Tag: Documentary

“The Last Bolshevik,” directed by Chris Marker

marker

New Waves

By Ray Sawhill

The best new works I saw at last year’s New York Film Festival were all documentaries about great figures from the movie past. The documentaries — about Leni Riefenstahl, Orson Welles, and the early Soviet titan Alexander Medvedkin — were reminders of the power of industrial-age myths and dreams: the dream of revolution; the revolutionary potential of film; and the idea of revolution as an esthetic, and artist-led, thing.

Watching these films and thinking about myths and dreams, I felt not just awe and horror, but nostalgia. I’ve loved some recent films, but the trends that have been discussed as new New Waves — the Hong Kong action films, the 5th Generation Chinese directors, the African films — have left me dumbfounded, worried that movies are a moribund medium. The festival itself has been a multicultural affair for some years, and though you can feel worthy catching up on what filmmakers from Burkina Faso and Vietnam are doing, you may wonder where the high — the drunken elation — that made you care about movies has gone.

CI recently went to the International Center of Photography for the opening of “Iterations,” a show of computer art and digital imagery — work not by techies, but by traditional artist-types using the new media. Some of the work was likably inconsequential, some dismal, but most of it gave the viewer the same scolding that art shows have been giving art-goers from some years now: oppose oppression, undermine the hegemony of the image, move the marginal to the center, question technology, etc.

What was striking about the show was how even-more-than-usually redundant this familiar package of messages seemed. The media the artists were working with made it irrelevant. Does anyone “trust” a computer-generated, or computer-related, anything? In the digital/multicultural world, it’s simply a given that all is relative, that everything connects, and that power gets dispersed. You don’t have to fight the medium or the establishment it represents to convey this — the medium conveys it for you.

The “avant-garde” (ie., establishment) art world is dealing in the rhetoric of an age that’s almost gone; the artists may see themselves as subversives, but they’re playing a game that’s passé. They think they’re fighting centralized (presumably WASP and male) power and “hegemonic” images, but that world is vanishing all on its own, of old age and sheer out-of-dateness. (And the new world doesn’t offer instant liberation, but a new set of demands, constraints, and challenges.)

We’ve tended to think of artists as romantic figures, and of the best art as being a vanguard activity; we assume that the first indications of new moods and feelings will appear in an art context, whether high or low. And if political revolutions haven’t worked out, well, we have our artistic revolutions to be thankful for and enjoy.

But this time around, the artists (most of them) are not only not leading the new demographic and technological wave, they appear oblivious to it. It just seems to have leaped beyond their conceptions. In the weeks following the Film Festival, tens of billions of dollars of media-company mergers were announced, and the businessmen seemed far ahead of the artists.

The Riefenstahl and the Welles were no more than proficient documentaries with exciting subjects. The documentary that pointed in fresh direction was Chris Marker’s videotape on Medvedkin, “The Last Bolshevik.” The emotionality of this tape isn’t the kind that comes from seeing an artist-hero storm the barricades (or pretend to); the crowing of ego simply isn’t to be heard. It has a different kind of excitement, one that it shares with such works as Robert Altman’s HBO series “Tanner ’88,” the “reality tv” of “Cops” and the Court TV channel, and some CD-ROMs.

Seeing or playing with these new works is different from going to the movies and hoping for a great picture. Traditional films almost always have at least a little of the self-conscious showcase about them, a monument-like aspect that’s suggested by the studio fanfares and logos that usually introduce them: sit back, pay attention, an Event is beginning. You watch, expecting to take in prepared performances, made-up scripts, and predetermined visual schemes; perhaps you hope against hope that the film’s elements will come together and a vision will take you over.

But energy isn’t erupting through the arts at the moment, it’s surfacing in the new technology and the category-busting social changes (the crumbling of boundaries, the new nationalisms, the age-group shifts). “The Last Bolshevik” and the other new works tower over nothing; they’re avowedly part of the general media flux. They don’t make their appearance wearing a familiar label (art, cinema, books), and part of the experience of watching them is wondering, “What is this?” Fictional and non-fictional elements are often scrambled; sometimes beginning and end aren’t apparent, or they seem to have no importance.

Even if you watch “Tanner ’88” on videocassette, it still feels like an inexplicable cable-tv form you’ve stumbled across and haven’t yet got used to. You watch it thinking, “Where did this come from? How did it take shape?” “Cops” can leave you wondering: “Who wrote this? Who’s the director?” Court TV is a story-telling creation (or vehicle) that happens to be a tv network. In these works, the creators aren’t battling the cosmos to wrest form from formlessness, or something from nothing; they’re accepting energy from elsewhere, and surfing on it. Creation becomes less a matter of overturning values and giving birth from the unconscious, and more a matter of balance, imagination, resourcefulness, and craft.

Chris Marker

In his slyness, obliqueness, and love of evanescent effects, Marker (who is French) can seem rather Japanese, and he has often visited Japan. (One of his best films is “The Koumiko Mystery,” a portrait of a young Tokyo woman.) The painter and art critic Peter Plagens once explained the difference between western and Japanese sculpture to me this way: westerners make objects that assert their presence against nature, while Japanese sculptors make slipknots in the space-time continuum — devices and contraptions that bring out qualities in what flows over, past, and through them.

That’s what “The Last Bolshevik” is like: a kink in the all-pervasive electromagnetism. Marker is meditative, and his video could be said to be about where images come from, and the roles we play in creating our own fictions and histories. He circles around and around his themes, but dartingly, quick-wittedly.

This video is in the form of six “letters” to Medvedkin, who late in life was a friend of Marker’s. Medvedkin is best known here as the organizer of the Soviet film trains that carried filmmakers, studios, and projection rooms out to the peasants for the sake of education and criticism — to keep the revolution’s fires burning. (In 1988, as perestroika was taking effect, Medvedkin died. One of the last hopes he expressed was that finally a real revolution might be occurring.) The video is Marker’s wave goodbye to his friend, and it’s also a wave goodbye to the movies.

In Marker’s view, the Soviet Union was the great, tragic, esthetic-political experiment of the film age, and he draws connections between it and such subsequent film movements as the French New Wave. “The Last Bolshevik” is impassioned, but it’s also modest and elusive; the computer that Marker, or someone, has used to monkey with some of the historical footage is given its own credit in the title crawl, and this isn’t meant as a joke.

Marker returns several times to talk with a lonely-seeming Soviet cameraman who once worked with Medvedkin. In one shot we see the old technician looking at himself in a mirror through Marker’s Handicam. He seems delighted by the tininess and efficiency of the machine; you have the impression he’s never touched a videotape camera before. As he plays with the focus and zoom, the voice-over says: “this revolutionary’s last act of cinema propaganda won’t be for Communism, it’ll be for Sony.”

Marker is a movie legend himself — he had dealings with the French New Wave, and is the essayist who made such films as “La Jetée,” “Le Joli Mai,” and “Sans Soleil.” In “The Last Bolshevik,” he shows us the industrial age — and its media, and its myths — receding into the distance. Marker isn’t like the artists at the International Center of Photography. He knows that the new technology and demographics are simply moving the old aside. Opening up to history, paradox and irony (and implicating ourselves) is all the “criticism” that’s needed.

Medvedkin — enthusiastic and naive, willfully blind to the turn the Soviet revolution took and desperate to continue working in a medium he adored — gave over in the ’40s and ’50s and made cheery Stalinist propaganda.

Marker, 72 years old now, knows that the artist in the new world has become a relativized figure him/herself. His videotape gets you thinking about how we sully our ideals and let ourselves be misled by them, how we ruin opportunities, and how we see things go to hell. The fact that “The Last Bolshevik” is on tape is one of the most poignant things about it. The infinitely manipulatable video images lap around the edges of the heroic, absurd old film frames like water around a sinking ship.

©1993 by Ray Sawhill

“The Thin Blue Line,” directed by Errol Morris

thin blue line reenactment

People As Kitsch

By Ray Sawhill

Errol Morris’ “The Thin Blue Line” doesn’t sit well. Watching it, you may find yourself engrossed in the story Morris is telling, but deadened and revolted by his presentation of it. Why is this film — which concerns an actual murder, and a miscarriage of justice — so fancied-up? As a reporter, Errol Morris shows canniness, sympathy, verve, openness and persistence. He has the gifts of an eccentric journalist, but he isn’t content with them. He wants above all things to make art, and he’s in thrall to his aesthetic thinking.

The film concerns the murder of a Dallas policeman, and its aftermath. Morris makes the case that the man put in prison for the crime, Randall Adams, is innocent. (Thanks in large part to Morris, Adams’ conviction was recently overturned, and Adams was released from jail.) Most of the movie consists of interviews: with policemen and lawyers, with people who claim to have been witnesses, with Adams himself, and with many others.

It’s puzzling that Morris is so often written about as an innovative, groundbreaking filmmaker. His techniques — which rely on “appropriation,” repetition and references to bad popular art — are pretty familiar. In his presentation, Morris uses no narration, and no expository titles; he doesn’t use titles or voice overs to identify who’s speaking. One result is that the story, which could be summarized in a paragraph or two, comes across very indirectly; the information we need to know is made to seem to emerge from Morris’ artistry. We see and hear only the people he’s talking to, not Morris himself; he makes his comments, such as they are, with his general approach and his editing, and with his photography style, which is related to William Eggleston’s visions of American suburbs as science-fiction film-sets, to “Still Life,” Diane Keaton’s collection of movie-studio promotional photographs, and to the radiation-glow cinematography of Ed Lachman.

The phrase “the thin blue line” is spoken in the film by the judge who sentenced Randall Adams; this judge recalls trying to hold back tears when the case’s prosecutor spoke of the “thin blue line” of men and women, i.e., the police, who stand between law-abiding citizens and chaos. Visually, Morris locates nearly all the people he films within “the thin blue line” (which he pretty clearly wants us to take to mean “so-called ‘normal’ American ways of going about determining truth”). He does this very literally: he films almost all his interviewees in blue light, or against blue walls. In one case he color-coordinates a woman interviewee’s blue eyeshadow and blouse with the light.

Morris gussies the film up with re-enactments of events from the night of the crime, which he artificializes with slow motion, “obvious” framing and super-deliberate cutting; he turns camera angles as well as certain images — a flung milkshake, popcorn, an ash tray, a dropped flashlight whose lens shatters — into icons of weirdness. Throughout the film, he scatters inserts of grids, maps, diagrams, photos and excerpts from newspaper reports about the crime and the trial; his point is to suggest the texture of “conventional ways of figuring things out.” (Some viewers may instead find this to be an instance of an aesthete’s fascination with the morbid reaches of tabloid journalism.)

He drops into the film excerpts from old crime movies — cruddy Hollywood junk he seems to want us to regard as what, in America, takes the place of an unconscious. These interludes are also scolding little lectures on “how America imagines crime to be and how it actually is” — Morris and the hip, appreciative audience presumably being those in possession of the true facts.

Morris is putting most of his filmmaking energy into creating a Next Wave-style art object about America the Grotesque. He treats the people he films, as well as the murder and the possible miscarriage of justice, as kitsch objets d’art that are evidence of a psychopathology that dwells within America. He isn’t interested in the people inside the kitsch; he’s interested in people to the extent they can be seen as kitsch. This is a form of snobbery that verges on outright cruelty. Morris uses his self-consciously foursquare framing and lighting (both of which suggest the way products such as dishwashing soap were presented in ’50s ads) to make us wince and giggle at the appearance of a woman lawyer who tried to defend Adams. We have to get over the reaction he has enforced on us to realize how on the ball the woman lawyer is, and how much gumption and brains she put into the case.

As a filmmaker, Morris is an aesthetic dandy with an elaborately-achieved, politically/artistically-correct, distanced/passive pose. He abstracts himself — his physical presence, and his human reactions — right out of the movie. We’re meant to register that he isn’t taken in by — and that he won’t take part in — kitsch culture. It’s clear that we’re meant to feel that Morris is more likely than a “mainstream” documentarian not only to answer the question of Adams’ guilt or innocence, but to be onto something philosophically impressive — like “the nature of truth,” or “how we do/don’t perceive,” or “the myth of objectivity,” or some such. What his film style signals us isn’t just that Morris believes that he recognizes the dangers and limitations of “the thin blue line,” but that he thinks it necessarily produces grotesqueries. He stands outside the thin blue line: his pose is “I’m a Martian lost in mid-America. Isn’t what’s going on around here bizarre?”

In a bit of audio-tape recording that’s included in the film, a hick charmer named David Harris, who spent part of the evening of the murder with Randall Adams and who is now on death row for another crime, all but admits that he, not Adams, killed the cop. (We have to obtain the film’s production notes to find out that that the reason this interview was recorded only on audio-tape was because Morris’ camera broke. And we have to read the production notes to find out that when Morris asked Harris if he acted alone, Harris nodded yes. Morris’ aesthetic — which is meant to question the possibility of directness and spontaneity, as well as the possibility of the existence of a speaking “I” — prevents him from simply telling us anything.) This is the only time during the film we get a sense of Morris’ person, and of his involvement in the case. It comes as a shock to realize that as a reporter he’s so quick on his feet; he’s sparring successfully with a psychopath.

But what Morris shows us during this passage is the minicassette recorder the tape is supposedly playing on. He shows it from all sorts of angles, the images dumbed-up in a “this is how bad photographers once took color photos” way, the editing treated similarly. He ends the sequence with an enormous shot of the tiny reels turning around and around. This turning over and over is of a piece with the rest of the film. For instance, Morris plays, and then replays and replays some more, his deliberately-fake reenactments of the murder, and then he replays them yet more. Only a couple of times do the reenactments serve an explanatory purpose — for instance, when we realize that people in passing cars who later testified against Randall Adams couldn’t possibly have gotten much of a look at the face of the man with the gun.

The rest of the time, what Morris has us watching is a slowly-modulating abstraction, like a musical phrase that’s changing ever so slightly as it moves past us time and again. In these passages, Morris does achieve an effect like those associated with the composer Philip Glass, who composed the film’s soundtrack music. But how will the family of the murdered cop feel when they see an actor playing their relative get blown away what seems like a dozen times for the sake of a rarified aesthetic effect?

Morris wants us to believe that his conclusion, which represents a genuine triumph of reporting, is in fact a consequence of style. In his thinking, style isn’t arrived at, it’s generative. The film, whose material lends itself to hard hitting, fast-moving treatment on “60 Minutes” (get the facts out there and make something happen, now!) is more than a little inhuman. Although he spent a great deal of time helping reopen Adams’ case, Morris-the-filmmaker doesn’t mean — or at least won’t be caught meaning — to inform or protest. His film conveys no urgency and no outrage.

What the film is really about is Errol Morris’ aesthetic responses. His filmmaking emphasis is all on his own way of seeing. Morris seems to believe that he’s an artist because he’s consciously perverse, and what he seems to want us to do is examine his obsessiveness, drive and willfulness as if they were somehow akin to what he would have us take as an insanity at the heart of the nation. But dwelling on your aesthetic responses to material like this is really kind of horrid. An actual murder and a miscarriage of justice aren’t great material to base refined, illusion-and-reality style games on. “I think the film is broader than just the story of a miscarriage of justice,” Morris told the Washington Post. “It’s a film about evidence, about illusion and self-deception, confusion, error. About lying and truth-telling.”

“Just” the story of a miscarriage of justice? Just?

©1989 by Ray Sawhill. First appeared in Anarchy! magazine.