Author: Rick Ouellette

I'm a freelance writer and photographer and the author of the graphic novel in-progress "In a Dream of Strange Cities. My previous non-fiction works include "Rock Docs: A Fifty Year Cinematic Journey" and "Documentary 101: A Viewer's Guide to Non-Fiction Film," was released in 2013. My other activities, like psychogeography, bicycling, and a little urban exploring tie into the content of this blog, which is dedicated to the celebrating the rich history of rock music, film, literature and popular culture.

“Documentary 101” Sampler (Part One)

img363

Now on sale as both a paperback and e-book: http://booklocker.com/books/6965.html Also available from Amazon and other online book sellers.

Roger and Me. March of the Penguins. Man on Wire. Paradise Lost. Grizzly Man. Gates of Heaven. Taxi to the Dark Side. Super-Size Me. Spellbound.

In recent decades, titles like this have raised the profile of documentaries like never before. The appeal of films that rely on the testimony of real life have increased in the age of the “indie” and attracted a growing numbers of viewers looking for an alternative to a movie industry that too often seems fixated on the bottom line.

Documentary 101 is a first-of-its-kind anthology, covering the entire spectrum of non-fiction film with entries on over three hundred titles from the years 1895 to 2012. There are 101 full-length reviews of documentaries chosen for their aesthetic prominence and/or historical significance, followed by briefer entries on related titles. There are 325 total reviews and an informational appendix in its 418 pages.

Over the next several weeks I will be excerpting the book, using film stills I purchased that were not included for reasons of cost and the eternal differing opinions on what constitutes fair use.

img356

The man director Robert Flaherty named Nanook (“The Bear”) was a prominent hunter for the Inuit tribes in the landmass to the east of uppermost Hudson Bay. He fashioned a “family” for Nanook and brought along on expeditions a handful of men known to him. They were all enthusiastic about the idea of the movie, which they called the “aggie” (big picture). From the start of film, Flaherty’s sympathies are clear: free of civilized neuroses, these are “the most cheerful people in all the world”, and the keen focus on daily survival skills affords them an inspirational aura. The affection Nanook and his screen wife show to the children and the children’s affection towards their puppy shrinks the vast distance between the subject and viewers. But the survival “lifestyle” is rugged stuff and the bulk of “Nanook of the North” is made up of a series of memorable hunting scenes. The 300 members of this tribe scrape out a living on a frozen range the size of England. The specter of starvation is always close at hand and Flaherty does not forget the crucial nature of this struggle—he hardly could have because he was part of the same knife’s edge existence during his sixteen months of filming. (“Nanook of the North” 1922)

fires started

Humphrey Jennings’ tribute to (Britain’s) Auxiliary Fire Service was called “Fires Were Started” and may have seemed passive in comparison (to the war’s more pugnacious bugle-call films), despite now being the most critically lauded of his works. It is set up as a dramatic film, largely re-created by real brigade members since large-scale bombings had ceased in London by 1943. There is no mention of the Germans until the twenty-eight-minute mark, when the banshee wail of an air-raid siren pierces the night. The brigade is sent to tackle an inferno at a dock warehouse and keep it from spreading to munitions-carrying ships due to sail for the Continent.
(“London Can Take It” and other films by Humphrey Jennings, 1940-1951)

img357

The popular legend that took hold in France after World War II, of a widespread resistance that fought Nazi occupation tooth-and-nail, comes under intense scrutiny in Marcel Ophuls’s epic work, one of the most critically acclaimed of all documentary films. Using the city of Clermont-Ferrand as a microcosm of the whole nation, Ophuls bravely makes the case that the forces of collaboration were much stronger and reduced France to a long-term accommodation with one of the most deplored regimes in history. “The Sorrow and the Pity” certainly struck a raw nerve with officialdom at the time of its release. It was banned from French TV for ten years.
(“The Sorrow and the Pity” 1971)

columbine

In the early minutes of the film there are some readymade Michael Moore moments like the well-known scene where he opens a savings account at a Midwest bank in order to receive the free shotgun that apparently has replaced the complimentary toaster of days gone by. But “Bowling for Columbine” works best when Moore is seen on camera talking matter-of-factly to a wide variety of Americans and trying to come to terms with the country’s high level of gun violence. This is not the easiest issue to suss out, especially when the murder rates of other industrialized countries barely rate as a fraction when compared to the United States. During a side trip into Canada, Moore finds that there are seven million guns in about ten million households nationwide, yet the folks there would barely know what a homicide looks like.
(“Bowling for Columbine” 2002)

img360

In 1983 Life magazine hired acclaimed photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark to do a story on the growing problem of teenage runaways. Her central subject was Seattle’s skid row and within a year Mark returned there with her filmmaker husband, Martin Bell, to make this equally sympathetic and non-judgmental film. These kids, most in their early teens, eke out a living via panhandling, prostitution and dumpster diving, forming a makeshift society on the fringes of the “respectable” world.
(“Streetwise” 1985)

All Hail Summer

Lord of the Ry's

When I return from vacation in early August, the almost never-ending saga of getting my book into final (and publishable) form will be over. “Documentary 101: A Viewer’s Guide to Non-Fiction Film” will be available on Amazon, my indie publisher booklocker.com, barnesandnoble.com and other online outlets. If you’re interested and feeling particularly virtous, request it from a local bookshop.

The book is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive anthology of non-fiction film, featuring reviews of well over 300 documentaries. Excerpts, along with related film stills that I had bought but never used, will start appearing in weekly installments here starting in August.

With a little luck and free time, I should also be releasing Part Two of my series “The Pale Beyond” about abandoned state hospitals in Massachusetts. In the fall, I’ll be back to the film reviewing, with added emphasis on rock docs and other musical subjects.

Enjoy your summer, hopefully we are done with the mid and upper 90s!
Thanks for reading,
Rick

Charlie is My Darling (Doc of the Week #10)

Charlie

The Rolling Stones: Charlie is My Darling—Ireland 1965
Directed by Peter Whitehead—1966—64 minutes

The Rolling Stones certainly are no strangers to celluloid, at least from the late Sixties on. In roughly chronological order, we got their headlining appearance in “Rock and Roll Circus”; a Jean-Luc Goddard agitprop period piece framed around their recording of “Sympathy for the Devil”; the Maysles Brothers’ hippie-dystopia classic “Gimme Shelter”, and various concert films from the 1970s on, culminating in Martin Scorcese’s 2008 “Shine a Light.” This spirited record of a showcase gig at New York’s Beacon Theater established the Stones as leaders of a movement that can only be called geriatric rock, carrying the flag of a genius era into the Social Security age bracket.

Good footage of the early Stones has been harder to come by. Their ascent to fame in the days before mass media overkill has yielded little more than their “T.A.M.I. Show” set and some old Ed Sullivan clips. Until now. Produced by their manager Andrew Loog Oldham reportedly to get his rising stars used to the idea of film, “Charlie is My Darling” was the first documentary about the band. The director was Peter Whitehead who would go on to make 1967’s “Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London” when the music-driven youth movement was in full “swing.”

After a brief theatrical release, however, all prints of “Charlie” were reportedly stolen and the film receded from memory, only getting a proper re-release in conjunction with the band’s 50th anniversary tour. Now you can wind the clock back almost as many years to the screaming-teenager epoch of the mid-1960s, as the boys are whisked off to Ireland for a quickie tour hastily arranged to capitalize on the recent smash hit “Satisfaction.” It’s a bit of a revelation here to see the Stones in the first flush of their youthful success. The Beatles have “A Hard Day’s Night” and Bob Dylan the warts-and-all “Don’t Look Back.” Here the five Stones likewise struggle with whirlwind fame, each of them ambivalent and thoughtful when Whitehead interviews each in turn.

A brilliant montage set to “Heart of Stone” shows the band arriving in Dublin where the establishing street scenes recall the age of James Joyce a half-century previous. But even if the country was still largely in the parochial grip of the Catholic hierarchy, the kids quickly shake free of that once the Stones hit the stage. The clarity and immediacy of this restored footage is electrifying, the lean-and-mean band whip their fans into a frenzy straight out of the gate with “The Last Time”, not that the crowd needs much whipping up. The Stones were already well known for the riotous audiences they attracted and by the end of third number, the stage invasion is in full stride, easily captured by Whitehead’s in-the-wings camera.

A bit of this footage recently turned up in the recent “Crossfire Hurricane” doc but it’s good to get the full flavor of those days here. The interviews reveal five guys to whom fame is still new and a little intimidating. Mick Jagger, an exciting young performer but hardly the indomitable peacock of later years, admits “I don’t know who I am on stage.” Keith is already the sly one, Bill is practical and Charlie misses his wife. Most poignantly, Brian Jones frets about the Stones’ chances for sustained success and—four years before his death—says, “I’ve always been a little apprehensive about the future.”

Elsewhere, you get the expected shots of the band being chased in public places, vox populi with the teenybopper lasses and hotel scenes of the guys goofing around and (more interestingly) writing a new song, “Sitting on a Fence.” Back onstage in Belfast, the joyful abandon in their version of Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” is visceral and the cathartic discontent of “Satisfaction” would probably never sound so real again—worldwide success was just around the bend. The druggy excesses and jet setting and artistic peaks were all to come and this guileless snapshot from a distant monochromatic past is the perfect antidote to today’s over-hyped media landscape.

Plimpton! (Doc of the Week #9)

movie_poster

(Currently only showing in Boston, LA and D.C., make a note to maybe check this out when it gets a wider release or is made available on DVD or to stream. A fine work by a couple of guys wo got started at Scout Productions, a place where I worked at in 2000-01)

Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
Directed by Tom Bean & Luke Polling—2013—86 minutes

Lately I’ve been thinking it is time to tweak that old saying by Andy Warhol. In the future, everyone and everything will be the subject of a documentary. This week it’s George Plimpton’s turn to shine in the non-fiction film firmament. In this appealing film bio, Bean and Polling uncover extra layers of documentary riches while focusing on the life of the lanky New Yorker who was the good-natured pioneer in the field of participatory journalism as well as co-founder and editor of the Paris Review.

From the 1950s through to his death in 2003, George Plimpton held his spot as a bon vivant of literary life and high-end celebrity culture, the latter nearly a forgotten art form. He will always be most remembered for his everyman-style excursions into pro sports, risking life and limb (or at least embarrassment) by boxing Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson, playing exhibition games as a Detroit Lions quarterback and Boston Bruins goalie, pitching to Major League all-stars and other such misadventures. These experiences would be the raw material for articles in Sports Illustrated as well as full-length books, including the best-selling “Paper Lion” about his footballing follies.

Polling and Bean first met while working at Scout Productions around 2001, around the time the company was becoming known for releasing such singular middle-period Errol Morris films as “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control” and “Mr. Death.” Some of that resident quirkiness can be seen here in the succession of recovered film foibles (Plimpton also tried his hand at being a circus trapeze artist and symphony percussionist) and the bemused recollections of friends and family. Though the general tone is one of admiration, it is tempered with a dash of retroactive regret. “Serious” writers, like novelist James Salter, bemoan the fact that Plimpton was more of a dabbler and could not or would not raise his game to the level of the many authors who he published in the Paris Review and who regularly attended his famous cocktail parties. We see Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth and the like, sometimes all in the same room together. Once taken under the wing of Hemingway, Plimpton seemed just as content to hang out with the Kennedys or appear in TV commercials for video games and garage door openers.

In the end, though, Plimpton’s knack for straddling both highbrow and pop culture, and making it seem all of a piece, is admirable and endearing. It is all part of our wider American culture and should be appreciated as such. But today a new George Plimpton would almost have to split himself in two trying to straddle the widening gap between mistrusted cultural “elites” and the easy-to-despise lowbrow media content that has puked up Kim Kardashian and Honey Boo-Boo. Another subject for another day, but like I said in the future someone will likely make a doc about that as well.

Chronicle of a Summer (Doc of the Week #8)

Chronicle of a Summer
Directed by Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin—1961—90 minutes

At the dawn of the 1960s, the development of more lightweight movie cameras with sync sound allowed for the intimate feeling of real life subjects with minimal intrusion. This would lead to the personalized and spontaneous documentary style that is more the norm nowadays. In America, a resulting style called Direct Cinema launched the careers of DA Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, the Maysle brothers and Robert Drew, whose 1960 film “Primary” was an unprecedented you-are-there look at a Wisconsin primary campaign between Senators Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy. In France in the middle of that same year, ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin made the influential “Chronicle of a Summer”, recently restored and given the grand Criterion Collection treatment, with a booklet and a bevy of extras, including a 73-minute look-back piece that includes recent interviews with people involved in the original film, now a half-century older.

Unlike the practitioners of Direct Cinema, who were more strictly observational, Rouch and Morin’s style newly coined “cinema verite” used proactive strategies to get closer to the kind of “film-truth” they were striving for. Rouch, who previously made films on African subjects, developed this new form (dubbed by one scholar as “hometown anthropology”) by starting with the novel but now-familiar technique of ask-the-man-in-the-street. Using a shoulder-mounted 16mm camera and handheld microphone, he and Morin employ two personable female collaborators (Marceline and Nadine) to accost Parisian pedestrians with the simple (but loaded) question “are you happy?” Comical brush-offs soon yield to some touching responses from aged or struggling citizens, pointing up the fertile ground the filmmakers have broken. Soon, Rouch and Morin settle on a group of people for a more in-depth investigation into the human condition at that precise point in time.

Francophiles and film history buffs will certainly have a head start in appreciating the charms of a film like “Chronicle of a Summer.” The monochromatic allure of mid-century Paris, viewed through a persistent screen of Gitanes smoke, is the background for these earnest interviews, informal roundtable debates and day-in-the life vignettes. Issues like the ongoing Algerian War, which caused a divisive debate akin to what Americans would soon be experiencing over Vietnam, sharpen the edges of what at its core is an inward-looking concept.

So we get a thoughtful discussion between a Renault factory worker and an African exchange student, the earnest musings of an activist couple easing (perhaps uneasily) towards a middle-class lifestyle and the artsy, garret-dwelling couple who scoff at the nebulous idea of happiness (an “empty word”) or that gross material gain would bring it about (memorably noting that their rich friends “don’t have the books and records we do”). The on-camera near meltdown of a young Italian woman hints at the more voyeuristic bent that such film and TV techniques could slip towards in the future. The general self-consciousness of “Chronicle of a Summer” may not always agree with all viewers all the time. But the general impression, that you can pick someone off the street and, giving them a space in which to express themselves, use that testimony to illuminate our life and times better than any talking-head expert, comes through loud and clear.

Detropia (Doc of the Week #7)

Detropia

(Just caught another view of this film as it is the newest entry on PBS’ “Independent Lens” series. Check your local listings as they say and see a postscript I just added below with other Detroit-related items. Rick)

Detropia
Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady—2011—91 minutes (Docurama DVD)

The fastest growing city in the world circa 1930 is left with 100,000 abandoned houses or empty lots less than a century later. A pioneer of heavy industry and worker empowerment is relegated to being the poster child for a national trend that saw fifty thousand factories close in ten years, leaving behind a permanently insecure labor force. The home of Motown and a mighty civic infrastructure reduced to the outward appearance of a fallen civilization. Few places illustrate the diminished American Dream better than Detroit. The documentary filmmaking team of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (who also made the excellent “Jesus Camp”) grapple with this weighty subject with a blend of citizen testimonials and impressionistic visuals, gleaning both the ground-level personal perspective and the dreamlike aura of an oversized ghost town.

Soon after the opening lament by video blogger Crystal Starr, as she gazes at the Motor City skyline from the upper story window of an abandoned apartment building, the film gets right down in the business. United Auto Workers official George McGregor regales the interviewer with stories of past glories while driving to a union hall meeting where most of the chairs remain stacked in the background of the shot. The nearly depleted rank-and-file membership listen in disbelief as McGregor reads out the latest proposal by American Axle, a company already threatening to move its production out of the country. Faced with either accepting a pay package that will leave them with slightly better than fast-food wages, or seeing the same jobs shipped overseas with impunity, it’s hard to leave the scene without understanding why the American middle class seems as gutted as the deserted buildings we see in so many of “Detropia’s” establishing shots.

Elsewhere, we see a nightclub owner trying to hang onto his business in the face of plant closures and fretting at an auto show when he sees the Chinese poised to corner the electric car market; briefly meet a performance-art couple attracted to the city’s low housing costs; and hang out with some enterprising metal scavengers, picking at the carcass of a once-great metropolis and selling the scrap to a country that can use it (China again). For Mayor Dave Bing, the options for improving conditions in this broke city are few. Left with half the town that once was, Bing (a former Detroit Pistons basketball star) proposes consolidating the thinly-spread population—down to 700,000 from a mid-century high of 1.8 million—into higher-density areas while “re-purposing” vacant land for large-scale urban farming. This idea is met with skepticism at a tumultuous community meeting and by a trio of amused front-porch philosophers. It’s these regular folks that make “Detropia” as appealing as it is, counteracting the directors’ tendency for a grab-bag approach that can cause contextual drift. So even amid the ghostly greens and reds of nocturnal street scenes, or snippets of barely-introduced subjects like the African-American opera singer, there will soon be some level-headed resident, with that Motor City mix of gallows humor and dogged perseverance, to keep things grounded.

In the end, several of the subjects sneak their way into the city’s gargantuan Michigan Central Station, the long-vacant Beaux Arts masterpiece that as much as any one edifice symbolizes this epic fall from grace. While the strategic bailout of the auto industry engineered by President Obama offers a modicum hope, the outlook remains bleak. The city went under state receivership in early 2013 and Dave Bing decided not to run for re-election. While there may be no foreseeable turnaround for the city’s endemic woes, to treat this as a matter apart from us is inadvisable in the extreme. “When you see your neighbor going down, you have to think about yourself,” the club owner warns us in the waning moments of “Detropia,” adding “a fire unchecked will only take you out as well.” It is another reminder of America’s abandonment of a production-based society in favor of an economy dependent on a distracted consumerism many can’t afford and lorded over by esurient Wall Street CEOs rewarded for cutting workforces. Ewing and Grady are to be commended for making their accessible and heartfelt film on this discouraging subject.

Det Disassembled

One thing I would have liked to seen a little more of in “Detropia” is the astonishing scale of both what was built there and the extent to which it has fallen to ruin. If you’re like me, then, check out the book “Detroit Disassembled”. I mean that literally. Check it out of the library if you can’t afford the hefty price tag, even if photographer Andrew Moore deserves every penny of it. This is one of the most extraordinary photo-essay coffee table books I’ve ever seen. Moore’s large-format camera peeks into every conceivable corner of what, through his lens, might as well be a lost ancient ruin. A melancholic paen to a faded nation of makers, the infrastructure and institutions that supported this industry-based system are now seen as losing a visceral battle to decay and the forces of nature. The dilapidation of catherdal-like assembly buildings, rococo theaters, technical schools, grand theaters and handsome apartment blocks may seem like an exaggerated and isolated example to some, but it leaves behind a sour taste nevertheless. It makes one think of the pipsqueak service economy we’re left with, 70% of which is dependent on consumer spending while at the same a huge percentage of workers are making the kind of wages that almost make indentured servitude an attractive alternative.

While I’m at it, I will also recommend the 4-minute film clip link below but don’t read the caption as it contains a spoiler alert, Documenatry Division.

Godfrey Reggio’s 2002 “Naqoyqasti”, the last of his trilogy that began with the trailblazing “Koyaanisqatsi” opens with that solemn tracking shot of the Michigan Central Station’s massive vaulted waiting room and once magisterial upper-floor offices, every window now smashed. Back on the ground, a close-up of the building’s mighty portico and entrance has a raging sea superimposed over it and the effect is of all of Western culture being pulled under.

Room 237 (Doc of the Week #6)

Room_237
Directed by Rodney Ascher–2012–102 minutes

There has been a fair amount of buzz surrounding “Room 237” and being a longtime Stanley Kubrick fan, I jumped at the chance to see this compilation of conspiracy theories that have grown up around his 1980 film, “The Shining”. Leaving my local art house a couple hours later, I felt sufficiently entertained (if a bit bewildered) and also a tad envious: where do these people get the time to come up with this stuff? According to the half-dozen interviewees here, Kubrick’s adaptation of the Stephen King horror novel is really one or more of the following things.

A) The veiled confession of a man who feels remorse for helping fake the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.
B) An encyclopedic film essay about sexual repression
C) A coded allegory of the Nazi holocaust
D) A connect-the-dots method of decrying the violent disenfranchisement of Native Americans

The director, Rodney Ascher, never shows onscreen the six conspiracy buffs that are heard expounding their obsessive ideas. This molecular-level investigation of details from “The Shining” runs the gamut from thought-provoking to barking mad. Yes, mainstream critics have kicked around aspects of theories “B” and “D” since the film’s original release. It didn’t take me long after pulling down my copy of “The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick” to find a section where author Norman Kagan quotes writers who spotted the Oedipal implications in the script. The tale of struggling author Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson of course), slowly going crazy over a long winter as caretaker of the snowbound Overlook Hotel, eventually menacing his wife (Shelley Duvall) and his physic young son played by Danny Lloyd, is well-known for its domestic abuse angle. The clues on offer here, though, can get a little outlandish. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a letter tray is just a letter tray. See it and decide for yourself.

The Native American supposition is also not far-fetched, as early on in the film the hotel’s manager reveals that the Overlook was likely built on a tribal burial ground and that the builders were engaged in a few skirmishes during its construction. Kagan details how writers like “History of Narrative Film” author David A. Cook see this “as a film metaphor for a society built on exploitation and even murder.” In “Room 237” one commentator can barely contain his excitement over the prevalence of stacked cans of Calumet Baking Powder (with its Indian logo) in the kitchen scenes. But a more convincing interpretation has to do with the film’s most iconic image. The stationary shot of double elevator doors, from behind which a torrent of blood is unleashed, is all the more powerful when the viewer is reminded that the elevator doors never open, that the genocidal truth will be uncovered even when access to evidence is closed out. It is also intriguing to think that the Jewish, Bronx-bred Kubrick, who never got past the pre-production stages of a planned Holocaust-themed film, may have inserted some below-radar clues that dovetailed with the other secret theme of Indian genocide. But details like the fact that Jack used a German-made typewriter are circumstantial at best.

By here in the land where astonishing revelations lurk behind every continuity error, by far the most eye-rolling of all the theories here is “A”. How did we not know that Kubrick, who set the standard for sci-fi visual magnificence in his 1968 epic “2001”, was somehow recruited by NASA to create on a soundstage what everyone thought they were watching on TV for real when the first men walked on the moon a year later? The old fake-moon-landing gambit has been around forever (remember “Capricorn One” starring O.J. Simpson?) and I doubt that Neil Armstrong would give featured conspirator Jay Weidner the satisfaction of rolling over in his grave. But this part of the film works as well (Ascher is on record as not endorsing his subjects’ opinions) because sometimes it’s just fun to let these people come in from the margins and air it out.

the-shining-still-3[1]

If you can’t tell that Kubrick faked the historic Apollo 11 mission from looking at this still from “The Shining” then you’re simply not trying hard enough.

Weidner is an admirer of Kubrick and in this legit documentary (as opposed to the self-produced ones he hawks on his website) he hedges his bets by stating that he’s not denying those astronauts landed on the moon, only that what we saw on the tube was not all that is seemed. But to use Where’s Waldo methodology to cast doubts on one of mankind’s greatest technological achievements is plain irritating. True, there are eleven cars in the front row of the Overlook Hotel parking lot, and the forbidden Room 217 of the Stephen King novel was changed to 237 for the film, signifying (of course) the approximate distance from Earth to moon in thousands of miles. But that may say more about OCD than it does about the possible secret motives of even a meticulous filmmaker like Stanley Kubrick. Still, some of this does leave you wondering:

shining%20boy[1]

So, yes, there’s a lot of intriguing stuff here and dedicated movie buffs all over will be tipping their caps to Mr. Ascher for this sensory feast. He adds in bits of all the other Kubrick films into the stew and at one point shows us the handiwork of an offbeat film club who project “The Shining” both forward and backward simultaneously, the resulting overlay offers a tantalizing glimpse of thin-air serendipity, comparable to the uncanny sync-up of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” with “The Wizard of Oz.” But Kubrick’s profile in the clouds during the film’s opening aerial shot? I’m just not seeing it. It is possible, as one “Room 237” interviewee suggests, that Kubrick’s 1975 Georgian-period drama “Barry Lyndon” shows a bored artist who came out of the experience with a determination to formulate a new secret language of film. (While we’re at it, let me put in another vote for the reclamation of “Lyndon”, which not only features some of the greatest cinematography ever but also stands tall as an indictment of the economic and class cruelties that dog us to this day).

But whether or not this assumed “secret language” was Kubrick’s intention is a mystery that he took to his grave in 1999. Since conspiracies are hard to prove and too interesting too ignore, they persist over time, whether it’s the “Paul is dead” hoax, the JFK assassination, devil-worshipping messages in heavy metal songs, etc. It lends us a sense of wonder, that there’s a clandestine layer of existence just underneath our everyday world. It’s a fun source of speculation and rumination, although be careful not to let your interest level get you to the point where people cross the street when they see you coming. It may be a bit too late for some of the interviewees of “Room 237.”

Escape Fire (Doc of the Week #5)

escape fire

Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
Directed by Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke—2012—91 minutes

Using the true-story metaphor of a firefighter who kept his wits while his colleagues panicked in the face of a fast-moving wildfire, this film makes a compelling argument for a levelheaded approach to fix a profligate and profit-driven American healthcare industry. This is a system devised so that it “doesn’t want you to die and doesn’t want you to get well”, instead relegating hundreds of millions of people to an expensive habit of suppressing symptoms while doing little in the way of preventative care.

Director Matthew Heineman (founder of the Young Americans Project and producer of HBO’s The Alzheimer’s Project) and veteran documentarian Susan Froemke (who made the Oscar-nominated LaLee’s Kin and was associate producer of Grey Gardens) do an admirable job of approaching this thorny subject with common-sense clarity and quiet compassion while distinctly avoiding the blame game. Through sections like “Good People, Bad System” and “The Dark Matter of Medicine” we watch demoralized doctors and overwhelmed patients being churned through a $2.7 trillion industry, while credible claims are made that three-quarters of that amount is for the treatment of preventable conditions. The directors point out how technological developments in medical devices and wonder drugs have evolved into an end in themselves, instead of being used as needed. “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” offers one expert. This mindset is said to be compounded by the fee-for-service system of doctor compensation, a setup that guarantees a quantity-first/quality-second result.

The end game, of course, has been a crippling inflation of health costs for the patient. One graphic shows what prices of everyday items would be today if they had moved at the same rate of inflation as healthcare since 1945: imagine paying $48 for a gallon of milk! The people interviewed by Heineman and Froemke (like former head of Medicare/Medicaid Don Berwick, nutritionist Andrew Weil and soul-searching PCP Erin Martin) suggest dealing with this issue with a sense of commonality and an enlightened wellness approach. A telling segment dealing with the evolution of a traumatized soldier back from Afghanistan, who frees himself from a multiple-prescription drug regime and finds help with holistic remedies, illustrates the imaginative problem-solving suggested by the title.

Instead, in lobbyist-infected Washington’s we get polarizing healthcare debate of recent years—as depressing as it is predictable—where American’s sense of rugged individualism gets exploited and boiled down into shortsighted self-regard. Even with the passage of Affordable Care Act there is still a long way to go with this issue, not the least of which is the way that the very word “care” (as in “Obamacare”) has been reduced to a derogatory term. Escape Fire is an excellent place to start to get one’s bearing on a crucial societal dilemma that affects us all and needs to be put right in all haste.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Doc of the Week #4)

Tammy faye

(In view of the Supreme Court’s recent hearings on gay marriage cases, and the recent conversion of several Republican lawmakers in favor of same, I figured it was as good a time as any to re-print my review of one of the earlier unlikely “evolvers” on this issue).

The Eyes of Tammy Faye
Directed by Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato—2000—80 minutes

Long seen as a figure of ridicule by those who recall her messy mascara meltdowns during her husband Jim Bakker’s infamous trial, televangelism’s first lady comes across surprisingly well in this entertaining revisionist biopic. Tammy Faye Bakker seems every bit the likable, plain-dealing farm girl who was an equal partner with preacher Jim. The couple built up a three-network TV empire based on a showbiz brand of Christianity that was kinder and gentler than that of most of their counterparts (Tammy is seen embracing AIDS patients way back in the early Eighties). But the Bakkers would be done in by personal scandals (remember Jessica Hahn?) and a penchant for living too high on the hog while their gigantic, parishioner-subsidized Heritage USA theme park was tanking.

The directors have a sharp eye for the snarky appeal of this subject matter, but in the end they ease up on eyeliner discussions and zero in on the dogged perseverance of an open-hearted woman who apparently received a lot more negative publicity than she ever deserved. “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” became a huge hit among homosexual men, and towards the end of her life she declared herself to be in favor of same-sex marriage and made many appearances at Gay Pride events. It’s ironic, given her fundamentalist background, that Tammy became a gay documentary icon almost in a league with Little Edie from David and Albert Maysles’ “Grey Gardens.”

The Pale Beyond (Part One)

The Pale Beyond Part 3 is Coming in June 2014

Danvers State

(The shuttered Danvers State Hospital in the late Nineties. Danvers State was once dubbed “the bad vibes capital of the Northeast” by the Boston Phoenix. I certainly felt it that day. Click on photos for larger view.)

To expand a little bit on the subject of this week’s selected documentary is difficult. But to expand on it “a lot of bit” (as my son used to say) is far easier. The topic of abandoned state-run institutions, and their distinctly spooky allure, has really taken off in the Internet age. The timing was perfect. Many such places, which warehoused society’s forgotten people in sprawling complexes of gothic-type structures, closed in the 1980s, in the age of Reagan-era budget cuts and a shift to community-based care in the treatment of people with mental and physical disabilities. The older state facilities had usually been built on leafy campuses on the margins of metropolitan areas and were soon infiltrated by members of the new urban explorer movement, an activity that combines thrill-seeking with amateur anthropology. Some of the participants were also talented photographers. Finding an audience, and each other, on websites like DarkPassage.com, these people gave a whole new meaning to the term “asylum seeker.”

In our age of autism awareness and 10K charity races for most major medical maladies, it’s fascinating to go back and see the lax standards that prevailed just a couple of generations ago. Willowbrook State School, featured in “Cropsey”, was known for living conditions that are hard to believe in today’s wised-up world. Robert F. Kennedy made a fact-finding visit there in 1965 while U.S. Senator from New York, famously referring to it as a “snake pit.” But his suggested improvements were slow in coming. Several years later, a guy named Geraldo Rivera first gained national attention when he brought a local news crew into the overcrowded facility, filming mentally disabled children, some naked, writhing on the floor in agony. (John Lennon and Yoko Ono saw the televised report and were moved to do a pair of benefit concerts—later released as “Live in New York City”—that were to be Lennon’s last full-length live shows). Even with these exposes, and further revelations by Staten Island newspapers, the last of Willowbrook’s residents were not moved out until 1987.

I grew up not far from one of the most infamous of such places. Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts was opened in 1878 and from my earliest days I remember it looming high above U.S. Route One on a dome-shaped hill surrounded by sloping farmland. Later in life I would find out that it inspired horror writer H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Asylum, which in turn was incorporated into the Batman universe. Interesting, as the place was one of many built on the idealized Kirkbride Plan. These imposing, gabled Victorian compounds had a staggered “bat-wing” layout that were meant to allow for maximum, beneficial sunshine for mentally-ill patients who were to be treated with new and enlightened methods.

Unfortunately, Danvers State became better known for electroshock and frontal lobotomies than for enlightenment. Again, overcrowding had a lot to do with the deteriorating conditions, as people with symptoms nowadays treatable with prescription drugs were shoehorned in with legitimately dangerous patients.

Growing up in West Peabody some four miles away, we kids amused ourselves with scare stories about escaped lunatics from the “Nut House” who made their way down the hill to the apocryphal Danvers Road, a shadowy lover’s lane. Thankfully, our tall tales of the unfortunate couples who parked there were more imaginative than our naming of the road.

session 9

In 2000, I was working for Scout Productions in Boston as a location manager. One day, director Brad “Next Stop Wonderland” Anderson was in a pre-production meeting with a few others at a table near the desk where I was working. I had already heard something of the project that would become the 2001 asylum thriller “Session 9” and I took the liberty of chipping in an idea or two. That would have been a great movie to work on but I was a location scout and none was needed in this case. That’s because the entire movie was to be filmed at Danvers State. Anderson had taken advantage of an initiative by the Massachusetts Film Office to attract filmmakers by allowing free use of any abandoned state-run property. The plot concerned an asbestos-removal crew who get swept up in the evil spirits still radiating from the ruins. Although there was a fairly big star (David Caruso) in the cast, the real main attraction was obvious. From the aerial shots of its massive gothic outline, right down to the skin-crawling claustrophobia of its service tunnels, you just can’t get enough of this place. Although “Session 9” was hampered a bit by its under-developed narrative, it’s still a decent psychological thriller and a valuable time capsule since the site was redeveloped into generic-looking condos. At least the façade of the central section was kept, as seen here in a recent photo I took.
img257

While the behavior of some patients at these places was undoubtedly beyond the pale, the sad legacy of these state hospitals is that untold thousands were committed for reasons that would seem outrageous today (the proverbial “nervous condition” was oft-used). Cast off by unscrupulous or overwhelmed family members and ill-treated by the state, many ruined lives ended there unceremoniously. As a final indignity they often were buried on the grounds in plots marked only by a number.

Here’s my son surveying the spartan landscape of the patient’s cemetery at Danvers State.
img258

In the foreground is one of the recently installed memorial markers. The inscribed numbers are on small gravestones are set flush to the ground. Matching up the numbers to names is not very easy when closed-down institutions kept the records. There are efforts underway by surviving relatives to have the state do more to identify the deceased. But that’s another tangent of this topic, which has legs like few others. More of that in Part Two….