Tag Archives: documentary

Everyone's a Critic, Thoughts

The Work / Call Me By Your Name

I love Melbourne in winter, when the air is so cold it stings your eyes and the Melbourne International Film Festival takes over the city centre.

The best thing I can do for my creative practice is to write as often as possible, so in that spirit I’ve decided to start jotting down capsule reviews for some of the things I see at MIFF this year. I’m not going to place limits on myself, so I may write about films I loved, films I hated, films I anticipated, films that surprised me… whatever piques my interest and presents something I think worth talking about. And I may not keep it up past this first entry, so we’ll see how I go.

THE WORK ★★★★½

Twice a year, New Folsom Prison allows members of the public to enter its walls to participate in a four-day group therapy session with inmates facilitated by former prisoners and counsellors. Prisoners begin the four-day intensive with a pact to leave prison rules and gang politics at the door, and the outsider participants find themselves thrust into the world’s most intense psychotherapy session, where white, black, Asian and Native American gang members down their arms and lay bare their most intimate insecurities and anxieties to one another, hoping to find some kind of remedy for the failures, betrayals and mistakes that landed them in prison.

The Work promises a “rare look inside the cinder-block walls” of a prison, but once the outsiders start divulging their own stories it slowly becomes clear that what the film actually offers is a deep dive into the darkest recesses of the human mind — and a slow realisation that the blackest of those recesses might not belong to any of the prisoners.

A genuinely bracing work of up-close filmmaking, The Work will hit you square in the chest and send a shiver down your spine — and make you think about how precariously balanced the line between functioning member of society and lifelong criminal really is.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME ★★★★½

“Is it better to speak or die?”

This question lies at the heart and soul of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a sumptuous and beautiful romance story set in the summer of 1983. Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is enjoying another quiet summer in northern Italy as any 17-year-old son of rich Americans would do: lounging by the pool, eating apricots, reading, playing piano and cavorting with the local girls. Oliver (Armie Hammer), a statuesque doctoral student hired by Elio’s father to assist him in his research, arrives to their estate and suddenly awakens in Elio a budding lust that he struggles to understand, much less act upon.

As the sunny days meander by, the two men dance around one another, slowly and tentatively giving in to the desire that dare not speak its name. Theirs is an attraction that at first confuses Elio and, given the era, poses questions of acceptance and decorum. Is it better to speak or die? Speak and risk everything, or don’t speak and condemn yourself to a life without anything worth risking.

Their lust is expressed not through sex (at least, not on screen) but through fleeting moments of tenderness spent in secret on the banks of a crystal clear river, or hidden in the forgotten rooms of the sprawling estate. Call Me By Your Name is overflowing with sensuality, and Guadagnino’s wandering frame contrasts the quiet stillness of the landscape with the raging desire lurking just beneath the surface of his two leads.

The director’s choice to shoot on a single, unchanged lens — placing the camera between the characters in intimate moments, never giving too much context  — resists allowing the two men to truly give themselves to one another, and delicately balances the viewer at the explosive centre of their sexual tension. Call Me By Your Name is, if nothing else, surely one of the sexiest films to come out of Italy since the days of Fellini.

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Cinema Studies

Documentary and Grizzly Man

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) presents itself as a documentary portrait of Timothy Treadwell, a nature filmmaker and self-styled friend of grizzly bears in Alaska’s Kodiak Island national park. Using Treadwell’s own material, which he recorded over many years camping in the wilderness, the film sets out to discover what made Treadwell tick and the circumstances leading to his death.

It is a synthetic documentary that blends many different types of documentary form: there is a framing narrative that occurs in “current” time (following Herzog as he talks to Treadwell’s friends and coworkers, watches Treadwell’s footage, etc.); talking heads interviews with people speaking generally about Treadwell’s life; and archival footage and images captured by Treadwell himself during his summers in Alaska. The story is not told in chronological order, nor is it governed by cause and effect, and it contains no fictional reenactments or recreations (with actors, staged lighting, etc.), but it does contain several sequences where real people explain to the filmmaker certain events in current time, such as an aeroplane pilot walking through the wilderness and pointing out the location where he discovered Treadwell’s body.

By manipulating Treadwell’s footage — deciding what to present, and how it is presented, as well as narrating the footage with his own words — Herzog articulates his own thesis about the nature of humanity using Treadwell’s life and work as supporting evidence. Though it presents itself as a portrait of Timothy Treadwell, Grizzly Man is actually a more nuanced and complicated essay film, with some similarities to the rhetorical form of documentary that sets out to convince the audience of a particular viewpoint.

This is a particularly subtle demonstration of the idea that documentaries are never true depictions of reality, no matter how convincingly they present themselves as such. Herzog manipulates the objective reality of Timothy Treadwell’s life and death, and uses it to craft and present his own worldview.

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Media 1, Thoughts

Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes

Video

Last night I watched a great little short documentary by Jon Ronson on the archive of boxes Stanley Kubrick left behind after this death. The boxes contain vast amounts of research for his films (both completed films and those that never made it off the ground), threatening crank letters, odd memos from Kubrick to his staff, and much more.

It’s a fascinating insight into the level of minute detail Kubrick obsessed with, which definitely shows through in his films. I think above all a producer/director needs to be concerned with detail.