REVIEW: Dreamcatcher (2015)

Few documentaries these days align themselves as concretely and directly with a particular cause or worldview as Dreamcatcher does. Most documentaries prefer to expose and to criticize without ever offering much in the way of alternatives or positives. Equally, many documentaries prefer hard-hitting action film camerawork and editing over stories about people eloquently and humanistically presented. Dreamcatcher then is a true documentary – a tough view of a world that needs fixed and a clear-sighted but non-judgemental view of the people on all sides of this world, an angry but compassionate, affectionate film about people and their world.

The film follows the Dreamcatcher Foundation, a Chicago-based movement that provides a framework for women to get out of sex work on their own terms and in their own time. The co-founders, Brenda Myers-Powell and Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, are both former sex workers themselves, are first seen driving around the streets of Chicago at night, offering help and assistance or simply condoms to anyone they find. Their approach to the problem is to act as a movement of solidarity, to support women who want to get out and to provide for them when they are ready.

Where many documentaries will have a political agenda and then find the people to fit, Dreamcatcher approaches the issue of sex work entirely from the perspective of the people both involved directly with the Dreamcatcher Foundation and those who came under their wing along the way. As a result, the film moves along with a world view that is totally undeniable and thoroughly authentic. Film culture is remarkably poor when it comes to the sex worker – they are common enough on screen, but they are usually confident and well-rounded and ultimately happy. Dreamcatcher has the effect of an angry polemic, but it is only angry as far as it makes the viewer angry – the film itself is relatively restrained, it does not even use much score to guide the viewer, rightly aware that the life stories told on screen are enough to make the point.

And these stories are powerful. In one shocking scene, Myers-Powell sits quietly in an after school meeting in which student after student offers up their experiences of sexual abuse and deprivation. We move from this to a scene of Myers-Powell in her day job, talking to sex workers in prison. The point is obvious – that sex work is not a choice but is being prosecuted as if it is – and powerful (there are still enough people in the world with delusions about the sex trade) but it is the stories of these women that is the focus, providing the true corrective. As much as Dreamcatcher is a film of solidarity, it is a film of collective action and experience.

Where other documentaries will settle for providing a villain for the audience to despise, Dreamcatcher and the founders of the Foundation itself do not settle for vilification. We also hear the story of Homer, Myers-Powell’s former pimp and now a key speaker in her organisation. Again, his story provides a further corrective, being another story of sexual abuse and economic deprivation, providing again a political point (the victimisers are often as much a victim of the cycle as the more obvious victims) through and because of a human story.

As a result, Dreamcatcher is a powerfully humanist film, addressing an argument in human terms where it has too often been presented in terms of statistics and criminality. Being a story of a grassroots movement and the good work that they do, the film provides more than a powerful push for change. It shows this change in motion and working. The film is not an easy watch but few films give as much hope.

Offering a view that cannot be ignored or belittled as well as providing an insight into how revolution can be achieved through collective action, Dreamcatcher is one of the most important political and humanistic documentaries ever made. It is an urgent and thoroughly moving film that bears witness and gives hope. Find it and see it.

REVIEW: The Look of Silence (2015)

Considered one of the best films of the year in 2012/3, The Act of Killing was a disturbing documentary about the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide of 1965 who still live in impunity, considered heroes for their slaughter. Joshua Oppenheimer’s new film The Look of Silence has often been considered as a film that addresses the criticisms that The Act of Killing encountered, though the two films were really made concurrently. While the earlier film was questioned for its lack of context and its willingness to allow the perpetrators to speak in place of their victims – even going so far as to almost complicit with their crimes – The Look of Silence offers a more confrontational approach to the killers and places the victims in the centre of events.

The film follows Adi, an ophthalmologist, whose own brother Ramli was murdered before Adi was born. After watching some footage shot by Oppenheimer of two killers bragging shamelessly about their crimes in scenes similar to those in The Act of Killing, Adi and Oppenheimer embark on a series of confrontations with some of the killers, using his experience as an ophthalmologist as a cover.

The Look of Silence is a tough watch, but it is also easier to like, freed as it is of the moral complicity of The Act of Killing by focussing on the pain of the victims and by confronting the killers. In each interviews, Adi casually asks the killers about what they did and what they think about it, allowing them to boast and confess their crimes, before revealing his identity and the details of his brother’s death. Interviewees includes the heads of local families, leaders of death squads and even M.Y. Basrun, speaker of the legislature. Each, when told the truth about Adi and his motives, offer similar, depressingly human, rationalisations for their crimes, feeble threats and panicked denials. Oppenheimer’s camera lingers on the faces, both of Adi and his interviewees, often concentrating on their faces when there are no words left to say – the titular look of silence.

Beyond the trickery and the sight of the murderer’s finally having to squirm out of the facts of the past (shades of Shoah here), the film is constructive. It displays the silence and fear of the victims. Adi is told by Basrun that the killings will begin again if the victims’ families continue to want justice. Another interviewee suggests that Adi is part of a communist plot and threateningly attempts to find out what his name is and where he is from. It also shows that, despite the frequent calls of the killers and some of the victims to forget the past, Indonesia will not overcome its problems until these questions are asked and the impunity of the killers is removed. The film ultimately makes the case for truth and reconciliation, but also shows that the victims who remains in Indonesia are still in a very tenuous and dangerous position – a criticism of the here and now in Indonesia and, hence, important and valuable.

More than The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence is about the lies that surround Indonesia’s past. Early in the film, we see archive footage of an American news report about the genocide which, though not hiding the violence and the suffering (how could it?), complacently suggests that the killing was being done with the support of the population, was indeed being carried out by the people themselves, was not being orchestrated by a military dictatorship. We see footage of Goodyear Company’s Sumatran rubber plant, where the workers are all accused ‘communists’ working as slaves at gunpoint – the American reporter is sickeningly casual about this open abuse. Later, we are in a classroom, during a history lesson, hearing a teacher shamelessly indoctrinating his students, including Adi’s son, giving gruesome lessons about communist atrocities and recommending full compliance with the state. Though both scenes are about the past, they are also about the present, and reveal the film’s strategy of talking about the fear, suffering and silence of the modern Indonesian state by revealing the horrors of the past. The film acts as a powerful corrective to the lies of Indonesia and the West today.

Centring on Adi, who confronts the killers with a remarkable bravery and composure, The Look of Silence puts the focus on the victims and, in the meetings between the victim and the killer, on the future. Though Oppenheimer is not particularly interested in authenticity – there are many scenes here that feel staged – he has created a work that confronts the lies about Indonesia’s past and which gives a voice to the victim’s, one expressive not of their wish for revenge but of their wish for the truth, justice and ultimately safety and security. It is a powerful statement and an important, disturbing film about Indonesia and about all of us.

REVIEW: Cartel Land (2015)

Cartel Land follows, with a remarkable degree of access, two different vigilante groups – the Autodefensas, a citizen’s group in Michoacán fighting against the cartels, and Arizona Border Recon, a small group patrolling the US-Mexican border. Akin to a straight profile piece, the documentary addresses the rise of each group and their inner workings.

Dr José Mireles started the Autodefensas in his own town to drive out the Knights Templar drug cartel. He then decided to move on to the next town and the town after that, often coming in armed and uninvited and performing raids on the houses of those suspected of having connections to the cartels. Meanwhile, army veteran Tim Foley has set up a small group who patrol the American side of the border, trying to catch cartels smuggling drugs into the US. Both groups need all the help they can get, which means that they do not delve too far into the motivations of their volunteers.

Cartel Land shows a fairly comprehensive picture of the Autodefensas, the main focus of the film, moving as it does from the hope of the Autodefensas’ early successes through to its inevitable corruption at the hands of both the cartels and the police. There are shorter sequences with Arizona Border Recon and even shorter sequences with a group of meth cooks. The aim of the film is to reveal how complicit everyone is in the drugs trade. The armies and governments on both sides of the border, the paramilitaries, the vigilantes, the cooks and the cartels are interconnected. The film closes as it opens with an interview with a meth cook, who learnt his trade from American chemists and whose biggest customer base is American citizens. At the end of the film, in a shocking reveal, with see also that he is wearing the official uniform of the Mexican security services. Cartel Land then is an exposé that reveals the problems inherent in Mexico and the US’ War on Drugs. It also has incredible access to the Autodefensas, creating such a full picture of the group’s rise and fall that it often feels like fiction filmmaking. However, the film isn’t without its problems.

As with The Act of Killing, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that the film is complicit in the crimes that it depicts. When the Autodefensas capture one high-level cartel member, he is beaten before our eyes, with many of the Autodefensas members seeming to play up to the camera. When the group controversially raid houses, the camera goes right in after them. Elsewhere, the film takes us into the Autodefensas’ base where they engage in torture right before our eyes. Worst of all is a sequence in which the members come under fire whilst inside a car – the camera is of course also inside the car. They run down a car with a similar description to the one that attacked them, bringing out a man and his family. Before the eyes of the family, this man is taken away. We watch as he is questioned in the back of the car, a gun to his head. While it would be naïve to suggest that these things would not have happened without the camera’s presence, it is hard not to imagine that the camera’s very presence is only making things worse for the people we see getting abused. The film does not offer any insight into how this access was granted and what the Autodefensas intend to get out of all of this.

Another issue with the film is its structure. The film examines two vigilante groups, one Mexican and one American, but we are never sure quite what has been gained by their comparison or juxtaposition. The story of the Autodefensas is of a grassroots movement that begins in reaction to a series of horrendous murders and spreads, corrupting itself and harassing the citizens. Meanwhile, Arizona Border Recon is a small group, without a clear purpose and without a clear enemy. The one group of Mexicans that we see them detain are only working people attempting to immigrate. Their members are less knowledgeable of the wider context of the drug war, more ideologically suspect and, ultimately, a lot less open to corruption. The film does give a picture of the near impossible battle to be fought against corruption and drugs in both Mexico and America, but there seems to be little value in comparing two so different groups. Meanwhile, the interviews and revelations of the meth cooks that bookend the film add some important context, but nothing important of the story of these two paramilitary groups.

Cartel Land then is a well-produced action movie style documentary with an important view on the drug war and the border war. It has fantastic access to both groups. However, it doesn’t hang together where a more sober and complex analysis might have done and it does not get away from questions of complicity. Like many documentaries these days, it is a dirty picture of a dirty war.

REVIEW: Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015)

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is the new film from prolific documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, based on the book by Lawrence Wright. Utilizing mainly footage and photographs from Scientologists through the years, with context added by talking heads, it looks and feels like a very traditional documentary. But is it any good?

The film begins with the history of Scientology and its creator L. Ron Hubbard, looking in particular at Hubbard’s treatment of his first wife and the battle with the IRS over tax. The film then moves onto the experiences of former Scientologists, detailing both the practices and structure of the cult, the belief systems and the stories of abuse. Each interviewee is a former Scientologist, who has left under fire from the cult, which mercilessly attacks those who break away from it.

If you don’t know much about Scientology, Going Clear is a good introduction. It explores the history of the cult, from its first manifestations in the fiction of sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard to the practice of ‘auditing’ etc. It also explores the cult’s battles to avoid paying tax by claiming the status of a religion, its purchase of real estate all over the world and its increasingly authoritarian and despotic leader David Miscavige. It also provides illuminating first-hand accounts of life inside the cult, which includes some thoroughly shocking accounts of abuse. Often the documentary is at its most powerful during these interviews, in which former members of the cult talk about what attracted them and what ultimately repelled them. Almost all of them speak eloquently and honestly, often with regret and shame, for what they did, excused or ignored.

These interviews are the film’s best and most focussed sequences, particularly from Sylvia Taylor and Mike Rinder, whose testimony is more powerful than any condemnation. It is elsewhere that the film ultimately falls down – I do not write ‘fall flat’ because it remains fairly riveting throughout. The rest of the film is about condemnation and, while most of the criticism is well-founded and totally deserved, some of it comes off as quite shrill. There is a whole sequence that suggests that John Travolta only remains in the cult because of blackmail, which may be likely, but is highly speculative. There is a large focus on Tom Cruise (who comes out very badly), which may be due more to his stardom than his effect on getting people into Scientology – the film paints him as a very successful and active ambassador more than it suggests that his involvement is an ego-driven fondness for their adoration of him (some footage of a birthday bash thrown for Cruise by the Scientologists is particularly cringe-worthy). Earlier, the film does its utmost to discredit founder Hubbard. Hubbard certainly does seem to be a highly discreditable person, but it does not quite tie in with the film’s purported wish to understand Scientology and Scientologists. And, of course, when the film moves onto what the Scientologist believes – that being all the stuff about thetans and volcanoes and atom bombs and an evil overlord – it goes into a full-blown animated montage, as if the beliefs themselves were not enough to convince us of the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

Ultimately this is where the problem with the film lies. At the beginning, Lawrence Wright explains that his primary motivation for exploring Scientology was to get to the bottom of what makes people believe things like this, what need does something like this fill. Gibney’s film is instead an angry, campaigning film against Scientology. It is less about the ‘prison of belief’ as the title suggests, but the prison of Scientology. Any attempt to understand is cast aside with the apocalyptic, near demonic animation and footage of auditing centres scored to Kenny Roger’s druggy “I Just Walked In To See What Condition My Condition Was In.” Instead of a sober analysis, Gibney has made a somewhat hysterical film that slings anything that it thinks might stick. In this way, the film is reminiscent of his previous film about the abuses behind faith in Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God in which disturbing and powerful voiceover testimony was undercut by some over the top horror movie reconstructions. Gibney, here and there, does not seem to believe that personal accounts of abuse and suffering are enough to hold the interest or outrage of an audience.

It seems strange to criticize a documentary about Scientology as being ridiculous, but Gibney’s film is a little overblown. Scientology itself is clearly damaging and abusive and the accounts of all of the interviewees are eloquent on this point. Taylor’s account of the neglect of her baby while she was undergoing hard physical labour, Rinder’s account of defending Scientology against accusations of abuse whilst showing the strain of having been placed in what was effectively a prison camp, Paul Haggis’ account of his delusion about the cult and the various accounts of the disconnection between family members enforced by the cult when someone steps out of line. This is where the film makes important and effective contributions to the debate about Scientology and the practices of its leader David Miscavige, who, if nothing else, looks like a corporate dictator. Given how heavily lawyered up the cult is, this is also where the film is brave. But, problematically, Going Clear has the same taste for hysterics, the same willingness to exaggerate and to condemn. A documentary that, ironically, keeps its head clear may be a much more powerful condemnation and would provide a much more informative analysis. Surely that understanding that Wright talks about would be a much more effective means to protect people who are preyed on by cults.

Since Going Clear opts for sensationalism, it can be too readily rejected as propaganda by Miscavige and his ilk – a calmer, less speculative film would be harder to ignore. It is a riveting watch, but I doubt it will have much of an effect.

REVIEW: Junun (2015)

A filmed record of a musical collaboration between Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur and ‘The Rajasthan Express’ in Jodhpur which resulted in an album ‘Junun’ (the madness of love). This is also Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film and a departure from his usual, being largely an observational documentary. But is it a film in its own right or more a feature for a bonus DVD accompanying the album?

Junun is another ‘process’ film, not unlike Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow and El Bulli, in that the majority of the film is taken up with footage of the artists performing their art. But while those other two documentaries were much more focussed on the art of production rather than on the art itself, Junun is a much more immersive experience. The film is near silent apart from the music that this group makes – putting this music (and indeed the act of creating this music) at the centre of the film. Aesthetically speaking, Junun is also a lot less pretentious – Anderson attempts to find images in and around the Mehrangarh Fort, where the recording sessions take place, to match the transcendent quality of the music, rather than forcing us only to watch the musicians at work. Utilizing hand-held cameras and drone photography, Anderson’s film has many fantastic visuals, which both provides something to look at while we are listening to the music and adds immeasurably to the film’s feel. There are a few vignettes between and during the tracks being recorded, including one musician feeding some large birds and a night-time trip through Jodhpur, both of which are very cinematic.

Junun is a well-paced (at 53 minutes, it is, thankfully, not over-stretched) and interesting record of the making of an album. Though it rarely delves into the personalities behind the music and it never indicates for non-initiates why this collaboration might be of particular interest, it is adventurous and mesmerizing enough, both visually and aurally, to stand up in its right. It may also be taken as a joyful exploration of the possibilities of modern digital technology from a director who habitually favours film. As is it then, Junun is short and slight in both ambition and approach, but it is an interesting and likeable watch.

REVIEW: A Syrian Love Story (2015)

Following on from 2012’s tough and powerful documentary about the Yemeni revolution, The Reluctant Revolutionary, Sean McAllister has moved to Syria with A Syrian Love Story, a documentary he has been making over the last six years.

In 2009, McAllister was filming in Syria when he met Amer, a Palestinian freedom fighter who had recently been released from prison. He had been left alone to bring up his two children, Kaka and Bob, since his wife, Raghda, a Syrian activist, has been imprisoned. McAllister follows their attempts to cope with life under Assad’s regime, their joy at the release of Raghda and their lives as refugees first to the Lebanon and then in France following their forced exile.

Following this family from 2009 through to 2015, McAllister captures the turmoil that this family goes through, making the documentary an engrossing personal examination of the troubles in Syria. It is a committed, campaigning film because it has chosen a side and pursues its agenda with an unarguable honesty. McAllister’s films are works of journalism since they inform the viewer about what is going on in a faraway place, but his methods are interventions. Most Westerners, if they pay any attention at all, find the whole situation too confusing or depressing, which ought to indicate the failures of most of our mainstream journalism to keep us adequately informed. The Syrian conflict is one of the most tragic and significant moments in this millennium and we should understand it. Here the audience sees the collapse of a country and the suffering of the Syrian people, and the engaged viewer should leave the film with their opinions much more fixed on the problems in Syria. McAllister’s film is, then, a very important film because it enters into the sphere of this conflict and attempts to radically alter its audience’s views on Syria.

McAllister’s ultimate subject, as with The Reluctant Revolutionary, are his human subjects and he addresses this conflict in human terms in a way that should move all of us. McAllister’s main focus is on this family and this family is not supposed to stand for all of the Syrian people, but only for themselves. It is a very personal film. Amer, Raghda, Kaka and Bob have granted McAllister a remarkable amount of access – they live in front of his camera without embarrassment and with total honesty. Raghda is ultimately a committed activist – at one point, she says that for her to leave Syria now when it needs her most is tantamount to treason – while Amer is more worried about giving his children a future. Amer and Raghda ultimately move to France as asylum seekers but their lives are riven by the traumas of their past. Amer wants Raghda to leave Syria behind and be a mother, but Raghda feels only guilt. Ultimately, this leads to the dissolution of their marriage but the film ends hopefully with Amer having secured his children’s futures in France and Raghda working as an advisor for the Syrian opposition in Turkey, twenty miles from the Syria border, feeling happy and of use to her suffering country. The film also follows Amer and Raghda’s two sons as they grow up on the move. Early on, we see Kaka amused by the picture of Assad in his schoolbook, his school trying to teach him to love the man who put both of his parents in prison. Later, we will see Kaka, more grown up but equally conflicted by his country’s troubles.

This film is quietly heart-breaking – a tragic story told in a way that will affect all of us. It should change how we look at this crisis and every other crisis in this world, not as a confusing mess of one cruel dictator, his faceless accomplices and a huge intangible crowd of victims, but in humanitarian terms. It is then a deeply important film and a rousing political documentary that keeps its focus squarely on a story of average humans.

SHORT REVIEW: Nas: Time Is Illmatic (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here.

Nas: Time Is Illmatic is a documentary about Nasir Jones, better known as Nas, taking us through his early years growing up in the Queensbridge Projects in New York City leading up to 1994 and the conception, recording and release of his debut album ‘Illmatic’, one of the most acclaimed hip-hop albums ever released.

The film is a fairly standard documentary, preferring to offer quick biographies of Nas and his family intercut with talking heads and footage of Nas performing the album live in 2013. The film analyses some key tracks from the album, detailing the genesis of the lyrics and music and the truths between the lines. The film is bookended with Nas’ journey to Harvard to announce the beginning of the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship.

Nas: Time Is Illmatic is not particularly groundbreaking in terms of form. At its worst, it resembles any cheap and quick biography with degraded footage cobbled together from publicly owned sources and released on some remote satellite channel. But for a potted history of the effects of the creation of the Projects and the GI Bill provided by Cornel West, the film often prefers to avoid context. Though it is true that writer Erik Parker and director One9 may legitimately feel that Nas’ furious but eloquent lyrics speak for themselves, it leaves tracks like ‘The World Is Yours’ and ‘One Love’ doing most of the emotional heavy lifting.

The key thing that differentiates watching the film from listening to the album are the interviews with Nas and his brother Jabari, or Jungle, which reveal the roots of the anger and disaffection that inspired Nas’ lyrics. Often filmed in the Projects themselves, the brothers eloquently and poignantly recount their troubles, the deaths and incarceration of friends and the toll that drugs took in their neighbourhood. These interviews bring across the value and truth of a record like ‘Illmatic’ with more melancholy and heart than the series of talking heads raving about the album seen earlier in the film.

Nas: Time Is Illmatic too often assumes that the viewer is aware of the socio-political causes and effects behind hip-hop and the urban African-American experience in general. It may not feel that it has to (and it probably shouldn’t have to), but the film does little of its own work. None the less, its portrait of the Projects in 2013 is as effecting as ‘Illmatic’s was in 1994.

SHORT REVIEW: Battle Company: Korengal (2014)

This short review appears on The Upcoming website here.

Following on from 2010’s Restrepo, Battle Company: Korengal returns to the same themes and the same soldiers interviewed in the previous film. Korengal repeats Restrepo’s focus on the day-to-day lives of men caught in extreme situations and the effect this lifestyle has on them physically and mentally. As a result, there is little here that hasn’t been tackled before, apart from the fact that the soldiers have since been pulled out of the Korengal valley and can now offer retrospective accounts of the experience, captured here in straight interviews. Much more than Restrepo, Korengal is structured around themes such as the meaning of bravery, the fun of a firefight and the feeling of having to be constantly alert in order to stay alive.

The main problem with the film is the same as in Restrepo. Both films claim to be apolitical and there is little to no engagement with anything unsavoury, which ultimately only succeeds in making the film feel equally culpable. There is a glancing reference to racism when one of only five black men in the company talks about his difficulties but it is not investigated further and is swiftly dropped. Equally troublesome is many of the soldiers open admission that they enjoy shooting people. One firefight sequence is scored with upbeat, exciting music, which feels wholly inappropriate.

The film also fails to offer any insight into the lives of the Afghans that the Americans claim to be protecting. The soldiers’ near total distrust of every Afghan they come across and their joy at shooting at them offers a troubling and indigestible view of Americans at war.

Battle Company: Korengal seeks to avoid politics and get to the truth of soldiers in battle but it’s refusal to engage with the dark side of the soldiers leaves only a bad taste in the mouth.

See also:

Dirty Wars
Lone Survivor

Zero Dark Thirty

SHORT REVIEW: Seven Streets, Two Markets and a Wedding (2014)

This short review appears on The Upcoming website here.

Seven Streets, Two Markets and a Wedding is a compilation of ten short archive films of London from between 1930 and 1980 – a mixture of rediscovered public information films and amateur footage.

The film is primarily a nostalgic affair, with each film introduced by modern footage from the same location. While the archive footage is vibrant, full of people and activity and often hand-held, the modern shots are tightly framed, steady, full of mundane naturalist sounds (sirens, alarms, traffic) and sparsely populated. Quite why the modern age is best represented by the techniques of ‘slow cinema’ is never quite addressed, nor is the question of why any of this archive footage is so nostalgic. The film prefers to merely show old footage and offers no contexts or opinions. As it is then, the film is merely a hodge-podge of old footage and is of little interest beyond some initial curiosity value.

The most interesting film is These Can Be Yours, a road safety film from Wembley Road Safety Council, a hopelessly dated and turgidly edited film that suggests that the most damaging consequence of a woman getting run over by a motorcycle is that her daughter will have to cook for her picky husband, who would much prefer his wife’s cooking. Similarly, her son’s attempts to help out in the kitchen will only lead to disaster – smashed dishes being worse than a smashed leg for a woman. Though amusingly archaic, it does lead one to wonder why this rather conservative project views such sexism with nostalgia.

More suffocating than nostalgic, Seven Streets, Two Markets and a Wedding offers little of interest, beyond certain observations such as: ‘People seem so ill at ease when faced with a camera in those days.’ But with no unifying theme, the film is ultimately dull.

REVIEW: Here Be Dragons (2014)

Mark Cousins continues his work on the essay film with what may play to some like an extended and more specialist episode of The Story of Film: An Odyssey, in which Cousins bares out his belief in that documentary series that the history of cinema is full of ‘omission.’ Here Be Dragons is a short history of one of the least known countries in Europe, an examination of its cinema and a rumination on the importance of cinema as a form of national memory.

The film’s own material describes it best: Filmmaker Mark Cousins goes to Albania for five days, and films what he sees. He discovers that the movie prints in the country's film archive are decaying. In investigating this, Cousins begins to encounter bigger questions about the history and memory of a place. Perhaps a country whose 20th Century, dominated by its authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha, was so traumatic, should allow its film heritage to fade away? Perhaps a national forgetting should be welcomed? Influenced by the films of Chris Marker, Cousins' film broadens to consider the architecture of dictators and the great icon paintings of Onufri. In the past, when cartographers knew little about a country, they wrote on it Here be Dragons. Albania was, for decades, one of the least well know countries in the world. Cousins' road movie meditation takes the advice of Goethe: "If you would understand the poet, you must go to the poet's land."

Here Be Dragons then is as much about the importance of history and memory and an attempt to bring to cinema a new kind of activism and improvisational style. The film is both personal and factual. One six-minute sequence in which Cousins, furious with what he sees as the economic destruction and stagnancy and pain of Albania, writes a letter to Enver Hoxha – just as he wrote letters to Sergei Eisenstein in What Is This Film Called Love? – an angry, verbose and rather moving rant against a vicious dictator. It is personal since it is the response of a traveller who has been there for only five days (Cousins insists that the rant was written as the camera was filming) and contains several sweeping generalizations, which many who are more familiar with the history of the place may wish to dispute. For instance, Cousins states that Hoxha believed in the equality of women though his only evidence for this seems to be Hoxha’s abolition of a husband’s right to murder his new wife if she turns out not to be a virgin. One does not necessarily suggest the other and we are forced to wonder if Cousins is using facts or just assumption. Another instance of this is Cousins’ claim that it is memory that is keeping division alive in Northern Ireland and not the segregation in housing and education – amongst many other things – which precludes a closer existence and a more meaningful dialogue. Cousins’ film, as fascinating as it is as a film of the moment, a ‘present tense’ examination of the feelings of travel and the exploration of the unknown, is nevertheless possibly a naïve work, an artist’s look at political and psychological scars that does not contain the weight of proper examination.

Nevertheless, the above is ultimately a minor gripe, since the film is not intended as a work of authority – few essays films are. The greatness of F For Fake is in its freewheeling fondness for ideas and opinions, but also its trickiness. Welles seems to love the idea that his audience may not trust him as their guide. The essay film asks questions, challenges presumptions and draws parallels; it does not need to give answers. Indeed, the film is best when it is based on ideas and opinions. A train station in Rome brings to mind de Sica’s Indiscretion of an American Wife and from there to Hitchcock’s opening shot from Marnie – cinema’s past imbuing places with their own sense of history. Cousins refers to a story from Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’, in which an oar is mistaken for a winnowing fan as one walks further inland – read travel is somehow transformative. This is brilliantly referred back to when Cousins comes across George W Bush Street – our villain is their hero. He muses on the transformation of fascist and hubristic architecture, particularly a pyramid in the centre of Tirana built in tribute to Hoxha but now overgrown with wild flowers and graffiti. Elsewhere, he muses on the importance on preserving Albania’s cinematic heritage, despite the propagandist intent behind its production. Showing some clips, Cousins brilliantly repurposes some of these films, questioning them and altering them. The films are the same, but they take on new meanings. One brief moment, in which he shows what Viktor Gjika’s November 2^nd used to look like compared to what it now looks like following a restoration, shows with one quick cut the phoenix-like nature of cinema, and the importance and possibilities of restoration, to the films themselves and to film history.

Here Be Dragons works best, however, as a kind of alternative The Story of Film, where Cousins examines the work of Albania’s cinematic past, finding two great filmmakers and showing clips from their work. These are Xhanfize Keko, who made Tomka and His Friends and The Newest City in the World and 27 other films between 1949 and 1984, and Viktor Stratobërdha, who made only three shorts between 1955 and 1956, including We Laugh Because We Cannot Cry, before he was imprisoned for twenty years for making a derisive joke about Hoxha during a stage show. This is where Here Be Dragons really works well, as a reminder that there are still mysteries, an Unknown out there – in cinema, in art, in literature and in the world. Where The Story of Film: An Odyssey mainly stuck to the facts and reminded you of how much you already knew of the history of film, Here Be Dragons infectiously delights in discovery.

Your own appreciation of Here Be Dragons will depend on your own fondness for Cousins’ style of cinema. Cousins can be irritating – the footage of children at play that finds a way into all of his work, close-ups of himself which are meant to be impromptu but don’t look it at all, some less successful digressions in his narration – but his films are nevertheless important and fascinating works of art. There are films about ideas, containing a breadth of reference that can be intriguing, challenging and thoroughly absorbing. For everything that doesn’t work, there will be a moment, an insight, an idea that will be beautiful, powerful or will change the way you look at and think about life, art and the world. Here Be Dragons is ultimately about exploration and its lasting effect is to make you want to read and watch and explore more.

Here Be Dragons played as part of the 14th Belfast Film Festival at the QFT on 3 April.

REVIEW: The Missing Picture (2014)

Many recent documentaries have explored sites of genocide with a view to reclaiming a lost truth about those events shrouded by time, state propaganda and cover-ups. Patricio Guzmán represented this search into the past through the search of those who survived the Pinochet regime in Chile for the remains of their murdered relatives in Nostalgia For The Light. Joshua Oppenheimer’s acclaimed documentary The Act of Killing gave members of General Suharto’s death squads the opportunity to recreate their crimes on film with full disclosure and full impunity. Now, Rithy Panh, who has made a career out of documenting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, is attempting to recreate both his own memories and those photographs either destroyed or never taken using a mix of clay figurines and archive footage in The Missing Picture.

The Missing Picture is both an essay film and an investigative documentary that tries to uncover the true stories of the Khmer Rouge’s reign over Cambodia. ‘The missing picture’ of the title is a term that is used to refer to a series of different images – either those in one’s head as in memories or stories one has heard, images of forced labour, starvation and genocide that were never taken, images that were suppressed or destroyed by censorship and by time. It may also refer to those images that do remain but which show untruths, such as those from Khmer Rouge propaganda films showing happy workers tilling the fields. By using clay figurines, Rithy Panh is able to recreate certain scenes that did occur but were never photographed, hence revealing a truth about the Khmer Rouge regime that had been suppressed and hidden.

The film begins with images of old film reels, representing the toll that time takes on the attempt to readdress the past. The reels are badly damaged and often unusable and suggest the inability to revisit the past due to diminishing means. As the evidence slowly erodes, Panh’s job is more important than ever and his own memories may be the last route into the past available to him. The clay figurines were, hence, conceived as a way of defying the loss of primary evidence. They recreate scenes that Panh himself witnessed, making the film his most intensely personal, particularly when Panh recreates the deaths of his parents and siblings. The narration, though not by Panh himself, is clearly performed by a stand-in for him, since it is given in the first person. However, the narration is not entirely that of Panh’s story, but of Cambodia’s story under the Khmer Rouge. It details events that Panh himself did not witness and is often broadly historical, though it always returned to the first person after it has set the scene.

Problematically, however, the narration ruminates on time and memory in the vein of certain artistic essay films. It is full of speeches about the old man seeking the memories of his past or, perhaps, the memories of his past seeking the old man. This gives the film a slightly unnecessary, somewhat irritating philosophical tone, which is at odds with the much more concrete retellings of past events. Such Proustian musings can be interesting in themselves but they feel oddly out of place in a film that has got so many more important issues at stake. To talk about the rush of memories in the same breath as starvation and state terror is an odd mix, as is, to a degree, the bald, dispassionate retelling of the objective history frequently played alongside the subjective stories of life in a Khmer Rouge re-education camp. There is a lot of talk about the fact that the bodies disappearing into the earth in the mass graves are, in a sense, returning from the earth through the clay, which is fine as an idea in a film more about art but a little too pat in a film of such seriousness and importance. It is not that one is more unworthy of examination than the other but that the constant shifts between these modes makes the film seem somewhat lacking in any one purpose or perspective.

As well as this, it becomes increasingly clear that, as thematically interesting as it is to recreate the lost past with clay figurines, the film is lacking visually. Though inevitable since it is a film about the loss of pictures, the clay figurines are not particularly cinematic and they are a little repetitive. Though it does feel unhelpful to criticise the film in this light, the fact remains that the clay figurines were possibly the wrong medium for the message, since they are quite inexpressive and distancing. Other forms of animation may have been more helpful – Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir is a good example of a film that attempts to recreate memories of the past without the help of primary sources. Rithy Panh sees the recreation of his memories as an act of defiance and he states that cinema is a powerfully effective political medium, though his choice of animation is fairly limited, an experiment in cinematic representation which just didn’t work.

Late in the film, Rithy Panh offers an account of pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, a darker and more complex take on the country’s past than the previous images of markets and parties. Here, Panh seems to be readdressing his own memories of before 17 April 1975, the day Phnom Penh fell to the communists, which were, admittedly, somewhat naïve and middle-class. In a potted history, he tells of how the working classes had a legitimate cause for unrest, especially after the USA dropped half a million tons of bombs on the country. The Khmer Rouge exploited this ill feeling for their own gain. Today, as Rithy Panh very quickly shows, the working class are still poor. He shows some brief footage of a worker cutting away at the ground on the side of a busy road, images reminiscent of both the false propaganda of Khmer Rouge and of his own clay figurines at work. As a result, the film has its own ‘missing pictures’ since it is a personal telling from a middle-class perspective. Rithy Panh does address the fact that his memories are tailored by his background, suggesting that there are many ‘missing pictures’ that he himself cannot recreate, but it does give an uncomfortable sense that Panh is falling on memory as a means to avoid the complexities of history. As a result, The Missing Picture may be a cathartic and worthwhile attempt to reveal the evil of the Khmer Rouge and to bring lost memories back to the surface but, like The Act of Killing, it has a very blinkered view and it avoids or only superficially touches on other uncomfortable and complex truths.

The Missing Picture should be understood best as one in a number of possible truth-seeking projects, made by a number of different people with a number of different backgrounds and experiences. Rithy Panh may have devoted his life to uncovering the evil of the Khmer Rouge, but this new film remains too subjective, too happy to be but a part of the whole. It is only one step of an important, necessary process, one that ought to be open to as many stories as exist, as many as can be found. As sincere and harrowing as The Missing Picture is, it is too intellectual and too limited to do full justice to its title and its themes.

REVIEW: The Irish Pub (2013)

The Irish Pub is a documentary travelogue that moves through the Republic of Ireland seeking out pubs that fit into the traditional mould and interviewing the proprietors about what makes an Irish pub so special. In a manner somewhat similar to Ken Wardrop’s affectionate and lovely His & Hers, The Irish Pub largely allows its interviewees to tell their stories and create the tone of the film.

The film travels throughout the country from Dublin to Castletownbere to Kingscourt (though it never ventures into Northern Ireland). Filming inside each, the proprietors and any game customers are interviewed about the Irish pub phenomenon and it is the stories, both funny and melancholy, and the banter and the lives of those involved that the film takes as its subject.

The film is a funny, moving portrait of the Irish pub, its proprietors and its customers. It moves between a series of pubs, structured around the themes that it addresses. The proprietors and the customers talk about what it is that makes an Irish pub an ‘Irish pub’, why they such an important from Irish society and culture and the importance of keeping the tradition alive. We hear about how one pub closes at 6pm out of respect for the proprietor’s deceased father who made this rule. Many of the proprietors have had the pub in their family for many generations, and refuse to modernise their pubs as much from a sense of responsibility to generations past and present than any particular aesthetic or traditional reason. The toll that running an Irish pub takes on one’s life is explored as many of the proprietors talk about the long hours and the fact that this will be, for better or worse, their life’s work. Few have travelled.

Mainly, however, the film focuses on the stories of the people, with one moody, slightly standoffish bar man (Paul Gartlan of Gartlan’s in Kingscourt, County Cavan and the unlikely poster boy for the film’s promotional material) offering a series of very funny anecdotes that feature a raid on his pub during after hours and an incredulous American tourist. Much of this humour is refreshingly human and the film has a real sense of life in modern day Ireland and the battle between tradition and modernity and between the rural and the urban ways of life.

As funny as the film often is, it is also surprisingly moving, since a pub is seen now as an ambivalent space, filled with both camaraderie and music as much as it is filled with sadness and loneliness. In fact, some audiences don’t seem to be quite as able to see the pubs in this light, and the film does not quite succeed in bringing out these awkward, often too sudden, shifts in tone, a fact not helped by an off-putting plinky-plonk soundtrack. When one elderly customer says that if he didn’t have the pub, there wouldn’t be anywhere for him to go and nothing to do but sit inside his house and stare at the wall one is given an insight into the Irish pub as serving a valuable function in a country swept by recession and cut backs in vital public services. There is a Garage-like sense of loneliness and isolation to a lot of the pubs, a wistfulness that jars somewhat with the film’s otherwise light, breezy, picture-postcard rendering of the pubs and towns on view. It is clear that the drink is secondary to a lot of the customers here and, though some audiences may laugh regardless, there is a prevalent sadness about the people in the film, something that Alex Fegan may not necessarily have expected to capture and something that makes the film a little uneasy and self-conscience.

Another issue with the film is its artless inauthenticity, especially in a sequence in Gertie Brown’s in Athlone wherein one opera singing regular’s loud, impromptu rendition of an old standard is suggested to have sent one disgruntled customer out of the place. However, it is clear that this is two unconnected shots stitched together to give the impression that one lead to the other – a cheap laugh gained dishonestly. And while this may seem like a fairly small thing, it does mar the rest of the film to a degree, making one wonder how much of the rest of the film was arrived at through equally dishonest means. Documentaries are always slippery when it comes to authenticity and much better films than The Irish Pub have been equally troubling, if not more so (last year, to name a few, there was The Act of Killing, Leviathan and Dirty Wars while Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God was unnecessarily exploitative), but here Alex Fegan allows his film to appear too easily cobbled together.

The Irish Pub is ultimately a little too unfocussed and a little too long, it overstays its welcome and its uncomfortable attempts to edit together unconnected events does make it feel like nothing more than a corporate advertisement for the Irish pub – coming to your town soon. That said, it can’t help but feel refreshingly human and authentic when it allows its interviewees to talk (often in long, steady takes – a good choice). This is ultimately where the film succeeds the most, in investigating a phenomenon through the eyes of the people most closely involved. It doesn’t have a patch on His & Hers – which was after all a much more deep project - but it does nonetheless have a bright, breezy and believable humanity.