The digital revolution can be felt in several of the entries in Ripping Reality: Essentials From Documentary’s New Wave (rating: NNNNN), a Hot Docs retrospective.[briebreak][rssbreak]
Whether they were shot on film or video, these 10 works capture the form in transition, moving from objective cinéma vérité record to something more personalized and eccentric.
The key entry is Errol Morris’s The Fog Of War (May 8, 9:45 pm, ROM). A feature-length interview with Robert S. McNamara, the U.S. defense secretary who escalated the Vietnam war under Lyndon B. Johnson, it’s a compelling, thrillingly edited film that also reads as a damning indictment of the tactics used by the Bush administration to lie America into invading Iraq in 2003.
Morris was working on The Fog Of War well before the invasion – the film was released the same year – but the tenor of his questions suggests he was fully aware of the parallels. It’s a zeitgeist moment, when a culture’s past becomes doubly relevant in the context of its present – and Morris is smart enough to let us understand that.
Eccentric subjects made for cult hits: Chris Smith’s American Movie (Saturday, May 1, 4 pm, Cumberland 3) introduced the world to Mark Borchardt, a profoundly inept director of backyard horror films whose ambition and energy wildly outstrip his talent Jeffrey Blitz’s Spellbound (Saturday, May 1, 1 pm, Bloor) turned the path to the 1999 National Spelling Bee championship into an oddball, nail-biting study of insecure kids and their overprotective parents.
The digital revolution made it possible for people to bring their own stories to the world. With Family (Monday, May 3, 11 am, Isabel Bader), Sami Saif turned his search for the father he never knew into a powerful drama, while Jonathan Caouette scanned some photos, digitized some home movies and turned his miserable life story into Tarnation (Friday, April 30, 11:30 pm, Bloor) for a reported $237. I think it’s the most narcissistic thing I’ve ever seen – a feature-length pity party – but it struck a chord with festival audiences when it first made the rounds. Maybe scheduling it as a midnight movie is the way to go.
Political filmmaking evolved well beyond the Michael Moore model. With The Corporation (May 9, 12:30 pm, Innis Town Hall), Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott brought cool contempt to their study of the rapacious American business model Hubert Sauper views globalization with horror in Darwin’s Nightmare (Friday, April 30, 11:15 am, Isabel Bader) while the perils of the free market were treated more whimsically in Vit Klusák and Filip Remunda’s Czech Dream (Saturday, May 1, 11:30 am, Isabel Bader).
James Longley’s Iraq In Fragments (May 7, 9:30 pm, Innis Town Hall) is a ground-level study of the damage wrought by the deposition of Saddam Hussein, as Sunnis, Shias and Kurds alike try to navigate the literal and metaphorical rubble of their nation. Longley imposes no political bias on the material. He just shoots what he sees, and what he sees is confusion and despair.
Last but not least, there’s Into Great Silence (Sunday, May 2, 1:30 pm, Innis Town Hall), Philip Gröning’s magnificent, mammoth study of a monastery in the French Alps. One of the few documentaries I’ve seen that waits for you to come to its point of view, it’s a profound and complex examination of religious devotion, best experienced in the silence and darkness of a movie theatre.
normw@nowtoronto.com
