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Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2012: Samsara, Detropia, & More

Samsara is another visually stunning, globe-trotting think piece from the director of Baraka.

Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2012: Diaries: 1971-1976, Samsara, Reportero, Detropia, & More

Ed Pincus was one of the founders of the MIT Film Section, a training ground for future documentary filmmakers like Ross McElwee. Pincus produced a body of work that straddles the line between the purported objectivity of Direct Cinema, a movement he helped pioneer with early works like the Black Natchez, and the more self-reflecting style known as personal documentary. As its name suggests, Diaries: 1971-1976 belongs in the latter category, an intimate epic that examines the inextricable Gordian knot of personal and political commitment by turning the camera eye on friends and family. Bookended by intimations of mortality, the deaths of a relative and close friend, Diaries spends most of its three-hour-plus run time charting the shifting sexual climate of the 1970s, delving into experiments in lifestyle choices ranging from nudism to open marriage. Frequent exchanges between Pincus and wife Jane, a member of the feminist collective responsible for the manifesto Our Bodies, Ourselves, consider the consequences of their decisions not only on their own relationship, but also on their two young children. Diaries also records, albeit in a distanced, Brechtian fashion, the last gasps of anti-war protest and the disintegration of the counterculture, at least the Cambridge variety. For a stretch late in the film, Diaries achieves a gritty kind of New Hollywood vibe as Pincus and a fellow filmmaker range around the desert Southwest, the documentary equivalent of Easy Rider. As a time capsule, Diaries is invaluable, but Pincus’s decision to work against narrative cohesion by cutting away from conversations at key moments, and otherwise hashing up individual segments, renders the film chaotic and disjointed, sapping it of the cumulative impact found in documentaries like Allan King’s A Married Couple, let alone the massive slab of social experimentation then going on over at PBS called An American Family.

Ron Fricke’s Samsara is another visually stunning, globe-trotting “think piece” from the director of Baraka. Once again Fricke’s focus is on transcendence and temporality, using time-lapse photography and immersive 70mm cinematography to explore manifestations of religiosity: a Buddhist mandala painted in sand, the soaring interiors of a Gothic cathedral, Islamic pilgrims circumnavigating the Qaaba in Mecca. Like Koyaanisqatsi, on which Fricke served as director of photography, Samsara gets a lot of mileage out of juxtaposing the splendor of natural landscapes with the hurly-burly of human activity: Luminous cityscapes and vast factory spaces where uniformed workers assemble electronics and household goods segue into massive food-processing facilities and munitions manufacturers. Fricke takes his only serious missteps in these latter segments, concluding sequences with too-obvious visual punchlines (overweight customers cramming fast food into their gullets, a disfigured veteran standing against the endless white crosses at Arlington) that knock the viewer out of the film’s captivating rhythms by clobbering them over the head with Morgan Spurlock-style cheap shots. Luckily, these infractions aren’t egregious enough to capsize the film, which rights itself soon enough and moves along to the spectacle of animatronic doppelgangers and Thai “ladyboys,” before circling back around to its own beginning, fittingly enough, since samsara is a Sanskrit term that denotes the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Reportero is a sturdily built investigation into the perils of investigative journalism that focuses on Zeta, a weekly magazine based in Tijuana, Mexico. Director Bernardo Ruiz does an excellent job laying out the publication’s turbulent history: how its redoubtable publisher, J. J. Blancornelas, overcame obstacles ranging from difficulties in securing reliable printing facilities to multiple assassination attempts (failed and successful) against Zeta’s staff and reporters; the terrible price paid for exposing political corruption; and the stranglehold of narcotraffickers. Along the way, I was frequently reminded of the title of a documentary about the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini: Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die. In that sense, Ruiz’s film is an almost archetypal story about speaking truth to power. What Reportero does best is to flesh that story out with names, faces, and histories.

David A. Siegel is a billionaire, president, and CEO of Westgate Resorts, one of the biggest timeshare companies on the planet. Siegel is in the process of constructing the largest single-family home in the country: a 90,000-square-foot mansion humbly patterned after the palace of Versailles. Jacqueline Siegel is his trophy wife, a former Mrs. Florida and mother to six of his children. From its opening scene, a lavish beauty-pageant photo-op along the Siegel home’s grand staircase, The Queen of Versailles clearly registers its subjects’ greed and exhibitionism, but is their subsequent chastened honesty ever anything but a subset of the latter? David gives interviews seated on a gilded throne, a bust of Napoleon visible in the background, in which he claims to have been singlehandedly responsible for George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential victory through somewhat extralegal means. Jackie has a penchant for enhanced cleavage-revealing ensembles and shopping sprees that require a caravan of SUVs to carry home all the swag. Despite our national fascination with “lifestyle porn,” exemplified by Real Housewives (or pretty much anything broadcast on E! and Bravo), these are not people we are immediately inclined to empathize with. Then the 2008 financial crisis hits hard, precipitated by precisely the sort of subprime mortgage bonanza peddled by Westgate’s timeshare hucksters, and Lauren Greenfield’s film evolves from an ode to entitled obliviousness to a surprisingly evenhanded character study, tracing the fault lines that develop within the Siegel family. Give Greenfield credit: She allows audiences room to empathize with the Siegels’ humanity while never stooping to pity them, an extremely fine line on which to balance a film. The Queen of Versailles is at its best when Greenfield delineates the push-pull between revelation and effacement: detailing the pep talks Siegel’s son and second-in-command gives the Westgate sales staff (all about dangling the illusion of affluence in front of blue collar noses), catching the Siegel family in candid moments that contrast vividly with interview segments where they’re more obviously in control, and, in a scene that literalizes the metaphor of effacement quite nicely, following Jackie into a makeover session complete with facial peel and Botox injections.

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Detropia plays out like the desolate inner-city endgame to Roger & Me’s suburban-entropy scenario, only executed with more poise and visual flair than Michael Moore could ever hope to muster. Moody lowlight cinematography and stropped-razor editing limns the city of Detroit on the verge of collapse, as it slowly disintegrates into isolated pockets of humanity lost at sea amid vast tracts of untenanted real estate. Narrative vignettes revolve around a demographic cross-section of urban survivors: a young woman blogger who assumes the role of inner-city archeologist, exploring and cataloguing the ruins; the head of the local auto workers’ union, leading the fight against lower wages and fewer hours, until the manufacturer decides it’s easier to simply shut down the facility; a bar owner whose establishment is close by the defunct plant, his tour of a “green” auto expo the comic highlight of the film; young white artistes flocking to the derelict downtown, keen on the prospect of low rents and abundant elbow room. Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady possess the good sense to let the segments speak for themselves, eschewing both alarmist Chicken Little antics and showy self-aggrandizement in the face of human suffering. As with the best documentaries, Detropia lacks the effrontery to suggest easy solutions, content instead to frame the necessary questions.

Ross McElwee’s latest rumination, Photographic Memory, spreads itself far too thin to say anything very profound about either photography or memory, apart from a brief (and admittedly intriguing) disquisition on photographic “decontextualization,” the process whereby time strips away the circumstances surrounding the taking of a photograph until only the mute fact of its actual content remains. Oh, and there’s a shameless plug for French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A big part of the reason for the film’s meagerness, over and above the incessant flow of self-indulgent palaver, stems from McElwee’s maladroit juggling of multiple storylines, any one of which, had it been explored with sufficient alacrity, might have yielded something more substantial: There’s his troubled relationship with son Adrian, seen in clips from earlier films as an adorable youngster, now in his late teens, surly and unmanageable; the year he spent in Brittany, right out of college, working as a photographer’s assistant, framed as a quest to find his mentor’s current whereabouts; and (a McElwee specialty) plenty of time spent pining after the possibilities represented by a lost love.

“Nobody joins a cult,” claims one of the survivors in Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple, Stanley Nelson’s assured handling of the Guyana tragedy that resulted in over 900 deaths. People join a community of likeminded individuals because it welcomes and accepts them. That’s an entirely necessary realization if you want to understand the draw of the Peoples Temple. For a time, Jim Jones’s progressive, even utopian vision of racial equality seemed like a viable alternative. The unanswered (ultimately unanswerable) question has to do with the darker forces lurking beneath Jones’s benevolent façade. Was the madness there from the start, only waiting to metastasize? Or did it steadily creep in over the years of (at least perceived) persecution? We’ll never know, and the survivors can only testify to their part in the unfolding nightmare. That testimony is easily Jonestown’s greatest asset. Intended for broadcast as part of PBS’s American Experience, Nelson and editor Lewis Erskine use that series’s prescribed format—alternating between archival footage and talking head interviews without the orientation of voiceover narration) to shape the material in ways that are empathetic and emotionally wrought, yet never exploitative.

From 1963 to 1977, Bob Fass hosted Radio Unnameable, an influential freeform radio program on NYC’s listener-supported WBAI. Fass cultivated a freewheeling, anything-goes atmosphere—playing two songs at the same time, opening phone lines to multiple callers, and letting them hash out their differences. The program also fostered the popularity of in-studio guests, a who’s who of the folk rock and counterculture scene, stopping by to chew the fat and perform their new songs. As the ’60s progressed, Fass aligned himself more and more with the protest movement; consequently, Radio Unnameable served as an on-air command center for countless Yippie-led demonstrations and be-ins. For Radio Unnameable, directors Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson obtained intimate access to Fass’s archives. As a result, the film is richly detailed, even though these riches are often merely glimpsed in passing. Of course, when faced with hundreds of hours of grade-a material, issues of structure and inclusion are bound to arise. Still, I can’t shake the notion that Radio Unnameable would’ve benefitted considerably if only Lovelace and Wolfson had stuck with that material, digging in deeper and broader, rather than padding the film with bootless discursions about kooky contemporary listeners and other distractions.

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Several years ago, Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten made Bananas!*, a documentary about the plight of Nicaraguan fruit workers sterilized by exposure to pesticides. That film quickly ran afoul of Dole’s legal machinery, which went to extraordinary lengths to put the kibosh on it, a process Gertten lays bare in his reflexive follow-up Big Boys Gone Bananas!* Given the nature of the material, it’s hardly surprising that Gertten places himself at the center of the juridical maelstrom, a move that hardly ever comes across as self-serving. The doc provides a surfeit of details exposing corporate chicanery via PR misdirection and legal scare tactics. These elements comprise the film’s strong suit and justify its validity as documentary. The problem lies elsewhere. Framing his story as an unambiguous David-versus-Goliath struggle, Gertten has the pesky habit of preaching to the choir. “Boycott Dole!” stands ready as the knee-jerk response. Nor does the trouble reside entirely in the film’s reception: Tone and tectonics encourage such hasty and uncritical corporate-bashing. Ultimately, I think it’s a moot point whether or not these sentiments are deserved; the issue remains that this variety of faux-populism seems better suited to the soapbox than the silver screen.

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, Volker Sattel’s Under Control takes on an eerily prescient quality. Constructed as a guided tour through Germany and Austria’s dilapidated nuclear power plants, the doc earns its comparisons to Kubrick by viewing these institutions with a jaundiced eye toward outmoded safety precautions, and utilizing a series of leisurely tracking shots to traverse—and render even more alienating—their space-age topographies. Sattel’s filmmaking style also resembles Frederick Wiseman’s explorations of the interplay between environment and process: Under Control thus bears comparison with a film like Missile. Later stops on the tour include IAEA headquarters in Vienna, where administrators lament the Agency’s limited capacity to level sanctions of any merit, and deep-earth storage facilities for nuclear waste with half lives in the millions of years. Along the way, Sattel peppers the film with images of abandoned facilities, power plants in the process of being demolished, even one that’s been converted into the unlikeliest of amusement parks. By the time Under Control loops back around to a now-deserted simulation room, as its control panels light up and warning klaxons go off, you’ll be speculating as to just how ironically the film’s title ought to be taken.

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival ran from April 12—15.

Budd Wilkins

Budd Wilkins's writing has appeared in Film Journal International and Video Watchdog. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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