Documentary Week
Last week was documentary week, meaning it was a week when I watched documentaries. Below I will expand upon my favorite documentaries I saw last week (during documentary week).
Don’t Look Back (1967), Directed by D.A. Pennebaker
Bob Dylan has zero interest in making sense. In a world running on human beings attempting to communicate with one another, Dylan has decided that such attempts are futile, so instead he writes world class folk songs, lets you make what you want of them, and he spends the rest of his time hovering somewhere in between asshole, genius, and lunatic.
Don’t Look Back follows Dylan through his 1965 tour of England. He was 23-years-old. With this sort of behind-the-scenes footage, you expect Dylan-the-legend to be demystified. You think you’ll walk away from the movie saying “he’s just a person” or “we’re not so different after all.” But Bob Dylan doesn’t really seem like a person. And we seem pretty freaking different, after all.
Whether he’s belittling reporters, writing songs in the middle of a Joan Baez-hotel-room-concert, or sharing his unintelligible philosophical musings, Dylan always remains constant in one way: he doesn’t make any sense. Dylan the icon has no interest in revealing anything about Dylan the person. Maybe it’s intentional — it’s a ploy to maintain his folk hero mystique. Or maybe he really is insane.
The movie ends with a rare glimmer of humanity. In a lightning-quick burst of subdued emotion, Bob Dylan seems to briefly acknowledge how freaking insane it is to be Bob Dylan. But then the moment’s gone as quickly as it comes, and the movie ends, and you have to reconcile with the fact that you spent 90 minutes trying to get to know a guy who couldn’t have less interest in being known.
You can’t watch this movie and not think Bob Dylan’s an asshole. Don’t Look Back is a filmic manifestation of the “never meet your heroes” saying. But the world has plenty of nice people. It only has one Bob Dylan.
At Berkeley (2013), Directed by Frederick Wiseman
Off the top of my head, the least interesting thing I can think of is my dad talking about Abraham Lincoln. I’m pretty sure Frederick Wiseman could make a 3-hour documentary about my dad’s plagiarized thoughts on the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural.
Wiseman has made 3-ish hour documentaries on Boston’s government, New York City’s Public Library, and Monrovia, Indiana’s everything. Nothing is unworthy of Wiseman’s camera. That is especially true of his 4-hour exploration of California’s premiere public school: At Berkeley.
We pull up a chair in staff meetings, grab a desk in classrooms, and hang out on the campus quad. We get to see professors, and custodians, and PhD candidates. We sit, and we listen, and we watch. The only thing we can’t do in Wiseman’s immersive, collegiate epic is speak.
You could describe Wiseman’s work as meditative, or patient, or ruminative. A lot of people would also probably describe it as boring, and it would be hard to say they’re wrong. But Wiseman’s comprehensive portrait of UC Berkeley is fascinating — and I’d say engaging — in the way it juxtaposes the school’s growth with its dwindling state funding.
At Berkeley has three primary areas of focus. Two of them — the classroom and the school’s new developments — are all about expansion, both intellectual and physical. The third is a lengthy administrative meeting detailing the college’s economic strain stemming from its reduced California funding. At first, it doesn’t make sense — how can a place that is constantly growing also be constantly losing money from the state? But then you realize the answer is simple: It charges its students more.
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This is a film about American higher education. But like anything related to American higher education, it’s ultimately about something else: money.
Harlan County, USA (1976), Directed by Barbara Kopple
One of America’s most celebrated documentaries, Harlan County, USA centers on a coal-mining strike in 1970s Eastern Kentucky. Featuring an Outlaw-Country score, to go along with an Outlaw-Country cast of characters, Harlan County is hyper-specific to its Bluegrass State setting, while its larger socio-political themes resonate across time and region.
My only problem with Harlan County, that I expect a lot of people born after 1990 will share, is that I don’t know a thing about labor unions. Thanks to Martin Scorsese’s 400-hour epic The Irishman I know they used to be a pretty big deal, but they aren’t the cultural and economic forces they used to be. Much of Harlan County involves keeping track of union presidents, and labor negotiations, and membership contracts. That all means very little to me. I’ve been raised in a Gig-Economy-world where Silicon Valley tech companies screw you over from thousands of miles away — no questions asked.
These are minor issues. You can lose track of who is president of which union and still empathize with those affected by the vicious, prolonged labor battle. Most hauntingly, Kopple never loses sight of the bigger picture: if the workers are victorious in securing their unionized labor contract, their “prize” is going back to work in a coal mine. I know Trump says that there’s “clean coal” to go along with the dirty coal, but the work all looked filthy to me.
(If you enjoy this documentary, one of the best TV shows of the 21st century is set in Harlan County: Justified.)
Time (2020), Directed by Garrett Bradley
In an age dominated by Marvel IP, it’s always nice to know that there’s a real artist with a distinct creative vision behind a movie. This is especially true for documentaries, which can often feel like home video compilations, or investigative podcasts set to an engaging PowerPoint. Time, the story of Fox Rich’s two-decade campaign to get her husband released from prison, is more than just a collection of candid footage, or a PSA on the structural racism of America’s criminal justice system. It’s a thoughtful, artful film that side-steps infographics on the country’s racially-lopsided prison statistics in favor of stunning black-and-white photography and a careful character study.
Time is one of the best things to come out in 2020. It’s a beautiful movie. But, at times, it might be a little too beautiful. There’s a fine line between artfulness and preciousness. Bradley might stumble a couple paces passed that line at certain points.
I might be nitpicking, because Time is a really good movie. Maybe it’s even great.
Amy (2015), Directed by Asif Kapadia
One of the better-known documentaries of the last decade, Kapadia’s film is a portrait of the talented and tormented singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse. Amy is a scathing critique of celebrity culture, and a damning portrayal of a family turning a blind eye to dangerous and ultimately deadly behavior.
In the end, Amy suffers from the exact thing that made Time so good: it often felt less like a movie and more like a collection of home videos, or a compilation of Amy’s Late Night performances.
Amy is good because Winehouse’s story is undeniably compelling; maybe Kapadia made the right choice by largely getting out of the way and letting the story speak for itself. But, at times, it felt slightly un-cinematic. Amy isn’t something I could imagine seeing in a movie theater.
