It’s notoriously difficult to evaluate the way most documentaries treat their subject matter, because one has to assess what’s included in light of what’s left out—something we aren’t usually qualified to do. I’m much more comfortable evaluating documentaries on how well they draw us into their subject matter and on how well they work as cinema. On these terms I can confidently say that I’ve seen and heard about a lot of exciting new documentaries recently, including an American work I really want to see, Charles Burnett’s Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property. Unfortunately few of these documentaries have been getting the attention they deserve, and if we don’t catch the first screening we rarely get a second chance. The films I want to discuss here are apt to disappear quickly, and they’ll never get the kind of notice the media lavish on two or three pets a year—this year’s favorite being Bowling for Columbine.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Fiction and documentary mix in a different way in Sally Banes’s 20-minute The Last Conversation—a reconstruction of one of Sergei Eisenstein’s final works, a short ballet he choreographed based on the last scene from Bizet’s Carmen, preceded by a detailed account of how the reconstruction was done. It’s the only documentary of the five that doesn’t resort to fictional techniques, yet the subject it explores is a work of fiction. It concludes by showing the ballet twice: first an extended take with the camera kept mainly at a respectful distance, allowing us to grasp the work as a whole, then an edited version highlighting details and gestures. In this fashion we’re led to see how the “objective” presentation of a ballet can be achieved only through multiple vantage points—which involves the accumulation of subjective camera moves and positions.
Eisenstein is represented through drawings as well as photographs, and the ballet is delivered to us by editing as well as photography. The subjects of the other four films are represented in similarly diverse ways: the killers in The Murder of Emmett Till by photographs, newsreel footage, and two credited “voice actors”; Marshall McLuhan in McLuhan’s Wake through his voice and the voices of others; and Manoel de Oliveira in his Oporto of My Childhood by himself and by actors representing him at different ages.
It’s understandable that Huie’s article was disparaged at the time by members of the black community—because of the payment and because the image of Till as aggressive and defiant would have complicated his status as a martyr in 1955, long before Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. But I would argue that today Huie’s version can be read differently, as a way of extending Till’s martyrdom, though the makers of The Murder of Emmett Till rejected this approach, perhaps because it humanizes all the parties involved. Roy Wilkins wrote one of the unsympathetic letters responding to the Look article, characterizing the killers’ story as self-serving, but I think Huie’s account sounds more plausible than any other and it’s much more comprehensive. In short, the film rightly honors the defiance of Mamie Till in displaying her son’s mangled corpse to 50,000 Chicagoans, but it also arguably shortchanges the even more courageous defiance of her son. This makes it historically somewhat parochial, an impression bolstered by such easy and old-fashioned fictional devices as playing black spirituals on the sound track at every opportunity—which reminded me of the way white 1930s Hollywood usually represented the “soul” and suffering of black people.
The city of Oporto, his birthplace, has been the principal Portuguese location for his films, so it’s natural that he includes clips from his first film as well as his first feature, the pre-neorealist Aniki-Bobo (1942), because he sees both as emblems of his youth, having made them during his 20s and 30s. In between the two films he acted in the first Portuguese talkie, became Portugal’s champion pole vaulter, won several grand prizes as an auto racer, and married his wife, Maria Isabel (who can periodically be heard singing a sort of lullaby throughout the film), though these early parts of his life are barely alluded to. He’s more interested in focusing on key images, music, and locations from the Eden of his privileged youth: letting us watch from behind as a conductor leads unseen musicians through Emmanuel Nunes’s Nachtmusik 1, letting us hear him sing the toreador theme from Carmen while we see the opera house where he first heard it, showing us actors playing him and his family in box seats at a local theater where his parents had season tickets, and finally giving us a scene from the play they watched, with him now playing the lead role—a burglar who’s doing his best to charm a woman whose house he’s broken into—which allows him to indulge in more singing, this time with mandolin accompaniment. Later his offscreen voice overlaps or echoes those of other actors playing him at various ages, one of whom is shown looking up at a man scaling a tall building—a spectacle we then see in matching archival footage.
Directed by Stanley Nelson
Written by Marcia A. Smith
Narrated by Andre Braugher.
Oporto of My Childhood ★★★★ (Masterpiece)
Directed, written, and narrated by Manoel de Oliveira.
The Last Conversation ★★★★ (Masterpiece)
Directed by Sally Banes
Written by Noel Carroll
With Galina Zakrutkina and James Sutton
Narrated by Patricia Boyette
McLuhan’s Wake ★★★ (A must-see)
Directed by Kevin McMahon
Written by David Sobelman
Narrated by Laurie Anderson.
Echelon: The Secret Power ★★★ (A must-see)
Directed and written by David Korn-Brzoza
Narrated by Francois Devienne.
