social ghettoes and find their structure in a series of events that spontaneously occurred during a stay by the filmmakers. Each shows how those who rule institutional life set about conditioning and controlling their inmates. Each leaves us more knowledgeable and critical.

Neither, however, pretends to be neutral or unaffected by what it finds. By letting us see a discharged woman soldier embrace the camera operator, by including the brothel owner’s tirade at the crew for filming what he wants kept confidential, each scene admits where the filmmakers’ sympathies lie and hints at the liaisons and even manipulation that went into their shooting. Broomfield has since made Battle for Haditha (2007, United Kingdom; Figure 18-19), a documentary-style enactment of the 2005 event after a marine was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. His colleagues went to find the perpetrators, resulting in 24 Iraqi civilians dead in a frenzy of killing that the military tried to conceal. Over time, a director’s themes emerge, and Broomfield seems concerned with the way that inferiors are manipulated into serving the interests of their masters.

FIGURE 18-18 The ladies in Nick Broomfield’s Chicken Ranch pose with their madame. The documentary led to a musical. (Photo courtesy of First Run Features.

FIGURE 18-19 Battle for Haditha—docudrama can sometimes say what documentary cannot. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Channel 4 Films/Barney Broomfield.)

The Thesis Film

This is any film that uses the essay form to educate, analyze, or elaborate on a thesis. Expos é s, agitprop, experimental, or activist films are often structured by the stages of an extended process, but more often they use montage to display ideas for the audience to consider. Let’s suppose you want to convince the audience that poor immigrants, far from draining the local economy, add economic value to a large American city. You must establish how and why the immigrants came, what work they do, what city services they do or don’t use, what their enemies say about them, and so on. You must build an argument and advance the stages of a polemic in order to convince the skeptics in your audience.

FIGURE 18-20 Darwin’s Nightmare creates a rare intimacy with poor Africans living on the edge of starvation. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Saga Films/Coop 99.)

Of the films mentioned in Chapter 5, Documentary Language, both Buñuel’s Land Without Bread and Resnais’ Night and Fog advance passionate arguments about the mechanisms of human cruelty. The Pare Lorentz ecology duo, The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River convey strong messages about the rape of the land. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004, United States) argues that the Bush Administration, supported by the corporate media and its embedded journalists after 9/11, used the wave of public feeling to further its prior agenda for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare (2004, Austria/Belgium/France/Canada/Finland/Sweden; Figure 18-20) draws connections between the export of fish from Lake Victoria, the neglect and starvation of its native Tanzanian population, and the import of munitions used to fuel wars over Africa’s mineral resources. Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005, United States; Figure 18-21), built on work by Fortune reporters, explains how the energy company built a house of cards and why it collapsed.

FIGURE 18-21 A house of cards collapses in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/HDNetFilms/Jigsaw Films.)

These are the independent voices of democratic reason that shine light in dark places. Their freedom to argue today rests squarely on the growth of accessible digital equipment but remains limited by the fact that most film archives are corporately controlled and very expensive. Meanwhile, the Internet is developing as an uncontrolled arena for the exchange of information and opinion. History will probably judge public discourse to have changed radically at this time.

The Catalogue Film

The catalogue film is a type of documentary whose main and enthusiastic purpose is to examine something comprehensively rather than critically. A film about harpsichords, steam locomotives, or dinosaurs might organize their appearance by size, age, structure, or other classification. Unless the film takes the stages of a restoration or archeological dig as its backbone, time probably won’t play a centrally organizing role.

Joris Ivens’ Rain (1929, Netherlands; Figure 18-22) is a silent, highly atmospheric 12-minute film shot in Amsterdam over two years. It reveals the beauty of rain in a cityscape. A year earlier, Ivens had shot another equally lyrical 11-minute classic, The Bridge. These films will stand for all time as defining portraits of city life in 1920s Holland. Soon Ivens and Henri Storck turned to social justice with Borinage (1932, Belgium), in which concern for the misery of exploited miners replaced Ivens’ earlier interest in aesthetics. By showing how the men and their families lived from day to day, the film exposed a hidden and desperate part of European society to the rest of the world.

FIGURE 18-22 Amsterdam under umbrellas in Rain. (Photo © European Foundation, Joris Ivens Archives.)

Les Blank’s films, usually described as celebrations of Americana, are really catalogue films. There is Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1977, United States), In Heaven There Is No Beer (1984, United States), and the delightful Gap-ToothedWomen (1987, United States). All are good-natured forays into special worlds, and were they not so innocent they would probably appear voyeuristic. The travelogue, diary film, and city symphony are frequently montage-based catalogue types.

When No Time Structure Predominates

There may initially be no obvious time structure. A film about stained glass windows may have no time structure inherent in the footage. You could posit a structure from the dating of particular windows, technical developments in glass, the region of the artifacts, or the origin and idiosyncrasies of the glassmakers. Which option you take depends on what you want to say and what your material best supports. Anthology films that chronicle a particular year take this approach.

Surreal Documentary

FIGURE 18-23 In Crumb, we meet the comic artist, his family, and his inspiration. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Superior Pictures.)

Surreal documentary is a rare form well suited to a playful handling of the outlandish or appalling. Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb (1994, United States; Figure 18-23) profiles the 1960s underground comic artist Robert Crumb, best known for Fritz the Cat. So weird was his upbringing that he and his family seem dangerously dysfunctional (he was suicidal and an older brother killed himself). His comic strips explore sexual obsessions and revolve around personal, confessional observations about abnormality. It’s hard to tell whether it is Zwigoff’s film or the subject matter that is more surreal.

FIGURE 18-24 Deborah Hoffmann and her mother in Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter. (Photo by Frances Reid, courtesy of Deborah Hoffmann.)

As Deborah Hoffmann’s mother descends into Alzheimer’s disease, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter (1995, United States; Figure 18-24) uses dark humor to explore what would otherwise be a crushingly sad situation. The film’s progression is organized by the daughter’s journey—from early consciousness of her mother’s growing eccentricity, to fearing that her mother will turn into the pathetic shell of her former self, to realizing that her mother is actually becoming more her essentially humorous self.