“The Look of Silence”
There are not many films, documentary or otherwise, that can claim to have had the kind of impact of Joshua Oppenheimer‘s Oscar-nominated 2012 title “The Act of Killing.” But perhaps it’s only now, with the follow-up, “The Look of Silence” that we can truly understand the scale of his projects’ undertaking. With both films born in the same moment, as Oppenheimer told us, it’s as though ‘Act’ was there to blow wide open the moral hypocrisy of an Indonesian regime founded on, and stomach-churningly proud of, an unreported genocide, but in the crater it left behind, ‘Look’ plants some tiny seedlings of hope. Which is not to say it is an easy watch — nothing about Oppenheimer’s films is easy — but in focusing on the survivor side of the story, rather than that of the perpetrator, amid the despair at injustice, there is a remarkably sense of calm grace. This is largely due to the film’s focus on Adi, a village optometrist whose brother was murdered by the regime, and who has, along with his aged parents, lived alongside his brother’s unrepentant murderers all his life. Adi is a remarkable individual, stoically facing down these men in quiet interviews that are simple on the surface, but roiling with conflicting currents of courage, shame, ego and horror beneath. If it is hard to imagine a more brilliant portrait of the perfect corruptibility of a human soul than ‘Act”s Anwar Congo, it’s maybe even harder to imagine a greater example of unassuming personal bravery than Adi. “The Look of Silence” is a different sort of devastating from “The Act of Killing” but no less necessary, because the cauterizing of an open wound is a painful process in itself, and it will leave a scar forever, but it is also the beginning of healing. [Full Review]
“Meru”
The winner of the top 2015 Sundance Film Festival audience award documentary prize, there’s a good reason why Jimmy Chin and E. Chai Vasarhelyi‘s “Meru” walked away with top honors: the heart-stopping chronicle may have defined the impossible, death-defying mountain climbing documentary (which has a fair few other entries, many of them excellent) for once and for all. In fact, good luck ever topping “Meru,” which is not only a deeply visceral white knuckler that will keep you exclaiming your disbelief out loud—and perhaps questioning the sanity of everyone involved—but a genuinely moving tale of super human perseverance and friendship. The doc centers on three friends and climbing-world superstars who try and scale the “unclimbable” Meru, a mountain at the base of the Indian Ganges river that features a perilous “shark fin” peak with crumbling, fragile qualities. The men attempt the feat and fail, almost dying in the process, and one is badly wounded in a subsequent avalanche accident. But digging into all corners of their emotional and spiritual reserves, the trio attempts to brave the mountainside one last time. Co-directed and shot by one of the three climbers, Jimmy Chin, the intimate and personal, yet also epic and vertiginous qualities of this stunning doc are just jaw-dropping. And J. Ralph has quickly positioned himself as perhaps the best documentary composer working today and his soaring score does this particular ascent quite awe-inspiring justice.
“An Open Secret”
Filmmaker Amy Berg is arguably running a social justice crusade in her documentary work, exposing and shining a light on stories of horrendous abuse and exploitation often at the hands of those in power. “Deliver Us From Evil” examined a sex abuse cover-up in the Catholic Church, “West of Memphis” looked at the miscarriage of justice in the West Memphis Three trial and now “An Open Secret” is very much of this breed. A devastating and sobering look at sex abuse and paedophilia rings in Hollywood, you may remember a recent case brought against filmmaker Bryan Singer (“X-Men: Apocalypse”) and some of his filmmaking associates. While the film isn’t about that case (which fell apart last year), it does point a very damning finger in the direction of those very people, convincingly suggesting that a widespread culture of child sexual abuse has been for many years been the open secret of the title amongst Hollywood power brokers, one that has been allowed to thrive within an industry that shamefully cares more for its bottom line than for its youngest and most vulnerable participants. It’s just an incendiary piece of work, but one shot and orchestrated with a very cool, striking composure that builds to a quietly explosive, no-holds-barred look at sexual predators within the Hollywood community. “An Open Secret” will shock and awe you on the way, but it will leave you incensed that the movie world can have tacitly condoned such life-ruining depravity for so long. [Full review]
“The Pearl Button”
Patricio Guzmán‘s last film, “Nostalgia for the Light” was a colossal yet intensely personal attempt to parse the philosophical meaning of the bizarre fact that the Atacama desert is both home to the Large Millimeter Array of state-of-the-art radio telescopes, and the final resting place for so many bodies of Chile’s “disappeared.” If anything, “The Pearl Button” is even more breathtaking in ambition, yet even more piercingly intimate in execution, as here Guzmán, in powerful, poetic narration relates the story of his country’s legacy of human cruelty to its relationship with water — the sea that laps its long coastline, the rain that fell on the tin roof of his childhood home, the droplet that came to earth on a meteorite and seeded all life. It’s a dizzying exercise in shifting scale and sweeping scope, sometimes containing, across a single cut, a contrast in time or place or theme so staggering it approaches sublime. And all the while it is woven together by this wonderful and wonder-filled narration, melancholy and musical and so skilfully written and read that the Berlinale Jury made the pretty much unprecedented decision to award its Best Screenplay prize to a documentary. But it’s not just the writing that is so striking, Guzmán’s visuals have a crystalline clarity to them, complemented by the cut-glass precision of the sound design that finds, literally at one point, melody in the sounds of nature — the running of water or the guttural noises of a nearly vanished language. This is the director playing so many roles at once — archaeologist, anthropologist, astronomer, archivist, activist — and often the conclusions he reaches are desperately sad, yet showing us his world in this most generous of ways can never be anything but an uplifting act of exquisite empathy. [Full Review]
“A Poem Is A Naked Person”
The late Les Blank is an American treasure whose work is still being discovered (here’s our Essentials on the master). A esteemed documentarian who came of age career-wise alongside Werner Herzog and Errol Morris in the 1970s, Blank’s works are unmistakably his; combing a freewheeling, no-frills, loose approach with a deep respect and affinity for the vibrancy of underappreciated cultures. A Blank’s film is thus kind of bouillabaisse; ostensibly about one subject (often centered on the South), his docs are always melanges of the people and traditions orbiting around the supposed focus. “A Poem Is A Naked Person” is exactly that kind of documentary — ostensibly about beloved singer-songwriter Leon Russell (also a famous session musician who worked with Dylan, George Harrison and all the greats), probably one of the reasons the musician was never a fan of this long-unseen doc is that it takes many of Blank’s habitual detours. While it does feature enrapturing performances by Russell, and legends like Willie Nelson and George Jones, Blank, perhaps the documentary equivalent of Terrence Malick, is happy also to be distracted by friends, family, birds and whatever image is catches his fancy. Thus, ‘Naked Person’ is as much a time capsule of the era and milieu around Russell (the richness of Louisiana that Blank loves so much) as it is a document about the musician himself. Shot between 1972 and 1974, “A Poem Is A Naked Person” was not released until this year due to music clearance rights and Russell’s disinclination for the portrait (though he seems to have changed his opinion on it some forty years later). For the well-versed, the doc is more of Blank’s eclectic gumbo, but even for neophytes, it’s a delectable treat, and a delightful way for us to remember this luminary of documentary cinema.
