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A Word from our Selectors: Panorama Documentaries

Everybody loves movies. Fiction movies, that is. Why is it that not everybody loves non-fiction movies? Documentaries get a bad rap. Most of these same people watch the news – newsreels used to be called "actualites" – and the plethora of enervating talking-heads programs from the vantage point of their couches. Not to mention reality shows.

Most spectators appreciate narrative films with style. Why is it that a documentary made by a gifted director with an eye and ear toward an appropriate form threaten these same viewers’ comfort zones?

Example 1: Errol Morris’s STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE (2008), presented in last year’s Panorama Documentaries. Morris not only profoundly addresses the horrors perpetrated by American soldiers (and their commanders up the food chain) at Abu Ghraib, but he also deconstructs the reporting of the events with mesmerizing formal panache. Manipulated photographs float across the screen, and beautifully reconstructed scenes – he is one of the few documentarians who can carry that off – are interspersed among the long, close-in interviews, confessionals really, of those who did the dirty work.

Yet few went to see the film when it opened theatrically, and even some normally astute critics were put off by the fusion of aesthetics with hard, and harsh, facts. Why is it that James Marsh’s excellent MAN ON WIRE, also part of last year’s Panorama Documentaries, which also deployed stylized reconstructions, was much more popular, and even won the Best Documentary Oscar? Is it because its subject, egotistical tightrope artist Philippe Petit, who walked between the World Trade Center Towers in 1973, is less intellectually and morally challenging? Outrage and protest can be pretty, too. Has Michael Moore’s manufactured naturalism – bending the truth has always been a Moore specialty, no matter how “realistic” the scenes appear to be – become the barometer for effective documentaries?

Example 2: All of the films in this year’s selection, none of which have that bland tv-only quality. Not that the chosen documentaries could not or should not be broadcast, simply that they transcend the limitations and scope of the tube. It’s the difference between looking at a fiction film on a monitor versus a large theater screen. The style, the organizing aesthetic, for each of the seven films in Panorama Documentaries is different, of a tempo and mise-en-scene that suits the subject matter. Frankly, there is more variety here than in the fiction Panorama.

Take Simone Bitton’s RACHEL, the opening film, from Israel. Bitton applies a leisurely, lyrical touch to the brutal story of an idealistic young American woman who went to Gaza to block the destruction of Palestinian homes and ended up being killed by an Israeli military bulldozer. It is a perfect eulogy to a life cut way too short. In INAL MAMA: THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE, Eduardo Lopez also reveals an unhurried poetic touch, just right for his film essay on the role of the coca leaf in indigenous cultures in his native Bolivia. And Juan Alejandro Ramirez, in his short faux-documentary DIARY OF THE END, from Peru, treats the horrid life and impending suicide of a poor woman in Lima with a similar style. He offers her dignity.

Both Levan Koguashvili’s WOMEN FROM GEORGIA, a Georgian documentary, and Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Hassan Damanzan’s TORGHEH are, appropriately enough, more observational, with perhaps less of an authorial signature. Koguashvili has incredible access to a group of Georgian women working illegally in New York, caring for old and decrepit Jews to support their families back home, so he works unobtrusively following their routines. TORGHEH is about four rural women technically banned from playing a traditional Persian instrument. Damanzan is smart enough to let them play and explain their devotion. The music provides the fluidity usually carried by the visuals.

American filmmaker Robert Kenner’s FOOD INC. is more accelerated, unleashing a torrent of horrifying information about American agri-business’s abuses, and the plight of the unknowing consumer. Kenner could not have made this any other way. And in PETITION, Chinese director Zhao Liang, who shot this over 13 years among poor people from the countryside who come to Beijing seeking the justice that has eluded them at home, melds his frequent hidden-camera scenes with complementary sequences of the petitioners’ daily lives in a shantytown and the personal histories they relay to the camera.

Coda: One wonders if the subjects of these documentaries are in fact…the subjects. I’m not trying to be cryptic. It’s just that in many fine progressive non-fiction films the scope extends beyond the ostensible topic. Is the focal point in large part a synecdoche of larger issues, a point of departure for a broader canvas than might appear on the screen?

RACHEL, for example, is also about Israeli government policy in general. PETITION touches upon human rights abuses and repression in China, FOOD INC. on unbridled corporate capitalism in the U.S., INAL MAMA on American foreign policy and the way the almighty dollar affects more underdeveloped countries, WOMEN FROM GEORGIA on post-Soviet economic disparity and Georgian sexism, TORGHEH on the repression of women in Iran, and DIARY OF THE END on Third World desperation born of financial hardship.

Film is not like a huge book: Time is limited, and most directors want to keep their audience immersed in accessible expository threads. Less serves more very well.

Howard Feinstein, programmer

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