Michael Moore

“Documentary 101” Sampler, Part Three

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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.

“Documentary 101: A Viewer’s Guide to Non-Fiction Film” is a first-of-its-kind anthology, covering the entire spectrum of non-fiction film from 1895 to the present day. 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.

Below are five more snippets from the book, accompanied by film stills only seen here.

berkley

During the Sixties, Berkeley, California became a boiling cauldron of activism and left-wing causes, the ingredients added one after the other (civil rights, free speech, Vietnam, feminism, the ecology) until it threatened to spill out of control. As to how this widespread culture of protest developed, director Mark Kitchell touches on the curious phenomenon that is the “oppression” of upper-middle-class white youth. It starts with parents who came of age in the Depression trying to give their children “everything” as they raised families in the expanding postwar economy. When this edged over into the materialism and conformity of the 1950s, it sowed the seeds of rebellion. Kitchell infers that these kids could only break through the status quo if they considered themselves not to be privileged in the conventional sense, but instead to have been raised in spiritual and intellectual poverty.
(Berkeley in the Sixties, 1990)

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roger

Michael Moore financed much of the film’s $160,000 budget himself and centered it on his own fumbling attempts to meet GM chairman Roger Smith and convince him to personally meet a few of the Flint area’s 30,000 newly unemployed… Toward the end of the film the camera is behind Moore’s shoulder as he finally tracks down Roger Smith at the GM Christmas party. The chairman has just given a speech where he somehow saw it fitting to quote Dickens’s famous monologue from “A Christmas Carol” (“I always thought of Christmas as a good time . . .”). Many viewers by this time would likely see Scrooge’s callous comments about the “surplus population” as the more fitting passage. At least Moore gets to speak to Smith amid a milling crowd; he’s just come from Flint “where we filmed a family [of a former GM worker] being evicted from their home on the day before Christmas Eve. Would you be willing to come with us to see?”
(Roger & Me, 1989)

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ereol morris

With “The Thin Blue Line”, director Errol Morris would ultimately achieve what most documentaries can only strive for: affecting tangible change on the issue raised by the film. The publicity surrounding the film in 1988 helped to overturn the murder conviction of former death row inmate Randall Adams, who was released from prison the following year. Originally sentenced to be executed in the 1976 killing of a Dallas, Texas, police officer, the dubious case against Adams had already caused a reduction to life in prison when Morris caught wind of the case while researching in the Lone Star State for a possible documentary on a related subject. Morris helps to correct a travesty of justice without ever coming within a mile of a soapbox, building a case against the legal system despite his seeming impartiality. Even more impressive is that he does this while having the stylistic daring to hone a detail-obsessed, overtly cinematic form of nonfiction filmmaking that would greatly influence the genre through the 1990s and beyond.
(The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris pictured in 1988)

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american dream

Set against an economic paradigm shift and the anti-union bias of the Reagan presidency, director Barbara Kopple investigates the nationally publicized 1985 strike at a Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota. She contrasts an old company film touting founder Jay Hormel’s enlightened employee-friendly policies with the compulsive bottom-line mentality of modern management and shareholders. The union splits into two in over strategic differences, sometimes ripping apart families in the process. The protracted strike leaves Koppel with plenty of time to portray a beleaguered American working class, with millions hung out to dry as the once-proud industrial sector becomes inexorably replaced with an anemic retail and service sector economy.
(American Dream, 1990)

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paradise lost

Modern-day America comes off looking more like a spruced-up version of the Dark Ages when three teenagers in Arkansas are arrested for the murder of three young boys and the only “evidence” against them seems to be that they dress in black, listen to heavy metal music, and have a high school-level interest in the black arts. This literal witch hunt forms the basic premise of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s masterful but distressing documentary. The fate of the accused seems as preordained as that of the Negro defendant in “To Kill a Mockingbird” in an earlier film treatment of the American South.
(Paradise Lost:The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,1996)

“Documentary 101” Sampler (Part 2)

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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.

“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.

Below are five more snippets from the book, accompanied by film stills only seen here. Click on images for a larger view.

hearts minds

Lieutenant George Coker, was a POW for seven years who returns home with a worldview that remains as black-and-white as one of those old Westerns. No one nowadays would begrudge Coker his status as a homecoming hero in his hometown of Linden, New Jersey. He takes the stage in front of a group of local housewives, literally extolling the virtues of motherhood and apple pie, calling the enemies “gooks” and telling a cafeteria full of schoolchildren that the people of Vietnam are “backward and primitive.” The film seems to imply that Coker is the perfect surrogate for a shortsighted national policy, someone who bought into the system early on and can be relied on to help carry out any military agenda no matter how shaky its justification.
(“Hearts and Minds” 1974)

28 up

Jackie, Lynn, and Sue are former East End school chums who for several episodes were interviewed together and even sitting in the same order. In earlier times, director Michael Apted used subtle tactics to get them to react to what is perceived to be their station in life. But they are now hip to the director they have known for so long, pointing out that the rich kids in the Up group must have found it hard living up to the greater expectations. Besides, they only think about class “every seven years, when you come around.”
(Pictured with Apted during the filming of “28 UP”, these three subjects are part of a group profiled every seven years since they were seven. “56 Up” was released in 2013.)

harlan county

The miners only receive medical benefits after they have been diagnosed with black-lung disease and they are generally treated as little more than another piece of equipment, easily replaced when broken. When the thirteen-month strike begins, you may already find yourself convinced that things haven’t changed much since the early mining days when picketers were openly attacked by police or troops. Director Barbara Kopple is right in the eye of the hurricane during the increasingly hostile confrontations at the gate and she’s not seen as a neutral presence when the company strongmen up the ante with impulsive violence.
(“Harlan County USA” 1976)

911

In one of the film’s more notorious scenes, President Bush is shown sitting at his Florida-classroom photo op, staring vacantly into space for seven full minutes after being informed the U.S. has just suffered the worst terrorist attack in history. Since Michael Moore can’t resist showing this sequence in nearly real time, he fills up the surreal normality of the moment with his own guess at the president’s train of thought as he continued to sit through the reading of “My Pet Goat.”
(“Fahrenheit 9/11” 2004)

les blank
Stalwart indie documentarian Les Blank was invited to Peru by his friend Werner Herzog to record the production of the German director’s wildy ambitious film “Fitzcaraldo.” This tumultuous project inspired Blank’s most sweeping work. It’s an exceptional insider’s look at the cinematic process at it’s most chaotic. The films center on directors whose grandiose vision of a masterpiece gets knocked off course by formidable obstacles of a political, financial, meteorological, and psychological nature, all in a far-off tropical location.
(“Burden of Dreams” 1982)

“Documentary 101” Sampler (Part One)

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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.

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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)

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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)

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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)