With screenings of this year's Oscar nominated documentary features coming to a close and ballots about to be turned in, I took some time over the last few days to think about this year's nominated films and which film should stand as the film to represent 2010, which was, by any measure, a remarkable year in nonfiction filmmaking.
One thing that surprises is the fact that most of this year's nominees are newcomers to documentary (even if they've had great success in other fields). Banksy is one of the world's best known street artists, Sebastian Junger is a noted author and journalist, Tim Hetherington is a respected cinematographer and Josh Fox has led a successful theater company in New York for more than a decade. It is somewhat strange to realize that Lucy Walker, now with four documentary features under her belt, is the Grande Dame of the category, or that Charles Ferguson becomes that rarest of documentary creatures - Oscar nominated for his debut and his sophomore effort.
Some of these filmmakers I know quite well. Some I've just met during the past year. Some I may never meet and will only know through email exchanges. And while personal relationships can complicate writing a piece like this, I felt that a year like 2010 required going on record. So, here are my thoughts on the films that will forever stand as representative of last year, at least at the Academy, along with my pick - which if you've been paying close attention over the last six months (not that you should), probably won't come as much of a surprise.
Full disclosure: I'm not the fan of WASTE LAND that many (if not most) people are. I have preferred Walker's previous films, yet I understand why people respond to the same construction techniques that had people tapping their feet to "Happy Together". To my eye, Walker and her Brazilian-based co-directors João Jardim and Karen Harley, have crafted a film that pretty successfully utilizes the strategies of good reality television - Act One: host/celebrity parachutes into area with people in need; Act Two: host/celebrity supplies them with tools so that they can do something outside of their comfort zone to possibly better; Act Three: host supplies the needy with a prize related to their efforts.
There's no doubt that such a formula is reliably effective (I admit to tearing up on the couple of occasions that I've seen Ty Pennington unveil the remodeled house on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, so I know that this stuff works) and I assume that my feelings of emotion on watching the conclusion of WASTE LAND are not that far afield from those of the audience members tearing 5's and 10s on their ballots. But knowing Walker's formidable skills as a filmmaker and believing her DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND to be one of the more important films of the early part of this decade, I would rather see Walker get her Oscar for something a bit more risky or messy. For a film about garbage, WASTE LAND struck me as just a bit too tidy.
One of the things I loved about Charles Ferguson's debut, NO END IN SIGHT, was that it transcended our notions of the talking heads interview film. The way in which his editors, Chad Beck and Cindy Lee, built a narrative consisting both of testimony from the major players and remarkable, on-the-ground footage from inside still-unstable Iraq, felt like a revelation, even if some of the information was already known. Ferguson and his team had created a film that felt like a rebirth in a somewhat tired documentary sub-genre.
The fact that INSIDE JOB feels creatively related to NO END IN SIGHT should not surprise, and it's become clear that, in just two films, Ferguson has become a master at this particular form. It seems that one's overall reaction to the film may hinge on how you feel about Ferguson's on camera confrontations of high powered Wall Street and administration interview subjects. Many folks I know loved seeing people squirm under Ferguson's prosecutorial inquiries, and there's little question that many of the subjects never knew what they were in for. If Ferguson (and producer Audrey Marrs) wins the Oscar, it will likely be for his impressive interview skills as much as his filmmaking.
My favorite part of INSIDE JOB is actually the opening sequence in which narrator Matt Damon describes the financial downfall of Iceland over a sequence of beautifully filmed land and city scapes. I would have loved more of this in INSIDE JOB - the kind of side stories that skillfully illuminate the way we got into this mess, and truth be told, I liked NO END a bit more. But Ferguson may be our best example of a filmmaker who can take what works on PBS' Frontline and make it into a cinematic experience, no small achievement that.
My feelings about RESTREPO are so clouded by the experience I had watching the film that it's almost impossible to separate them in my head. I first saw the film in August, in an outdoor setting on a river in the still war-scarred country of Kosovo. Hearing machine gun fire and English-language expletives echo off of fortress walls and century old buildings marked with bullet holes was an immersive and probably unforgettable experience.
Particularly in that environment, Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger's decision to tell an almost strictly verite tale about one platoon in Afghanistan seemed right on the money. Surrounded by a country and a people who were both haunted by war and appreciative of the NATO forces who helped rid them of the Serbian army, I viewed the film a different perspective than I could possibly have had if I seen it in other circumstances.
That said, I found then - and continue to feel - that RESTREPO is a wholly impressive debut and leaves me hoping for more nonfiction features from Hetherington and Junger (whether they work together again or separately). My feelings about the work both men did prior to their debut documentary (Hetherington's camera work on THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK and Junger's landmark nonfiction books like The Perfect Storm) comes through in RESTREPO almost completely - a sense of intimacy, impending danger and everyday, ordinary courage, gratefully accompanied with little frills or fanfare. Hetherington and Junger do great justice to their subjects by neither deifying (cue the embedded American news crews at the start of the Gulf War) nor asking them to serve as stand-ins for our political beliefs, whatever they may be.
I'm on record so far as my feelings about Josh Fox's GASLAND go. As I wrote this summer after the film aired on HBO and was under attack (as it is now) by energy interests, GASLAND is "one of the year's best and most important films". Beyond that, it is that rare creature, an activist film with a message that actually feels like it was made by filmmakers who dare to play with, even subvert, the documentary form - not in ways that undermine its truthfulness, but in ways that announce a major new filmmaking talent.
It's probably no surprise that someone with a background in alternative forms of theater would make a film that feels so revelatory from the opening minutes. Fox' dulcet narration (a friend compares to Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thompson), editing cuts that defy accepted structute, an introductory pacing that knocks you for a loop and the occasional banjo tune. It's every rule of the "saving the world" documentary turned on its head and kicked down into a canyon.
The structural and artistic advances made by GASLAND are one of the reasons that lazy comparisons to other first-person docs rang so hollow. Josh Fox may be a crusader with a baseball cap, but his onscreen personna has an air of vulnerability, made potent by his willingness to be seen in (or inability to hide his) varying states of true surprise, compassion, anger and emotion. He's your favorite artistic friend from college turned backwoods storyteller - "I got this letter in the mail, you see..." - and his debut is a knockout.
Each of the above films has a chance to win the Oscar this year - I'm on record as saying that I think a case could be made for almost any of them to take home the statue - and I'd be happy to see Oscar go home with most of the above movies.
But if I had to vote, if I were a member of the Academy, I'd make my mark for Banksy and Jaimie D'Cruz' landmark work in the nonfiction canon, EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP.
When we talk about the history of the Academy's documentary branch, the years are littered with major films that were never nominated for the feature Oscar. I was able to think of 12 from the last 25 years without breaking a sweat, most of which didn't even make the shortlist: THIN BLUE LINE, ROGER & ME, A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, HEARTS OF DARKNESS, CRUMB, BROTHER'S KEEPER, HOOP DREAMS, AMERICAN MOVIE, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, TOUCHING THE VOID, GRIZZLY MAN, ANVIL! and there are, of course, so many more.
But if we're going to reminisce about Oscar years past, we need to acknowledge that things are changing. Two years ago, the winner was MAN ON WIRE, a masterpiece of portraiture filled with recreations and completely resistant of the allure of tapping into the emotional well of 9/11. As I wrote in January of 2009:
MAN ON WIRE has managed to win jury and audience prizes, be a indie-level hit for Magnolia and sweep the critics awards with nary a pejorative word about the film's extensive use of recreations. Including actors. That's a mighty big corner we just turned. And it might seem small to some but not to those who've been arguing that nonfiction can be more than just Direct Cinema. That it arrives (the same year as) MY WINNIPEG and WALTZ WITH BASHIR and even the much-maligned AMERICAN TEEN, signals not just a corner turned but a movement realized.
Cut to two years later, and a film that is, at heart, a meditation on the form of documentary itself. Who would have thought that Banksy, the provocative British artist, could point such a perceptive lens at the art of documentary filmmaking, and at the consumption of art and culture, that he would find a way to mostly destroy the debate that has consumed documentary for half a century - "is it or isn't it".
Banksy may never have intended on creating a film that would spark so much debate, so much divide over whether the film is, as he assured us in an interview "100% true". He certainly could not have guessed, nor could anyone but the most hopeful among us have suspected, that even the most bitter of these arguments would end with most everyone agreeing, "not that it matters, it's a great film."
From my standpoint, I believe Banksy about its veractiy (I thought it was true when I saw it) and I continue to be surprised, amused and ultimately exhausted by the vast numbers of professional journalists and/or websites who suspect or state categorically that the film is fiction or fictionalized without backing up the suspicion with anything approaching facts or even details. They just say it is, so it must be so. Guilty until proven innocent.
Filmmakers, curious and gossip-prone as we are, are no different, and these debates have been so frequent, so animated and occasionally so fun, it's as if the film spills over into our psyche for months after we see it. The movie may not be a funhouse mirror, but we have made it so, and this, too, speaks to the film's tremendous power, helped as it may be by its creator's mystique.
But in the end, a film's word-of-mouth potential or its water cooler quotient isn't enough to move it into the pantheon of greatness. EXIT reaches that by existing as several films simultaneously - a mostly straight-forward accounting of an important artistic movement, a subversive deconstruction of the documentary form (wherein the filmmaker is the subject of the subject's film) and a pointed critique of culture consumption. Any one of these films would have been interesting and entertaining, but that all three films co-exist and intersect in one nonfiction work is nothing short of an artistic triumph.
There are many reasons to vote for the Documentary Feature Oscar to go to EXIT. Like MAN ON WIRE, it is an instant classic of the genre - one that challenges and raises the bar on the nonfiction field. It's also the most honored nonfiction film of the year. Finally, it will be a great show: Having witnessed Banksy's playful and irreverent acceptance speech, read by producer Jaimie D'Cruz, at this year's Cinema Eye Honors, I'm tempted to say that one should do it because it's bound to be amazing television (not unlike Philippe Petit's balancing Oscar on his chin after MAN ON WIRE's victory).
After years in which we bemoaned that so many of the great films about our times, films that rocked and entertained us, were denied recognition by the Academy, it's worth noting that, once again, the opportunity exists to reward greatness and to course correct. EXIT, like MAN ON WIRE two years ago, has already achieved that, just by profoundly changing the discussion about the nature of nonfiction film itself. That it's a brilliant work of filmmaking, exhilerating, maddening, hilarious and somehow still informative, seals the deal.
It should be the Oscar winner on February 27.
Yer bloody well right there ... great film.
Posted by: John D | February 08, 2011 at 12:41 PM
This is an eloquent summary of a great year in docs. Reading your description of Gasland especially brought it all back for me. Thanks for doing this.
Posted by: Paul Sturtz | February 09, 2011 at 04:23 AM
Certainly "EXIT" is an interesting film and the "best" of a bad bunch. What reflects sadly on the state of self-annointed punditry like yours is the inability to deal with the more appropriate and hard questions. Rather than speculate on which of these films should win - why not question why such a poor bunch of films - from such a great talent pool- made it to the final five nominations?
Posted by: Richard Drumond | February 09, 2011 at 06:43 PM
nice write-up. i'd love some follow-up on this very thick paragraph:
similar to (though meaningfully quite different from) your critiques of writers for not detailing their suggestions of EXIT's fiction, you have above made a couple of not-so-obvious claims about the worth of EXIT: first, that it is "a meditation on the form of documentary itself", and second, that Banksy has "found a way to mostly destroy the debate that has consumed documentary for half a century 'is it or isn't it'". hopefully you'll feel these are worthy of follow-up, I'd love to read your thoughts.
for now, i'll toss this thought into the mix: if, as you claim, EXIT is a meditation on documentary, doesn't it seem that the critique the film offers on the marketplace - and what you suggest is also on "consumption of art and culture" writ-large - is a more a criticism of itself, EXIT FROM THE GIFTSHOP, and its mainstream success and instead (perhaps) ought to, in some convoluded way, champion the Thierry Guetta film?
Posted by: DocCritic | February 09, 2011 at 08:46 PM
Richard, what is the great talent pool you speak of? the shortlist? other work from same directors? while i agree with you that these five are largely underwhelming regarding contribution to the form, i wonder which films you would suggest. beyond the formal considerations, i think, contrary to AJ, that WASTE LAND offers the most valuable content/cultural commentary (and really, isn't that what is typically most worthwhile?) of valuing not only the experiences and voices of poverty but, arguably, the moral superiority of poverty itself. AJ is correct in naming the conventions it plays on, but **SPOILER?** i think an interesting twist is added in knowing that this project lost Vik his marriage (arguably a continuation of the criticism AJ raises). nonetheless, clearly the most radical social statement being made in any of these films.
also, i don't remember AJ self-anointing, though he is clearly a prominent "doc community" insider with a well-written, well-thought voice. i will agree with you that it is difficult to find rigorous criticism of the field online, but i certainly wouldn't expect it from an insider, and i'd suggest you take up the charge yourself. that said, i think AJ implicitly sides with you as he champions MAN ON WIRE and now EXIT as spotlighting a preferred direction for documentary. (have you seen his ABOUT A SON? i am a pretty critical viewer, like yourself it would seem, and i think it is quite excellent.)
lastly, i'll point out the obvious, which should go some way in answering your question - this is The Academy we're talking about, i don't expect anyone thinks they are much other than the milquetoast organization they are.
Posted by: DocCritic | February 10, 2011 at 07:19 AM