Tag Archives: documentary

God Knows Where I Am

God-Knows-Where-I-Am
God Knows Where I Am

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 14 April 2017

Venue: Bertha DocHouse Screen (Curzon Bloomsbury), London

Directors: Jedd Wider, Todd Wider

USA 2017

99 mins

Tickets are on sale via the DocHouse website

***** out of *****

There is plenty of drama in the directorial debut from noted producing brothers Jedd and Todd Wider, but make no mistake, this is a documentary.

There is a deep mystery that unfurls in God Knows Where I Am – sometimes scary, often creepy, but eventually giving way to something much deeper than the surface details. Like most evocative whodunits, the picture becomes a whydunit and exposes, not unlike great film noir (and modern neo-noir), something far more desperate and downright insidious. There is plenty of drama, but make no mistake, this is a documentary.

Sadly, too many filmmakers forget about the power of poetry in cinema. This is especially endemic in documentary work that’s limited to imparting facts, and/or becomes so wrapped up in ‘story’ (demanded by narrow, vision-bereft commissioning editors) that no matter how proficient the films are about the issue and/or subject matter at the centre of the work, they are ultimately bereft of genuine artistry.

God Knows Where I Am opened in the US on 31 March 2017 and is released nationwide by Bond/360.

There is no such problem plaguing God Knows Where I Am. The picture is an absolute heartbreaker and a good deal of its success is directly attributable to its pace, style and structure, which yields a film infused with all the qualities of the sublime. I challenge anyone to not weep profusely at several points within its elegiac 99-minute running time.

The picture reimagines the last weeks of Linda Bishop, an intelligent, sensitive middle-aged woman found dead in an abandoned New Hampshire farmhouse. Existing only on rainwater and apples from a bountiful tree, she felt trapped by dangers which threatened and frightened her to such a degree that she was unable to leave the comfort and shelter afforded to her by this lonely enclave. Eventually, as the apples ran out and the unheated house was battered by one of the coldest winters on record, comfort gave way to agony and agony gave way to grace.

Directors Todd and Jedd Wilder have constructed their film using a seemingly endless series of gorgeously composed and lit shots (gloriously mastered on FILM by cinematographer Gerardo Puglia), with many of the dolly and tracking shots moving with the kind of slow beauty Vilmos Zsigmond employed in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. These haunting images, many of which are so stunning they’ll be seared on your soul for a lifetime, are accompanied by off-camera readings from Bishop’s journal by actress Lori (Footloose, Trouble in Mind, Shortcuts) Singer. Singer’s performance here is astonishing – she captures the pain, desperation and even small joys in Bishop’s life during these sad, lonely days with a sensitivity and grace linked wholly to her ‘character’. This is no mere narration or voiceover – this is acting.

The aforementioned sequences are interspersed with actual 8mm home-movie footage of Bishop as a child, who was once bright, happy and full of promise. The filmmakers also wend interviews into the film’s fabric with such figures as Bishop’s adult daughter, various friends and relatives, and a local police detective and medical examiner – all of whom contribute to the mystery that unfolds with spellbinding dexterity.

In addition to the cinematography, the key creative elements in the picture are simply astonishing. Editor Keiko Deguchi creates a gentle, yet always compelling pace that contributes to the poetic nature of the film (and a few dissolves so powerful that each one knocks the wind out of you) while Paul Cantelon, Ivor Guest and Robert Logan have created one of the best scores I’ve heard in any documentary. Elements such as sound, art direction and visual effects are on a par with the best cinema can offer.

This is great cinema and certainly a contender for one of the best documentaries of the new millennium. It captures profound poetic truths about homelessness, mental illness and loneliness, which are rendered with such artistry and sensitivity that this is a film for the ages.

Greg Klymkiw

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The Moulin

The Moulin
The Moulin

Format: Cinema

Seen at Rotterdam 2016

Director: Huang Ya-li

Original title: Le Moulin

Japan, Taiwan 2015

160 mins

A fascinating, contemplative documentary on 1930s Taiwanese modernist poets.

If you thought that it might be a tad painful to watch a nearly three-hour documentary on an obscure Taiwanese pre-war, avant-garde group of poets determined to bring a modernist agenda to the cultural table – think again.

The Moulin concentrates its eye on seven literary men who heroically formed a poets’ collective, ‘Le Moulin Poetry Society’, in 1933 in order to introduce the spirit of surrealism, and especially the ideas of André Breton and Jean Cocteau, to a Taiwan that had already been occupied by the Japanese for 40 years. Protest at this colonial occupation was a linked purpose of the group. Their chosen vehicle – in common with many proselytising artistic avant-garde movements of the modernist period – was the production of an advocacy journal, which in reference to its French intellectual affiliations and to its surrealist intentions, they named The Moulin. The intentions of ‘Le Moulin Poetry Society’ were clear: to lob a bomb into the body of historical Taiwanese (and by extension Japanese) artistic forms and to attempt to re-configure the poetic and artistic agenda. The seven were to be bitterly disappointed, however, as their journal and their aspirations met with incomprehension and failure, and The Moulin only survived for four issues.

Their hitherto forgotten story is revived in this fascinating slice of cultural history, which mixes old film clips, radio programmes and re-enacted scenes with spoken lines of poetry, on-screen imaging of the original texts and the incorporation of traditional songs, to paint an imaginative portrait of the group and provide a fulsome context for its understanding. The film interestingly notes a visit in May 1936 by Jean Cocteau, who enthusiastically showed his admiration for the Eastern culture that provided direct inspiration for the group.

The recounting of their story covers a turbulent time span in Taiwanese history, from the Japanese occupation, through the war years and to the 1950s annexation by China, all of which reflect the cultural struggle that the country endured. Utilising the dictum that ‘things are good to think with’, director Huang has chosen to reveal key aspects of the story not through facial close-ups but through his preference instead of close-focusing upon human interactions with objects of significance: the lighting of cigarettes, reading of texts, leafing through pages, gazing at photographs. This creates a poem-like reverie that takes its time to unfold and demands a contemplative response from the viewer to project meaning upon these ‘small’ gestures.

Huang Ya-li’s moving and expressive film essay is a revealing and memorable account of this forgotten slice of modernist history – a history that all too often relies on Eurocentric narratives and ignores the larger international moments that occurred elsewhere. This is a very welcome antidote to that centrist tendency.

James B. Evans

This review is part of our Rotterdam 2016 coverage.

Porno e Libertà

Porn to Be Free
Porno e Libertà

Format: Cinema

Seen at Rotterdam 2016

Director: Carmine Amoroso

Alternative title: Porn to Be Free

Italy 2015

78 mins

An uncritical documentary on the Italian porn industry from the 1960s to the 1980s.

‘Pornography should be entirely liberated!’ enthuses Bernardo Bertolucci in footage inserted into this documentary about the ‘tumescent’ rise of pornography in the Italian cinema of the 1960s–1980s. This period of counter-cultural aspiration has been the subject of several hagiographic and frequently mythologising accounts of the assorted social and political liberations – gay, straight, psychotropic – which bestrode the period. Indeed an entire nostalgic consumerist retro-movement in material and cultural matter revolves around it to this day. The very appellation attached to its origins, ‘The Swinging Sixties’, bears testimony to this.

Through the literal and metaphorical rose-coloured testimonial lens of the aptly named director, Carmine Amoroso (carmine indicating red and amoroso indicating amorous and loving; though in light of the present subject matter one might well ask, ‘What’s love got to do with it?’), this documentary traces the growth of Italy’s porn industry from the tentative ‘let’s push the boundaries’ spirit of the 1960s to the ‘let it all hang out’ zeitgeist of the 1970s onwards. It features interviews with pornographers such as Riccardo Schicchi (kicked out of high school, it is said, for spying on girls’ toilets, and having served a prison term for prostitution offences) and touches on issues such as censorship, sexual revolution and the popularisation of some of its stars, such as Ilona Staller, aka Cicciolina, who was elected to the Italian parliament in 1987 and married to the ‘artist’ Jeff Koons for two years before embarking on a 14-year custody case over their son, Ludwig… these facts being germane in considering the documentary’s unproblematic thesis.

In matters sexual, Amoroso has previous form as the writer and director of Come mi vuoi (1996), considered to be the first Italian film delving into issues of the transgender community, and Cover Boy: Last Revolution (2006), a story of two male cultures clashing.

In Porno e Libertà, a voice-over narration accompanies and contexualises the account in an attempt to historicise and revise Italian porn history. But the main polemical aim is to celebrate and legitimise the enterprise by using techniques of narrative and visual persuasion to turn the porn business into a great carnivalesque affair, unconcerned with capital gain and pre-occupied with sexual liberation. It’s an erotic carnival where no one is exploited, no disease, suicide or drug habits are present and profits are not greedily grabbed by producers and distributors; an egalitarian universe where performers ‘do it’ largely for the cause of freedom and hey, just plain fun. It has to be noted that a brief feminist perspective is introduced into the film but serves little balancing purpose to the overall thesis.

This is a documentary that is made unproblematic with regard to the darker issues of pornography and as such is simply a lively romp through a particular cinematic history for which few visual essays have been made. Taking advantage of the contemporary retro taste for porn of an earlier age – vintage porn videos fetch good prices on online auction sites – this celebratory (certainly not masturbatory) documentary is a journey to a lost continent. A seemingly innocent and Arcadian continent where women actually have – can you believe it? – pubic hair! Never has so much hirsute pudenda been spotted since the late 1980s. Porno e Libertà, while historically irresistible, is critically irresponsible.

James B. Evans

This review is part of our Rotterdam 2016 coverage.

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The Fear of 13

The Fear of 13
The Fear of 13

Format: Cinema

Release date: 13 November 2015

DVD release date: 25 January 2016

Distributor: Dogwoof

Director: David Sington

USA 2015

90 mins

A fascinating storytelling tour de force and an ambiguous documentary about a Death Row convict.

A bald-headed man in a blue shirt sits in the corner of a stark room. He leans into the camera, his face half in shadow, and begins to tell his story. The first words he speaks are about time: ‘In the blink of an eye, you can look and 10 years are gone… but the next week is agony.’ This is Nick Yarris, recounting the years that he spent in solitary confinement in a Pennsylvania prison. It’s a dramatic opening to David Sington’s documentary, which is also a breathtakingly dramatic monologue. Yarris is charismatic, intense and a masterful storyteller. After two decades on death row, Yarris requested that all appeals be ceased, and that he be put to death; David Sington’s engrossing, if uneasy, film is an attempt to understand what led to that decision.

Footage of Yarris is mixed with cinematic recreations, often almost abstract close-ups, filmed with a Gregory Crewdson-like vibrancy; in slow motion, a boy runs through the woods, a hint at a dark secret that is shockingly revealed at the film’s end; water pours down a man’s back in a shower; a pair of women’s gloves lie on the seat of an empty car. Crisp, eerie photography of the inside of the prison – the rows of bars, the cold steel of a toilet in an empty cell – is also interwoven with Nick’s tale, as he speaks about the harsh, brutal treatment that he and other prisoners endured, including being ‘tortured with silence’. It’s a captivating performance, full of emotion, as he recounts the horrors of jail, building up a sense of atmosphere by evocatively describing life behind bars, then his rehabilitation, and his newly found obsession with words and literature.

It’s only later in the film that he begins to reveal the details of his past, and the nature of his drug addiction and the crimes that he committed. Though we learn that he was first jailed for auto theft, the crime that – wrongly – landed him on death row is a mystery that runs like a thread throughout much of the film. It’s a story full of twists, turns and tragedies, punctuated by the many mistakes that he made, and also the vagaries and delays of the justice system. And though we learn that he was later exonerated of murder after the advent of DNA testing (although it took years), it’s the final twist that is the most disturbing, powerful and gut-wrenching.

It’s a striking, compelling film that is incredibly personal. Yet, it’s hard, at the end, not to feel as though we’ve been manipulated by both the filmmaker and Yarris. The vague way he’s shot (and the film itself) is reminiscent of interviews in Errol Morris’s remarkable documentary The Thin Blue Line, where the location is obscured, lending a sense that Yarris is perhaps still in the system, though the reality is that his ordeal ended in 2003. While his story is an incredible one, it feels like we’ve watched a very rehearsed theatrical performance, and are left wondering how much of this is documentary and how much is masterful storytelling. But maybe it doesn’t actually matter.

Sarah Cronin

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Hurt

HURT
Hurt

Format: Cinema

Seen at TIFF 2015

Director: Alan Zweig

Canada 2015

84 mins

***** out of *****

Hurt, the latest film by the acclaimed, award-winning Canadian filmmaker Alan Zweig (When Jews Were Funny) has its masterpiece status guaranteed – not simply for its selection in the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival’s all-new 40th anniversary Platform competition (named after Jia Zhang-ke’s 1998 epic); not only because it was an exclusive selection chosen from hundreds of movies in a showcase devoted to shining a light upon 12 international feature films made by exceptional filmmakers doing bold, original work; and most certainly not because it was the only Canadian film in competition, which was then subsequently awarded the Grand Prize by a jury that included Claire Denis, Agnieszka Holland and Jia Zhang-ke. These might normally be considered reasons enough for the picture to attain a lofty status, but the real rationale behind such a proclamation is that Hurt is a film of such greatness that it can’t help but live eternally as one of the most original, compelling and heartbreaking films of the new millennium.

Over one non-stop year between 1984 and 1985, 18-year-old cancer-survivor Steve Fonyo ran 8000 km across Canada with a prosthetic leg. Though his handlers and medical doctors urged him to take a break from running during the blisteringly cold -40 degree weather on the bald, open prairies of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, he refused. He did not want to slow the momentum of reaching his goal. Raising $14 million for cancer research, he received his country’s highest distinction, the Order of Canada.

Fonyo was constantly dogged, however, with unfounded accusations of being a copycat opportunist. A few years earlier, Terry Fox, a young man similarly afflicted, set out on a similar run. Alas, he never finished, dying en-route across Canada in Thunder Bay. His death was exploited by the various Canadian cancer societies, and Fonyo was all but ignored until he passed Fox’s dropping point and, in fact, began raising serious coin for cancer research. Fonyo, a sweet-faced, honest kid, became a hero to all regular folk across the country. He was no longer in the shadow of a previous ‘hero’ and the bureaucrats and administrators of all the high falutin’ charities had to acknowledge his feat of greatness.

Greatness, however, can be fleeting.

After suffering for three decades from abject poverty and various addictions while living within the dark underbelly of the criminal class, Steve Fonyo, this Canadian Hero, was transformed into a pariah by pencil pushers in the nation’s capitol and turfed from the Order of Canada. If he’d been suffering from a disease like cancer, this would have been unthinkable. Because he suffered from the diseases of alcoholism and addiction to crack and other drugs, he was fair game for humiliation by Canada’s fascist Conservative government.

Charting one year in Fonyo’s life, Alan Zweig pulls off a miracle. This stunning documentary (the only one selected for the Platform competition) is as narratively searing and artistically compelling as the grim and gritty 70s cinematic forays into crime, punishment and atonement, like Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Zweig, along with his editor Robert Swartz, cranks up the drama, careening us dangerously and deeply into the horror-ridden life of a hero.

We follow Fonyo’s loving relationship with a wife who was with him through his darkest hours, which included living homeless on the mean streets of Vancouver’s Hastings Street, the very locale in which Canada’s most notorious serial killer Robert Pickton, the farmer who kidnapped what might be hundreds of street women, addicts and prostitutes, then abused, tortured, murdered and subsequently fed them to his pigs. We get sickening first-hand accounts from Fonyo and his wife about what it was like to live on the streets, surrounded by pushers, pimps and rapists.

Zweig captures what might well be Fonyo’s ultimate annus horribilis, including violent altercations with his wife when he drops her for a younger girlfriend; a move to the most dangerous, crime-ridden ghetto of Surrey, B.C.; more violence with the sleazy, drug-addicted ex-boyfriend of his new girlfriend; and a bitter journey to his sweet, Hungarian mother’s suburban home to look over all the stored items of his year as a hero.

It is the very notion of heroism that is at the root of Fonyo’s massive downfall. People want their heroes to be shining examples of modesty, grace and success. What happens, though, when our heroes hit rock bottom?

The very process of filmmaking is what creates an indelible portrait of a fallen hero. Even more astonishing is how Zweig, his voice frequently heard off-camera with probing questions and conversation, gradually becomes a trusted confidante/confessor to this decimated idol of heroism, and a friend whose growing bond is what adds a brave and complex layer to the film.

Zweig’s intervention as both artist and humanitarian offers the promise of healing and redemption to Fonyo. A deus ex machina sees Zweig bringing in one of the world’s foremost authorities on addiction, the brilliant counselor, author and teacher, Gabor Mate. With the cameras rolling, with Mate’s assistance (and by extension, Zweig’s), Fonyo, for the first time in his 50 years on earth, looks deeply into a mirror of truth. We weep with him and finally see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Finally, we feel this tragic figure will find peace and that we’ll be rewarded with a happy ending. Remember though, that the film shares a great number of similarities with American cinema’s existentialist male angst movies of the 70s – tough minded ambiguity. Sadly, the film leaves us with yet another deus ex machina out of left field. There’s nothing happy about it at all.

Alan Zweig’s Hurt cold-cocks you as frequently as it wrenches tears.

This review is part of our 2015 TIFF coverage.

Greg Klymkiw

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The Look of Silence

The Look of Silence
The Look of Silence

Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 June 2015

Distributor: Dogwoof

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer

Denmark, Indonesia, Norway, Finland, UK 2014

98 mins

‘Once I brought a woman’s head to a Chinese coffee shop.’

‘If we didn’t drink human blood we’d go crazy. Many went crazy, they killed too many people. To stop it you have to drink your victims’ blood.’

‘So we fished him out and killed him by cutting off his penis.’

Time and time again in The Look of Silence we are in the company of old men, normally sat in the most mundane settings, wood-panelled living rooms and cluttered gardens, as they blithely spout the most horrible and twisted things you will ever hear. They are reminiscing about their part in the mass slaughter of loosely defined ‘communists’ in 1965 in Indonesia. And they are generally unconcerned about talking about the catalogue of horrors that they took part in, because the powers that sanctioned the slaughter are still in control.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up/companion piece to his extraordinary documentary The Act of Killing does not disappoint on any level, least of all in its evocation of gobsmacking weirdness and horror existing just below the everyday. It’s a leaner, shorter piece of work than The Act of Killing, and while it lacks the central innovation of that film – the phantasmagorical genre-movie reconstructions that were set up to extract confessions from the killers – it benefits hugely from a tighter focus, this time on Adi, born after the killings to mother Rohani and father Rukun, and considered by Rohani to be a replacement for her son Ramli, who was brutally murdered in 65. Adi is the son she needed to have as a reason to keep on living, and the film follows his journey as he pieces together what happened, confronting those responsible for his brother’s death, occasionally using his position as an optician to get close to them, and asking the questions that his country clearly doesn’t want asked.

The responses to Adi’s questions range from a kind of shrugging ‘well, that’s just how it was’ to excuses that the communists deserved it because they didn’t pray enough, to not-so-veiled threats that stirring all this stuff up will lead to it happening again. There’s an ever present double-think at work here, a sense of something undigested and unhealthy. The killers of 65 flick peace signs and thumbs up as they pose for photographs by the river that was once filled with dismembered corpses (‘after it was over nobody would eat fish or clams’). They’ve made picture books about what they did (‘I illustrated it myself’). They follow the official line that hacking people to death was for the good of the country, but there’s a squirming evasiveness to their responses (‘I don’t like deep questions’) and an anger that Adi is talking about all this old news. Families in 2012 aren’t too receptive to the knowledge that, 40-odd years back, Grandpa used to cut women’s breasts off. There’s a lot of denial and obfuscation, and the kind of sick politics that can lead to someone saying ‘let’s all just get along, like the military dictatorship taught us’.

All the while Oppenheimer quietly observes, juxtaposing the most appalling revelations with tranquil shots of lush, photogenic scenery, emphasising a dreamy disconnection between then and now. Music is kept to a minimum, and barring the opening text on screen, there is no overt editorialising. This approach is mirrored in Adi, who has plenty of reasons to be angry, but never fulminates or rages, and is a model of quiet dignity throughout; he is persistent but never confrontational or accusatory, in a climate where it is doubtless unwise to be so.

As with The Act of Killing, many of the crew are credited as ‘anonymous’, and it becomes obvious that members of Adi’s family were unwilling to appear on screen. The film asks what happens to a country that’s unable to look itself in the mirror, what the scars are from this trauma. We see Adi’s parents, both over 100, Rohani stoic, but still feeling the pain of the loss of Ramli, Rukun lost in dementia, believing he’s 17, and see a parallel. We see people clearly afraid to repeat what they know to be true, and others clinging to lies they want to believe. In this context, the daughter of a killer who makes an attempt, no matter how gauche and inadequate, to reach out to Adi, and pray for his forgiveness, is a glorious exception.

Thoughtful, beautiful, upsetting, magnificent, it’s a film you’ll chew over for days, and weeks, afterwards. A film you’ll leave in silence.

Mark Stafford

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The Decent One

the decent one
The Decent One

Format: Cinema + VOD

Release date: 3 April 2015

Distributor: Curzon Film World

Director: Vanessa Lapa

Writers: Vanessa Lapa, Ori Weisbrod

Original title: Der Anständige

Austria, Israel 2014

96 mins

Heinrich Himmler was not only the most terrifying figure in Adolf Hitler’s inner circle, he was also the most elusive of his henchmen to have gained tremendous power. Despite his inexorable rise from patriotic lad to the Nazi party’s propaganda leader and Hitler’s personal bodyguard, before heading the SS and the police and, from 1943, serving as minister of the interior, his character and personality remained a frustrating enigma. Inevitably it raises the question of how and why it was possible for someone as inconspicuous as he once was to eventually become Hitler’s right-hand man, solely responsible for overseeing the ‘Final Solution’.

Israeli filmmaker Vanessa Lapa’s documentary The Decent One tries to shine new light on Himmler’s murky psychological profile and, to some extent, the telling details that are revealed are haunting and illuminating in equal measure. The film is based on a newly discovered collection of documents, including hundreds of pages of diary entries and private letters between Himmler and his family, mixed with official correspondence. These documents are thought to have been found by US army officers in May 1945 in one of the Himmler family homes in Gmund, in the Bavarian Alps, but failed to get into the hands of the authorities until a few years ago. While most people might think that the number of documentaries on Hitler and his entourage have come close to exhausting the subject, what makes Lapa’s approach different is the disturbing sense of banality in the material. Recited in sometimes emphatic voice-over by actors, illustrated with photographs and archive footage, and accompanied by a heavy, occasionally sensational score mixed with amplified sound effects, the documents presented unravel the picture of a precocious, petty bourgeois who writes corny letters to his wife, and later to his mistress (his long-term secretary Hedwig Potthast), while his relentless bureaucratic bigotry, fierce anti-Semitism and urge to serve help him to quickly move up the party ladder right to the top.

The Decent One is also released on DVD in the UK on 13 April 2015 by Artificial Eye.

Yet as historic events unfold, the consistent, progressively devastating flow of readings, combined with descriptive footage, becomes problematic and precariously unwieldy. Lapa’s presentation is at its best when it exposes Himmler’s inner thoughts and occasionally surprising considerations in the wealth of mundane private correspondence. But while there’s little doubt about the value of the film in terms of revealing new aspects of Himmler’s personality – albeit on a rather superficial level – the lack of impetus that characterises The Decent One almost from the outset, with its insistence on a very concrete formal investigation, offers little more than a reminder of dark times. Ultimately, it gives less insight into the actual psychology of an introverted mass murderer and war criminal and his repression of any sense of guilt than one would have hoped for.

Pamela Jahn

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In the Basement

In the Basement 1
In the Basement

Director: Ulrich Seidl

Original title: Im Keller

Austria 2014

84 mins

Ulrich Seidl likes to go where it hurts and, over the last 35 years, he’s been there and back again many times in his relentless attempt to explore the murkier depths and chasms of Austrian society. Sometimes he digs deeper than anyone else would dare, as in his 1994 documentary Animal Love (Tierische Liebe), in which he portrayed a number of Viennese residents who turn to their animals for affection and more. At other times, such as in his most recent Paradise trilogy, he uses fictional settings and stories to sting, invade and undermine the human psyche and the terrifying obsessions and perversions it can nurture, fiercely drawing out patterns of social behaviour that range from the mundane to the extreme.

In his latest documentary, In the Basement, he sets out to investigate what’s happening in Austrian cellars and what kind of relationship the often dubious owners have with their precious spaces underground. And as one would expect from a Seidl film, what he finds is a bunch of rather obscure characters, framed and juxtaposed in carefully arranged single-take shots with non-judgemental compassion, who (at least partially) seem almost desperate to step out of the shade and into the spotlight of his honest, vigilant camera. Among the most memorable are a failed opera singer who has turned his cellar into a fully operational underground shooting range; a devoted Nazi and his memorabilia cabinet; the inhabitants of professional and private SM-studios; and the ‘mommy’ of shockingly natural-looking baby dolls stored in shoe boxes.

The portraits are filmed in typical, tableau-like perfection, mocking both the protagonists within the film and the act of documentary filmmaking itself. To some extent, In the Basement is crafted in the same way that John Waters created Shock Value, an often fascinating, frequently creepy, unashamedly funny compilation of oddities and curiosities that are occasionally hard to digest. And yet, over the course of the film you begin to wonder whether there is anything new, anything unique being said here that couldn’t be found elsewhere.

Still, what becomes clear after watching In the Basement is that even after more than three decades of arduous research, Seidl doesn’t seem to run short of impaired souls to explore and portray in his films, and his combination of grotesque rituals with tragic comedy is handled with an increasingly deft balance of wit, irony and candour in almost every work he produces. And even if the film makes no direct connection to the case of Joseph Fritzl – the Austrian who kept his daughter imprisoned in the cellar of their very own house, raped and abused her over nearly a quarter of a century, and fathered her seven children – the mere thought of his existence adds a layer of disconcerting reality to Seidl’s protagonists who merrily display and confirm that whatever is happening in some Austrian basements these days, it’s far from the ordinary.

Pamela Jahn

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

Finding Vivian Maier

Finding Vivian Maier
Finding Vivian Maier © Vivian Maier/Maloof

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 July 2014

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Directors: John Maloof, Charlie Siskel

USA 2013

84 mins

By now, many people will have heard of nanny Vivian Meier, who was revealed to be one of the 20th century’s very best street photographers when her astonishing body of work – often shot while she wandered the city of Chicago with her young charges – was discovered posthumously. It’s a remarkable story: in 2007, the amateur collector John Maloof came across several boxes of her photographs at an auction; over time, he tracked down her remaining possessions: over 150,000 photographs and negatives, hours of Super 8 footage, as well as audio recordings, receipts, letters – everything.

Finding Vivian Maier documents the attempt of directors John Maloof and Charlie Siskel to tell her fascinating story by tracking down people who knew Maier – her employers, their children, the odd friend and relative. But the film is also about Maloof, who is now the sole owner of her work; it’s understandable, but somewhat regrettable, that he has been so heavily injected into the film. Maloof deserves enormous credit for tirelessly promoting her to the public, and to the sometimes less-than-receptive art establishment, but the truly captivating element of this tale is not Maloof, or even Maier, but the incredible artistry of her photographs.

Finding Vivian Maier is released
in the UK on DVD and Blu-ray on
10 November 2014 by Soda Pictures.

The woman was an enigma; she spoke with a French accent but was born and raised in New York; no one really seemed to know where she was from or what her background was. But she went everywhere with her camera, photographing the children she cared for, crime scenes, the destitute (think Weegee and Mary Ellen Mark), as well as creating incredible self-portraits using mirrors and glass – anything she could point her camera at.

The documentary is at its best when it reveals Maier’s photographs and films to the audience, and the narration at its strongest when we hear her own voice on the audio recordings. What is clearly evident is her ability to capture candid and beautiful moments on film; and while playing detective proved irresistible to the filmmakers, does it really matter if she was a hoarder, or, as she’s painted towards the end of the film, possibly mad and violent? There’s something uncomfortable and slightly sensationalist about a posthumous portrayal of a woman who can’t speak for herself.

Some of the very best documentaries are themselves works of art; skilfully written and shot, intricately pieced together. And while there’s little doubt about the value of Finding Vivian Maier in terms of revealing her work, it’s a shame that the documentary itself is a victim of conventional story-telling, with its over-reliance on talking heads, and insistence on a very concrete linear narrative, rather than something more abstract and innovative. But despite its flaws, the film should be seen, if only for the chance to experience Maier’s stunning photographs.

Sarah Cronin

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The Man Whose Mind Exploded

The Man Whose Mind Exploded
The Man Whose Mind Exploded

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 July 2014 (UK), 13 June 2014 (London & Brighton)

Distributor: Picturehouse Entertainment

Director: Toby Amies

UK 2012

77 mins

For many years 70-something-year-old Drako Oho Zahar Zahar was a prominent figure in the British gay underground. In his time as a dancer he had posed for Salvador Dalí, worked with Andy Warhol, and can be seen, leather-clad, giant black dildo in hand, writhing around in the foreground of Derek Jarman’s The Garden.

But that was then and this is now. Today Drako suffers from anterograde amnesia: he is a man with no past, just a permanent, rolling present that forces him to take everyone, and everything, at face value, including filmmaker Toby Amies. When Amies first visits Drako to discuss making a film about him, Drako remembers nothing about their arrangement, but agrees to do it anyway, abiding by the code he has lived by, and has tattooed onto his arm, ever since losing his memory: ‘Trust, Absolute, Unconditional’. The moving and inspiring film that emerges from several years of regular visits to Drako’s cramped Brighton council flat, festooned from wall to wall with gay pornography and scribbled notes-to-self, is a deeply human portrait of a developing friendship, and of a difficult life lived to its fullest.

Rather than document Drako’s colourful existence before the accident that robbed him of his memory, Amies makes the bold decision to focus on Drako now, choosing to take his subject for what he is, rather than for what he used to be. As their bond strengthens, and Amies shifts in Drako’s consciousness from another unknown to a ‘cher ami’, so Amies’s role changes, from documenter to carer, and the genuine warmth between Drako, on screen, and Amies off it, is enough to heat even the largest gentlemen’s sauna.

This in itself should counter any accusations – and they have been raised – that the film exploits Drako’s mental health problems: indeed Amies confronts his subject with that very question. ‘I like to be used,’ moans Drako, staring into the camera, tugging at his stretched, pierced nipples through specially prepared holes in a chunky knit sweater. Just who, we are forced to ask, is using who here?

With all the current talk of ‘British Values’, it strikes this reviewer that every voting age adult in this country should be encouraged, or, if they protest, forced to see The Man Whose Mind Exploded. Here they will learn about the once deep-seated British Values of not just tolerance, but of celebration of difference and eccentricity that must be retained, and will surely be lost, in a world without Drakos.

Mark Pilkington

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