Left Center Left

With Oscars coming up Sunday, I thought I’d reflect on one of the more interesting developments in film over the last year: the return of the documentary. Of course, the documentary was never gone, but last summer saw a couple of high profile releases that outshone the art house features in box office and buzz both - Spellbound and Capturing the Friedmans. Since then, a number of higher profile documentaries have come to extended first run showings: Fog of War, Weather Underground, My Architect and Etre et Avoir come to mind. The latter, in fact, seems to be going on its third month of first run at the Coolidge Corner theatre. Pretty amazing feat for a French documentary about a school teacher, with no voiceover narration. What’s behind this renaissance? I have a few thoughts…

The return of totality. For ages, documentary had been associated with a grand approach to its subject matter, one which combined Marxist and Durkheimian visions of social totality. The Griersonian 1930s documentaries, in Britain and the U.S., turned an eye to pressing social issues, like housing and electrical power for the poor. The titles of Frederick Wiseman documentaries, for instance — High School, Hospital, The Store – suggest that the particulars of his observational filmmaking is meant as insight into and commentary on larger social institutions. Even when 1970s filmmakers rejected the 30s’ big microphone approach or the 60s’ false objectivity, they still used the personal is political maxim of documentary as the basis for understanding social totality in gender roles (Word is Out) or labor relations (Harlan County USA).

By the 1990s, that had changed. On one hand, quirky offbeat portraiture documentaries (like Crumb, say) found a market niche alongside ironic, postmodern documentaries of that substituted irony and humor for materialist dialectics (careful viewing revealed more going on in the films of Michael Moore and Errol Morris… more below). On the other hand, “serious” documentarians went on, making quietly political but formally uninspired current events pieces…Latin American dictatorship (Panama Deception), US immigrants (Daughter from Dinang), queer Harlem balldancers (Paris is Burning), the list goes on. I don’t mean to trivialize the often smart perspective the films could offer. And certainly they were every bit as political as their predecessors, maybe more; only, few of them seemed to be about more than the topical issue at hand.

In contrast (and I know I’m taking liberties with historical generalization here), the current films in their understated way traffic in documents of totality. What viewer could watch Spellbound and not realize that something more than spelling bees was what was being covered? Throughout, the whole of social class relations gets explored in the particulars of individual narratives of the spelling bee participants — even if in the end the film is agnostic on questions of class. Similarly, Etre et Avoir is no High School - no structured thesis, no indictment of its subject matter - but it too is a portrait of education as social institution. The schoolteacher is no sinister agent of social control here, but humanist aura aside, the film hinges on subtle revelations that the peasant schoolchildren’s future hinges on their academic achievement from an early age. That the teacher’s own position shows a prized accomplishment for someone from his humble beginnings only frames the class stakes involved.

Postmodern Docs tackle history. Watching Capturing the Friedmans, I couldn’t help but be struck at how closely the film followed the template established by Thin Blue Line: tongue-in-cheek use of music, cross-cutting to undercut interview testimony, atmospheric soundtrack, backing into its thesis rather than presenting it linearly. (Only instead of a cop-killer in Dallas, it’s a child molestation case in Long Island.) But where that film continued Morris’s postmodern documentary, Morris himself pushed his documentary work, forsaking the quirky portraiture of Fast Cheap and Out of Control and returning again to grand issues, this time war. Fog of War is not without its limitations, and McNamara seems to be holding the reins as much as Morris. Still, I can’t recall a film in a long time that pushed the viewer to question the use that documentaries tend to have of historical footage as usefully as this one did. It doesn’t use voiceover to make the image signify what it’s supposed to, but rather sound (McNamara’s interview) and image continually collide in fascinating unpredictable ways.

Furthermore, in this light, I might mention Weather Underground. Hardly postmodern in feel, it still is all about our difficulty in effecting and understanding historical change. Not a viruoso film by any means, it still has wonderful archival footage. If there’s any justice, it will lead some distributor to dust off Emile de Antonio’s Underground and his works as a whole.

Opening of Academy rules. Previously, only documentarists in the Academy could nominate or vote on documentary films. Starting last year, the process was opened up to allow all members to vote. That move, I suspect, was instrumental in Michael Moore, a maverick in documentary form, winning the Best Documentary award. This year, four of the films have had prominent first run distribution. Compare this scenario with previous years when the nominations were unheard of, even after the awards. This change portends well for the future and vitality of documentary filmmaking.