Notes on Some Documentaries

The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936, directed by Pare Lorentz, 4.4 stars) is the second movie I've ever watched for its musical score (by Virgil Thompson; the first was for bernard Hermann's score for "Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef"). The subject of this documentary is the causes of the 1930s dust bowl (see its title). It includes footage on the exodus from the Great Plains and more sparing narration than that for "The River," but still is repetitious.

The River (1937, directed by Pare Lorentz) is a documentary sponsored by the Farm Security Administration showing deforestation, soil erosion, flooding, and celebrating the Tennessee Valley Authority. The images of the Mississippi and its tributaries are striking and there is another splendid score by Virgil Thompson, but the narration is more than overbearing. 5 stars for the music and the images, 4 for editing, 1 for the script.

Since watching Kon Ichikawa's awesome Tokyo Olympiad (about the 1964 summer Olympics), I'd been meaning to take another look at Leni Riefenstahl's (1937, 4.5 stars) classic Olympia. Some of the filming of events in Riefenstahl's pioneering documentary is routine now, but these are the events in which black Americans trounced "the master race" while Hitler's favorite (still-resident) director recorded them. Both of the great Olympics documents have pole-vaulting competitions running into the night and seemingly beyond human endurance. Neither film is remotely close to the chauvinism of American televising of recent Olympics. Riefenstahl celebrated athletic bodies of all races and downplayed German successes.

The Men Who Made the Movies: Howard Hawks (1973, 2005, written and directed by Richard Schickel, 4.8 stars) has great clips and stories already familiar to me from the auteur of speed (with interviews in the vicinity of his grandson's motorcycle racing).

The 1978 film, directed by Martin Scorcese, of the (1976) last concert performance by The Band, The Last Waltz, seems to me undistinguished cinema, interspersed with mostly dull stories told by the members of the group, though the last half hour strikes me as marvel-filled. (3.3 stars for me; more for Band fans)

George Stevens, Jr. compiled color film of World War that was shot by his father, director and former cameraman George Stevens Sr. (Shane, Giant, A Place in the Sun), who was in charge of an army film crews in the European war From D-Day to Berlin (1994, Emmy-winner). Lasting less than an hour, it includes rare shots of George Patton and Omar Bradley, and Charles De Gaulle in color, and even rarer color footage from Dachau as the Allied troops tried to sort out who had been the SS guards. The documentary is less than an hour and includes many shots of Stevens with soldiers (not all generals) that he obviously did not shoot himself. The home movies of Stevens on the western front are supplemented with some footage of combat crossing Belgium, footage of the liberation of Paris, the aforementioned Dachau horrors, and looking around bombed-out Berlin.

A Place Called Chiapas (1998, directed by Nettie Wild, 3.6 stars) is an earnest documentary about the Zapatista rebellion in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas that began in 1994 (with the signing of NAFTA and the ending of any pretense at land reform, the primary issue of the 1910-20 Mexican Civil War that ended with an "institutionalized revolutionary party" that governed until after the movie was made), and is still not resolved (though a cease-fire continues). Although I have spent weeks in Chiapas, I was almost always confused about where the footage was shot. Still, some of the sequences capture the surrealness of "the first postmodernist revolution" that began in a town named Realidad (reality!). Taking a page from the Karl Rove playbook (or is the Negroponte one?), the right-wing paramilitary terrorists call themselves Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice). The government denied the existence of the thugs it was supporting. There is some lugubrious narration, the cat and mouse Q&As with Sub-Commandante Marcos and with the Bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas are more fun.

The Gleaners and I (2000, directed by Agnès Varda, 4 stars) is a genial documentary about people bending over to salvage food or discarded stuff. It and a 2002 followup have arresting images and considerable wit, but ignore some of the side effects of what my partner calls "the recycling pirates": noise, garbage strewn about, what is put out for recycling being moved to the garbage for the convenience of those going through the garbage, and here (but not apparently in France) robbing recycling credit from those who put stuff out to be recycled rather than collected and sold by the recycling pirates.

Kurosawa (2001, 4.5 stars) It's hard to go wrong with clips from masterpieces by the man whom I consider the greatest of filmmakers, Kurosawa Akira (1910-98) and interviews with the likes of Ichikawa Kon and Nakadai Tatsuya, and shooting in Kurosawa's mountain retreat. On addition to footage from a series of 2002 interviews, "It Is Wonderful to Create," parts of which are on Criterion edition releases of Kurosawa films, there is a superb 1985 documentary about the making of his culminating masterpiece "Ran" (Chaos, a medieval Japanese adaptation of "King Lear" with the kingdom divided among sons rather than daughters) by Christ Marker, titled "A.K."

Hidden Values: The Movies of the '50s (2001, 4 stars) including John Carpenter, Roger Corman,Paul Mazursky, Lee Grant, Molly Haskell, Paul Mazursky commenting on some of the challenging (to conventional norms) movies from the 1950s: The Wild One, Rebel withou a Cause, The Blackboard Jungle, The Thing, Giant, and Anatomy of a Murder. Interesting comments and good choice of film clips (but no Sam Fuller movies, alas).

Im Spiegel der Maya Deren (In the Mirror of Maya Deren), a 2002 documentary (directed by Martina Kudl e cek for Austrian tv, 4.2 stars) about the Russian- émigré dancer turned avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren (1917-1961) includes footage from the seven studies of motion Deren made along with Haitian voudou(n) footage that was put together by her second husband, Teiji Ito, long after her death (released in 1985), various interviews, and some color footage shot in Haiti. The basic chronology of a short but tempestuous life is laid out in intertitles. There are also audiotapes of Deren speaking (she sounds remarkably like Lucille Ball!). I've read Deren's voudou(n) book Divine Horsemen and seen the movie given the same name by Ito, but had never seen any of her experimental films (I'd like to see all of the last two of them; her completed films are available on a single DVD from Mysticfire.com, as is "Divine Horsemen"). There are some good stories told by survivors (including Katherine Dunham, a dancer/choreographer who also did ethnographic/ethnomusical work in Haiti; Jonas Meeker and Stan Brakhage). John Zorn added music to that of Ito's and the sound (except for the silent Deren movies from the 1940s) is as interesting as the images in this documentary that (like Deren's films) deserves a wider audience.

The most self-indulgent movie since Prince made "Under the Cherry Moon" has to be Rosanna Arquette's Searching for Debra Winger (2002, 1.4 stars), which she ostensibly directed. There musta been some editing, because interviews with Whoopi Goldberg and Sharon Stone are interspersed with scenes of Rosanna visiting Patricia, sitting around with kvetching actresses, and cornering Frances McDormand in a can at Cannes. It does not appear to have been difficult to find Debra Winger or to get her to explain why she stopped making mov. There's way too much of Arquette(s), far too much scatter and no attempt to explore how some leading actresses survived turning 40. Charlotte Rampling shows up, but Arquette has no idea what to ask her (and, for that matter, Jane Fonda). The movie is also annoyingly coy about money... and talent differentials (between Daryll Hannah and Vanessa Redgrave, to leave the Arquettes from being the low end of the continuum of talking heads in the movie).

Tibet The Cry of the Snow Lion (2003, directed by Tom Piozet, 4.7 stars) is a heartbreaking movie about Chinese cruelty that is all too real. It tells the story of the brutal repression of Tibetan culture/religion since the 1949 invasion by the nascent PRC. It gives time to PRC spokesmen, who are considerably less convincing than the testimony of those tortured in PRC prisons. I was interested to hear Jeanne Kirkpatrick label what the Chinese communists are doing in Tibet as "genocide." I don't recall her saying anything similar when she was Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the UN, but since Henry Kissinger sold out Tibet (and Taiwan) to Zhou Enlai in the first minute of US government fawning to the regime that has killed more of its people than any in history, subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations have ignored the massive human rights violations in the conquered nation of Tibet.

"Les plages d'Agnès" (The Beaches of Agnès, 2008, 4.1 stars, winner of the César for best documentary) is a charming memoir by Agnès Varda ("mother of the French New Wave" and of two children, husband of Jaques Demy, director of "Cleo from 5 to 7" and of "One Sings, the Other Doesn't"). The octogenerian Varda speaks directly to the viewer both on-camera and in voiceovers, includes scenes of her directing the movie itself as well as archival footage, and some dramatization by actors of her memories. The movie is more or less chronological and occasionally rambles a bit, but Varda is candid more than she is sentimental about the past, including her husband who died of AIDS in 1990. There is more gleaning, including finding cardboard portraits of film directors at a flea market on the Seine. She buys one of herself, and remarks on being transformed from flesh and blood to cardboard. In addition to filming the Black Panthers in California in 1968, she directed the first appearances on screen of Gerald Depardieu, Phillipe Noiret... and Harrison Ford!