Category Archives: Documentary

Art Film, Documentary, Imaginary French Cinema

#83 – Christmas Day, 1989

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(1991, Fr, 102 min) Dir Remy Disco.

Produced by the Remy Disco’s Institut de Réalisme Fictive (Institute of Fictional Realism) during its nineties heyday along with their restaged compilation of Gulf War I related speeches, their nine-hour dramatization of Gorbachev’s three day house arrest during the 1991 coup and many other political moments of the era. The whole of the film is essentially a staging via court documents of the trial that ended with Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu’s execution but, in keeping with the Institut’s aims to realise the fictitious (i.e. to render ‘fictitious’ events like the news ‘real’), the whole thing takes place in the offices of an insurance firm with the two leads an anonymous and disgruntled middle-aged couple. It’s all here from the Ceaușescu’s ten minute meeting with their council Nicu Teodorescu to them being led away to be shot, though the film doesn’t actually show this as Disco eschews the use of ‘conventional dramatic props’ like firearms. The effect is totally boring and not in a slow cinema transcendental boredom kind of way but then I think that’s the point of it, to recontextualise world-changing events in language so banal that they can be viewed in their most elemental form. Or something.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Documentary, Imaginary US Cinema

#79 – 1983

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(1987, US, 183 min) Dir Ted Malcolm.

Radical, mad and mostly unseen documentary. By the mid-eighties Ted Malcolm hadn’t directed in the guts of a decade when he was hired by the progressive Washington-based Grapes Institute to produce an hour-long documentary about inequality. Two years later he handed in this – a three-hour plus meditation on how then governments were dismantling the apparatus of the state and concocting imaginary wars in order to bring about a world order more alike Orwell’s 1984 than he thought anyone realised. The Grape Institute – which was partly public funded – panicked and stuck the cans in their vault. Six months later Malcolm was at Cannes showing the film out of competition – according to interviews he himself broke into the Institute’s vaults to liberate his film and yes, when they went to check up on this, they found that the cans were actually missing. Cue lawsuits. If you’re lucky you might get the chance to see this as I did, surreptitiously, at the Cork Film Festival a six years ago but while it’s well worth three hours of your time for it’s brazen provocations and the sheer skill of it’s making, weaving as it does a half-dozen narrative without short-changing any, it has to be said that it has less to say about the politics of it’s era than it does about Malcolm’s then deteriorating state of mind with leaps of logic that don’t hold up to scrutiny and suspicions that seem only to exist in his paranoia.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Black and White, Documentary, Drama, Imaginary British Cinema, Science Fiction

#75 – Rivers of Blood

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(1970, UK, 48 min, b/w) Dir Ted Malcolm

Shot for the BBC and set in 1983 Malcolm’s film, as the title might suggest, takes as its starting point Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 speech to hypothesise a right wing anti-immigration victory in British politics and what that would mean for Britain. This gritty docudrama crosscuts between footage of the Dover camps in 1983 as shot by a news crew of the time where West Indian and Pakistani deportees are interviewed and talking head sections where historians and politicians detail the mechanics of racialist policies both historically and contemporaneously. Notable by his absence, unsurprisingly, is Powell himself. Malcolm found himself following in his compatriot Peter Watkins’ docudrama footsteps in more ways than one with his film as it was not broadcast in the year of its making (an election year with a Tory win) but was instead “shelved indefinitely”. It has only been seen since as part of film festivals or retrospectives but, as of writing, has never screened nationally or been released on DVD or video. That could all change and were it to be belatedly released it would underline it’s continued relevance now that immigration has once again come to define British politics.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Documentary, Imaginary French Cinema, Imaginary US Cinema

#67 – Phone

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(2012, US/Fr, 193 min) Dir Murray Grossman.

Another epic and encyclopaedic documentary from Grossman, this one following the construction of a mobile phone from the mines in Mongolia and Sierra Leone where the rare earth minerals are dug up to the engineers in South Korea and the United States who construct the various parts like the gyroscope, liquid crystal display and internal processors and then to the enormous plants in China where all these elements are put together, assembled into the finished product. More than that each part is subject to a brief biography, like a short film within the film, telling you who invented it, who designed it, what the elements are used for in the finished products and the people involved at every juncture, from the designers to the assembly line workers, are heard from and their lives illuminated. Despite what it sounds like it’s not a polemical film either, simply addressing the facts as they are. Over two years in the making Phone is more like spending three hours on Wikipedia following links than the standard documentary but it does what Wikipedia can’t – it puts a face on the modern world and realises fantastically how much modern industry straddles the globe. It may well sound like the most boringest documentary of all time but you’ll come out of the cinema gobsmacked, believe me.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Documentary, Imaginary US Cinema

#62 – All Art is a Sham

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(2014, US, 80 min) Dir Alex Gibney. Cast Anthony Kane.

The gazillionth documentary from Gibney in the last couple years and the simplest in execution, being basically an illustrated talk from Kane punctuated with interviews with him and with famous faces that either back or dispute his thesis. And what a thesis – Kane famously quit The New Yorker in 2005 to write the book this documentary is named after, causing a kerfuffle in the arts in the process. The big idea, from the man himself: “We’re always told that what separates us from the animals is math, science and art. This is bunk – the first two undoubtedly serve a purpose but art only exists to fuel our narcissism. All art, no matter how misanthropic it appears to be, exists to reinforce our status and worldview. It’s essentially propaganda that is made by us, for us. In my book I describe it rather crudely as masturbating while looking in the mirror but that’s what it is – a luxuriating in our own self-regard while we destroy all around us in fulfilment of our childish gratification. Anyone who tells you otherwise – about the transformative nature of art or whatever else – has a stake in making you believe that to be so.” This is from a former cultural reviewer too! He expands on this with reference to the history of art, from Monet to Hirst, cave painting to Tarantino. The only time the unflappable Kane loses it is at the end, at a Q&A when an audience member calls him a fascist. “I am not a fascist,” he replies, red-faced, “The fascists loved art because it flattered them! I require no such flattery!” The film, much like the man himself, is mad and occasionally bizarrely persuasive. “Once we cast off the shackles of art,” he concludes, “We will finally be able to grow up.”

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Art Film, Documentary, Imaginary US Cinema

#36 – Access Road

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(2012, US, 87 min) Dir Emmanuel Pascal, Andrea Filipe.

An ethnographical docufeature from Pascal and Filipe, the makers of 2009’s Raised Road that followed the titular elevated motorway’s three year construction in the Philippines. Access Road ploughs a similar furrow in the unnarrated documentation of process and progress. A road is built through the forests of the Pacific Northwest to the site of a prospective mine. Trees are felled and rock dug out by bulldozers to make way for the asphalting crews. At the end of the road is the mountain, at which point the demolition crew get to work. The camera seems as interested in the environment and the equipment as it is in the people, keeping itself at a distance to the action being observed. Not everyone will be happy with this perspective being that it casts the workers as ants in the dirt and indeed there are those who have condemned the filmmakers oeuvre as ‘construction porn’ that sides with the devastation being witnessed. Of course an equal amount have taken an opposite view, that the remove places the filmmakers in the God’s eye view of nature, witness to it’s own ravishment. Personally I can see neither vantage point being explicitly portrayed but instead see a process usually hidden from view – one that forms part of our society for good or ill – being documented without prejudice for us to judge ourselves. That diametrically opposing perspectives can be had based on this film speaks volumes, I think, of the directors’ success.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Documentary, Imaginary British Cinema

#31 – Is Your Life Worth Living?

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(1974, GB, 51 min) Dir Alan Foster. Cast Phil Farmer, Janet Bee, Oliver Basquit.

A strange bit of propaganda produced by Anthony Beckett, the head of the notorious Anti-Life Brigade prior their disbanding the following year. The film takes the form of a documentary following three people – Phil, Janet and Oliver – as they occupy themselves in their day-to-day life while being interrogated by an omnescient narrator as to the point of their existence, the pointlessness of their marrying and reproducing and so on. As a failed propaganda this would have come and gone and that would be that but following the demise of the ALB copies were passed about film societies in the UK and it was shown once or twice television too. Unfortunately for Beckett this interest wasn’t for the film’s philisophical arguments but for the comedy of every point the film’s leads come up with for living being rebuked by the narrator’s doomy stentorian voice, like a furiously depressed Christopher Lee. For example, from Phil: “Sometimes on a Sunday I’ll go to the pictures – that puts the time in.” Narrator: “In the life of the universe the time you spend on earth is so insignificant that you might as well not exist.” There are, so far as I know, no records of the film’s effectiveness.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Black and White, Documentary, Imaginary Irish Cinema

#1 – Bread on the Wind

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(1932, Ire, 32 min, b/w) Dir Seamus de Pascal.

A kind of realist/surrealist documentary that suggests Buñuel on holiday in Sligo, the mysterious (and pseudonymous) de Pascal serves up a horse’s lucky gold shoe (he won’t plough without it), a village of blind crones stitching frocks for cigar smoking clergy and – in the most astonishingly realised vignette – a family using a beached Spanish galleon as a house complete with their washing strung between the masts to dry and children sleeping in the barrels of its long abandoned cannons. Despite the fancy on display de Pascal – here helming his only film – never shies from the squalor of rural Ireland in his time. The film ends with a hilltop family, scanning the horizon for the flock of loaves suggested in the title but doesn’t reveal whether this is a hunger fuelled delusion or whether this is an Ireland so poor that even the bread migrates to warmer climes.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms