Day 2: Glutton for Punishment

All told, I attended six screenings today, during which I saw all or part of well over a dozen movies. There’s a lot to say and little time in which to say it, so let’s get right to the films.

The day started out with qualified levity. My first doc was Sound it Out, a charming and resolutely lo-fi film about one of the few remaining record shops in Northeast England. The eponymous store plays sanctuary for a host of subjects as eccentric as one should expect: metal heads, saucy drunk Englishmen, dancehall kids, Makina DJs. Humor is inevitable with such a group. But their uneasy private lives (attempts at suicide, mental disorders), and the tacit possibility of Sound it Out’s succumbing to low foot traffic and high iTunes sales, noted sporadically keep the film grounded. Music, then, is respite, not cure, and director Jeanie Finlay is wise to resist the urge toward sentimentalism.

The film’s homespun production gets in its own way sometimes, as when a handle on a metal case onscreen jiggles loudly through an entire scene. But then again, it’s the scratches and pops on this retro vinyl pressing that keep Sound it Out pure.

A far tougher film to witness is Heather Courtney’s Where Soldiers Come From, which I caught second. The film starts off as you could probably infer from the title—a group of lower middle-class kids from a rural town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (though it could be any rural, Middle American town), decide to join the military (here the National Guard) as a way to get some money and direction. They are deployed to Afghanistan fairly soon after.

It is at this point that the movie veers into unexpected territory.  The group of friends are tasked with patrolling Afghani roads in armored vehicles, blowing up IEDs sometimes for 20 hours at a time. Not all of the detonations onscreen are intentional. Concussions are suffered, skin toughens and tightens. At night they guzzle NyQuil so as to be allowed even the shallowest of naps.

The film switches between Afghanistan and Michigan, where we gaze the soldiers’ families. Eventually, however, the Michigan National Guard’s tour ends, and Courtney follows her subjects back home, only to find their reintegration proves tougher than their deployment. All in all, a fair, intimate, and unflinching set of portraits.

At the recommendation of a man I met in line, I went right from Where Soldiers Come From to another war doc: Danfung Dennis’ Hell and Back Again. Here we follow Sgt. Nathan Harris, U.S. Marine Corps, as he rehabilitates from a nasty gunshot wound. Even more, we watch how that rehab affects his reintegration back into a small town in North Carolina. Hell and Back Again will no doubt be remembered as a technologically important doc. Dennis shot the whole thing on a DSLR; the resultant images are just as beautiful as any comparable video camera could capture, and they are certainly nimbler. There is no question, then, that Dennis has assembled some of best war footage I’ve ever seen, period.

But it is the film’s structure, a structure which imports a number of techniques from narrative film, that give cause for concern. Harris’ Afghanistan story is told at the same time as his North Carolina story, and Dennis tends to switch back and forth the following way: Harris is back in North Carolina; he is alone or off by himself; wartime soundtrack bleeds into the picture; cut back to Afghanistan. Harris’ insularity always implies a movement into interiority. And given the intensity of the war scenes, as well as our intuitions to respond to such memories as moments of pathos, what Dennis effects are war flashbacks.

Yet Harris tells us numerous times that actually he wants to go back. He wants to kill more people, and the real stress comes from the fact that he simply won’t be able to do that. There’s no evidence that Harris is lying about this. And given the nightmarish nature of many of these transitions (Dennis often recorded sounds and slowed them down to 2% to create a low and ethereal soundscape) it would seem wrong to read them as thoughts of desire. So the question one should ask is whether Dennis is aestheticizing Harris’ troubles or editing them.

I don’t like feeling as if my emotions are being manhandled by a filmmaker, and so I don’t know how I come down on Hell and Back Again. But it is still one to look out for, if only for its jaw-dropping iconography and sporadically pure intimacy. And if it prods you into thinking about the role of authorial presence in documentary, even at its own expense, then its still worth the price of admission.

I wish I could say I lightened things up after this. Instead, I took in four shorts, grouped under the theme of “stories that shape us.” The first, Bathing Miky, was a characteristically European film, and a little frothy at times. But its subject, a centenarian named Miky, whose weathered yet confident face was made for this movie, provided a remarkably eloquent account of the inevitable march toward death.

The second, Living for 32, detailed the efforts of Colin Goddard’s efforts campaigning for new gun control legislation in America. Goddard was shot four times during the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, but he survived and recuperated admirably. The film was informative and at times moving, but the whole thing suffers from massive overdirection. Goddard’s story is tough enough; there is absolutely no need to shoot his interviews like David Fincher shot Se7en.

Good Bye Mandima, a Swiss film about director Robert-Jan Lacombe’s last day living in Zaire before moving to Europe, came next. Chris Marker’s La jetee is an obvious predecessor, as Lacombe contextualizes his narration by cutting in and across different still images from his time growing up in Africa. It was a thoughtful way of publicly sifting through one’s own conflicted memories. (Shortly after Lacombe’s family left Zaire, all of his childhood friends fell victim to genocide.) But despite all the memories, something about this film left me cold. Maybe the day was getting to me.

Last came Robin Fryday and Gail Dolgin’s The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement. Adequately made, I suppose, but the story they tell, that of one James Armstrong, is phenomenal. This guy was essentially in the background of some of the most significant events in the Civil Rights Movement. He cut Martin Luther King’s hair in Birmingham, brought his kids to school upon the integration of southern schools, and marched at Bloody Sunday. Worth seeing, if only for the history of it.

Sadly, dinner was eaten in line again, this time for the 2011 Guggenheim Symposium honoring cinema verite giants D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. The conversation was candid and enjoyable, but thin overall. Pennebaker and Hegedus are responsible for some of the most iconic images of the 20^th century (Jimi Hendrix playing at Monterey Pop Festival, Bob Dylan’s video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in the beginning of Dont Look Back, footage of James Carville and George Stephanopoulos in Bill Clinton’s campaign HQ), even if they don’t want to admit to it. I sat next to a particularly nice man who, before the event began, asked me which film so far has moved me the most. I think that’s one of the best questions I’ve been asked in a long time.

I ended the evening with some Fro Zen Yo and a free screening of Monterey Pop in a pavilion near the AFI Silver. There’s not much I need to say about the film other than it’s one of the best rock ‘n roll documentaries ever, right up there with Gimme Shelter. Seeing it outdoors provided a nice symmetry with the event itself.

A long day journeyed into night; I trooped back to the hotel, where I sit resting my aching emotions. But don’t worry too much. I think they could use the exercise.