los chicos y la calle (d carlos echeverría)

In 2001 Argentina and Uruguay suffered a brutal economic collapse. Kids that grew up in that era are sometimes called here, los chicos del pasto, the kids who ate grass. Made during this recession, Echeverría’s documentary looks at the street kids of Buenos Aires. It is orientated around a refuge, called CAINA, where the kids go for food, clothing and shelter, run by willing young men and women with clear social consciences. The doc has a Wiseman feel, albeit interrupted at times with interviews. The kids roam the streets near Retiro. The film captures the humanity behind their hard facade. No-one finds themselves living on the street without a story that explains how they got there. Kids that most would walk past or shy away from become people in their own right. The camera roams the streets with them, listens in on their stories, a testament to the trust the director and his crew managed to engender. Below the surface there lurk tales of sexual abuse and violence. It’s impossible not to contemplate what has happened to these lost children twenty five years on, now that those who have survived will be adults entering middle age. 

nuestra tierra (w&d lucrecia martel, w maría alché)

Martel deviates into doc. Nuestra Tierra is a rangy documentary which looks, as the title suggests, at the issue of the land, who owns it, who has rights. The location is Tucuman, the northern province of Argentina. Northern Argentina has a far larger native or indigenous population than other parts of the country. One of the notable aspects of Martel’s documentary is the way it makes explicit how little representation this element of society has within the general Argentine audio-visual world. The film revolves around a dispute over land rights in a valley which the indigenous Chuschagasta population claim they have always inhabited, which several white families now claim ownership of. This lead to a clash between the local indigenous population and three men of caucasian descent which ended with shots being fired and one indigenous man dying. The film is loosely weaved around the subsequent court case, brought by the relatives of the dead men. There was one pointed moment in the cinema when an academic opines that there are no official rastros (traces) of Chuschagasta in the valley. Rastros can also mean features, and Martel juxtaposes the academic’s words with the faces of the Chuschagasta who are present at the trial. The irony of the academic’s negationist argument was not lost on the Cinemateca audience.

The film seeks to both relate the dramatic events of the confrontation, of which there is grainy footage, and also to recount the stories of many of the inhabitants of the valley. It is an object lesson in a non-netflix method of storytelling. It resists sensationalism, preferring to dwell on the complex history of the region and its inhabitants, shifting from courtroom drama to archeological/ sociological study. There is no dominant central character. The viewer is encouraged to immerse themselves in this valley, to walk through its ravines, to gaze at the wild horses, to listen to the memories of the elders. In so doing, Martel creates an important document about discrimination and the inequities of Argentine society.  

juvenile court (d. frederick wiseman)

An earlier Wiseman. Same fly on wall diligence. Same immersive and demanding viewer experience. Here the precinct, as they call it, is more restricted. A specific Juvenile Court in Memphis, the Deep South of the USA. There is even a kind of heroic protagonist, the humanist judge who, a la Azdak, has to seek the best life-resolution judgement for the troubled youngsters who end up in his court. Wiseman is never afraid to let a storyline play out and this is a film with multiple storylines, enough for a dozen potential movies. Towards the end, the film follows one character in great and harrowing depth, as a 17 year old accused of armed robbery breaks down, saying he has been set up, that there is no ‘good’ outcome for him, whilst his lawyers and the judge try to ensure he doesn’t end up getting convicted when he turns 18 in an adult court, where, they say, he would likely get sent down for twenty years. It’s a bold approach to storytelling, as the film has already documented a host of other cases. The minutiae of the court’s dealings oscillates between being fascinating and tedious. Wiseman sticks to his guns, and as the storyline reaches its denouement, we come to understand that this is how the system works. It’s a long, slow grind, working towards a conclusion which is by its nature unsatisfactory, but might be the best playing of a bad hand.

in jackson heights (d. frederick wiseman)

In Jackson Heights is over three hours long. It’s fly on the wall. The directorial choices are all in the edit and the decision of what to film. One wonders how much was left on the cutting room floor. Given the length and the lack of any clear narrative, it’s inevitable that there are longeurs for the viewer. In a way it’s like going on a long bus ride through this little known barrio of New York, stopping off to drop in on people. Gradually, themes emerge. Gentrification. Immigration. Language. Towards the start of the film a middle aged white man states that this is the most diverse place in the whole world. More Spanish is spoken than English. There are scenes in mosques, in nail bars, in diners, in immigrant centres. As the film flows, like a river, the viewer starts to recognise elements of the geography. A railway bridge, a station, the mall. By the end, as the director offers a closing shot showing the NY skyline, we might almost be fellow citizens of Jackson Heights, a place most viewers will probably never have visited. And, like any place we have visited, people and images from that journey continue to reverberate in the head long after we have left the film and the place itself behind.

Nb - Uruguay Watch. La Banda Oriental features twice in the movie. Once when they play in the World Cup and are being defeated by Colombia, to the delight of a raucous Colombian crowd, and a second time when, more surprisingly, the annual pride parade passes in front of a Uruguayan restaurant. Which only goes to reaffirm the claim of Jackson Heights being the most diverse barrio in the world. 

tardes de soledad (d. albert serra)

We are living through an age of war and savagery. Few films I have seen have captured the latter with quite the unremitting insistence as Serra’s bullfighting doc. It’s a relentless attack on the viewer’s senses, as we watch the spectacle of death unfurl time after time. It is a spectacle indeed, as the preening bullfighter, Andrés Roca Rey, dandies his way through the killing fields in his exquisite, homoerotic costume. Most of the film takes place within the bullring, punctuated with scenes of the team in the back of a minivan, but one intricate sequence shows Roca Rey getting dressed, almost being winched into his skintight costume by his batman. The scenes beyond the ring are the viewer’s breathing space. In the ring, Serra’s camera, welded with surgical effectiveness by DOP Artur Tort, captures every straining sinew of both torero and bull. The blood flows down the bulls’ flanks. After the coup de grace is executed, the bulls are dragged away unceremoniously, their might reduced to nothing more than dense flesh. The camera offers a different view of the spectacle to that of the stalls. There’s no hiding from the cruelty or the torero’s valour. The torero’s face contorts with courage and concentration. In this the film is reminiscent of Douglas Gordon’s remarkable Zidane. But it also possesses the unflinching violence of an Ulrich Seidl film. You want to look away. You don’t want to watch the act of killing. Just as we always look away from the killings, day after day. Tardes de Soledad is a fitting film for this age of savagery. 

the shepherd and the bear (w&d max keegan, w. sabine emiliani)

Keegan’s doc is what might be called lovingly made, as it follows the travails of an ageing shepherd in the Pyrenees. The shepherd is one of the last of his line, happy to spend months living in a small shack in the high country. When bears are released into the wild, re-establishing a bear community, local livestock owners are fearful. The ancient conflict between man and nature has a new battleground. The shepherd keeps doing his thing, no matter what, even after a few savaged sheep carcasses make spectacular appearances. The film, like the conflict, simmers rather than coming to a boil, but it’s a well crafted portrait of a remote rural society which highlights the paradoxes around ideas of re-wilding and environmentalism, concepts that can lead to the sense of an agenda being imposed by metropolitan diktat on the rural communities who inhabit the countryside and the wild places the environmentalists seek to preserve.

 

reminiscences of a journey to lithuania (d.jonas mekas)

Mr Amato urged me to accompany him to watch a film by Mekas, a name I have often come across without ever sitting down to watch a film of his. The film takes places in three sections. Mekas in New York, post war, seeking to come to terms with exile. Mekas’ return voyage in 1971 to Lithuania. And, as a coda, a short section on the visit to Vienna which followed the Lithuania trip.

The filmmaking style is informal, homemade. Mekas went everywhere with his camera and filmed everything. His elderly mother, a trip to the Catskills, the dance after the meeting of the collectivist farm. In many ways it seems prophetic of the current era, where everyone documents everything, and lives are captured and mapped out as they are lived. Or at least, a curated version of a life. The images are grainy, beautiful, jagged. It is an assemblage, an act of editing, pulling together the loose strings of the journey to form a tapestry. It is also a cine pobre, stepsister to the Poor Theatre or Arte Povera. Mekas reveals you don’t need a team and lights and gaffers to be a filmmaker, and as such the film reveals how cinema is capable of becoming an egalitarian art form. The other side of that coin is one no-one foresaw in 1972: everyone in the whole wide world is a filmmaker now. What Mekas reveals in the film is the need to both edit and curate. Images acquire another kind of weight/ humour/ magic, when juxtaposed with other images. There’s a difference between a visual information soup and a visual poem. 

au cimetiere de la pellicule (d. thierno souleymane diallo)

The macguffin in Diallo’s documentary is a search for what he believes to be the first sub-Saharan film from Guinea, a film called Mouramani, directed in Paris by Mamadou Toure. This is the hook Diallo uses to go on a voyage through Guinea, hunting memories or traces of a lost film which plenty have heard of but none have ever seen. Does the film even exist? At the end of his playful doc, Diallo recreates the received content of the movie, but this isn’t the real raison d’être of his film. His concerns are twofold: the role of cinema within Francophone Africa, and the declining role of cinema in culture per se. The former leads him to excavate disused cinemas and warehouses, where he is told about the glory years of cinema in Guinea, long since past. Now, people watch films on their laptops or TVs. The communal joy of cinema is being eroded, something that is happening all over the world, and leads to him visiting a guerrilla cinema in Paris that has been reclaimed. Diallo, who references Joris Ivens, goes barefoot through the parks of Guinea and Paris, hunting his elusive game. It makes for an affecting insight into a little documented corner of the world, and an engaging meditation on the role of cinema in the 21st century. 

municipale (w&d. thomas paulot, w milan alfonsi, ferdinand flame)

In Municipal, a playful documentary, actor Laurent Papot goes to Revin, a small town in the Ardennes, where he plans to stand as mayor. He makes it clear that this is an exercise in the functioning of democracy, saying that if he wins he will return to Paris and leave the chair vacant for his supporters. Perhaps unsurprisingly the project meets with some resistance, even as he garners some unlikely supporters.

The film has three strands. Firstly it interrogates how democracy functions on a local level, showing how local people become involved, tracing Laurent's journey towards polling day. Secondly it is a study in post-industrial decline. Revin used to be an industrial hub, and its economy thrived. Now, in common with so many Western European towns, it has no industry left and has consequently declined. The gilet jaunes candidate both befriends and harangues Laurent, and he clearly represents a more militant critique of 21st century European politics. Thirdly, the film ends up being a surprisingly tender portrait of a man struggling to find his place in an alien culture. Revin is still France, but the distance to Paris seems vast. Laurent is also on a voyage to feel as though he belongs, one the film, which is perhaps directed by his brother (?), traces with elegance and sympathy. 

la batalla de chile, segunda parte: el golpe de estado (w&d. patricio guzmán, w. pedro chaskel, jose bartolome)

The scary thing about watching Guzmán’s fabled documentary (albeit only part 2) is that it feels closer than ever. A brilliant exercise in both compiling material and editing it, The Battle of Chile acts as account of events and a warning. This could happen in your back yard. With the efficiency of a thriller, the film traces the lead up to September 11th, 1973, the first 911, when the military staged a coup against Allende’s government. We know what’s coming, and surely Allende knows it too, but history is remorseless and irreversible. The film is an act of courage, in the filming of it, in the conception of it and in the execution. As such it contains a moral authority which cinema can rarely aspire to. Who knows how much of that courage will be needed as the world lurches in the direction of the golpistas. 

don’t look back (d. d a pennebaker)

Pennebaker’s film is catnip for this reviewer. Dylan in London in ’65. That point on the crest of a rising wave when the world was turning, the times were changing, and the impish poet was at the epicentre of it all. With the laconic suaveness of a Swami. Bubbling with life and wit and energy. Whilst Great Britain tried to get its head about what it all meant. Young men in ties, women in starchy dresses, believing that this will be what normality will always look like.

At the same time as charting the locus of a global shift, Pennebaker’s doc is also great on the rigours of touring, The only time Dylan seems to move out of his gnostic mode is when he is forced to become mother hen, confronting a drunken Donovan and trying to get to the bottom of who threw a glass in the street. When he sings It’s All Over Baby Blue to a packed hotel room later that same night, there’s a beatific smile on his face. 

soundtrack to a coup d'état (w&d johan grimonprez, w. daan milius)

Soundtrack is a tour de force of editing. Editing to music is an art, and Grimonperez and his editor, Rik Chaubet, weave the jazz notes of the score into the found footage with aplomb. In truth, the jazz link in what is essentially a film about Patrice Lumumba and the Congo is slightly tenuous, anchored on the one visit Louis Armstrong paid to the country shortly before Lumumba’s murder. But this is also a film about connections: linking Lumumba to Castro to Malcolm X to Thelonious Monk, who briefly mentions how he went to check out the activist. What were the connections between the jazz greats and politics? The clips of Dizzy Gillespie’s satirical presidential bid are marvellous, but the deeper resonance of the musicians’ political consciousness is mandated mostly by the sound of their music. Clearly Nina Simone’s lyrics are charged with a political anger, but this becomes the backdrop, or soundtrack, to the tale of Lumumba. There is a verve and a jazz feel to the film, it’s a jazz edit, and this bowls the viewer along through the film’s two hours plus. It might also be noted that the only actually filmed footage for Soundtrack to a Coup, rather than found footage, would appear to be of Koli Jean Bofane, both reading from Congo Inc, and narrating a harrowing story from his childhood.

a night of knowing nothing (w&d. payal kapadia, w. himanshu prajapati)

“Eisenstein, Pudovkin ... we shall fight, we shall win”

Kapadia’s documentary opens and closes with extended scenes of people dancing, with the music they are dancing to kept offstage. It’s a neat if somewhat flashy device, an understated imprimatur. The film documents in a loose, poetic manner the resistance of the Mumbai Film School to the appointment of a BPJ choice as director of the FTII film school. It is an account of friendship and struggle, told via black and white photography and a muted voiceover, against a backdrop of Modi’s divisive politics. Kapadia invests the film with a wistful, elusive aura as it captures a lost moment in the narrator’s history. This voiceover adds a metatextual level to the doc, allowing it to float somewhere between capturing a reality and capturing time lived as a dream. 

the war game (w&d peter watkins)

Playing as part of a radical season in Cinemateca, The War Game is a curious blend of horror and lost Englishness. A mock documentary set in Kent, describing the impact of a nuclear strike on Britain, the film is famous for having been banned by the BBC after being initially commissioned by them. Watkins manages the horror superbly. The film escalates in its brutality, starting with a kind of normality and then moving on to full blown nuclear firestorm, inspired, as made clear by the commentary, by Hiroshima, Nagasaki, but also Dresden and Hamburg. You can readily understand why the BBC got cold feet about screening it, as the images of a devastated Kent and its citizens are genuinely shocking. The horrors of war had rarely been so surgically captured.

At the same time, as an Englishman, there is something nostalgic about viewing a lost Britain, with its clipped accents and eccentric dress sense, and a certain reticence which seems to have been foregone with the coming of Britpop, Brexit and post war prosperity. At one point the documentary mentions ration cards, reminding us that the film was made at a time when every adult would remember what a ration card implied, something subsequent generations would never have to contemplate, or even understand. There is also something in the tone of Watkins’ film, a blend of the extreme with a tight-lipped understatement, which speaks to the qualities which might once have been perceived to represent Britishness, or at least a version of Britishness which this writer might identify with. 

clandestina (w&d maria mire)

Mire’s experimental film juxtaposes the words of Margarida Tengarrinha, an artist who participated for decades in Portugal’s anti-fascist movement, with contemporary images which riff off those words. Tengarrinha used her talents to help forge documents for fleeing revolutionaries to cross the border into Spain during the fifties and sixties, eventually moving to Russia. (An interesting parallel with another Portuguese film seen this year, Astrakan 79.) Mire constructs vivid contemporary images to accompany the words, as a young woman silently goes through the same processes as Tengarrinha, working with her partner at a computer, tending to their child, setting up a false office full of pot plants. The modernity is designed, one suspects, to give a fresh perspective on the radical activities and dangers of the anti-fascist movement of another generation. However, there’s something a little winsome about all this, and the element of danger never feels overly present. The fact that the characters frequently use carnival type masks is engaging, but doesn’t help to take us deeper into the perilous, nightmarish world that Tengarrinha inhabited. It’s notable that the director is also listed as Art Director in the credits, and there’s a sense of playfulness at work in the project which isn’t entirely in keeping with the intensity of the source material. 

astrakan 79 (w&d catarina mourão)

Astrakan 79 is a documentary of two parts. The first two thirds are taken up with a recreation of the journey of a Portuguese fifteen year old, Martim, to Askatran in what was then the Soviet Union. The child of left wing activists, Martim left Lisbon on his year long adventure, sent by his parents to study modern practices in agriculture . When he arrived, it wasn’t what he expected. He had two passionate love affairs, made friends with South Americans, rather than the Russians, and eventually dropped out of the course, sleeping rough and getting picked up by the police. The story is told using photos Martim took, which have a beautiful, nostalgic grainy quality. The account is hypnotic, fascinating, the story of an adolescent caught up in the geopolitical matrix, like a lost chapter from The Savage Detectives. The film is rounded out with a lengthy interview between Martim, revealed to have become a potter on his return to Portugal, and his grown-up son. The interview is somewhat anti-climactic. 

copacabana (d. martin rejtman)

Rejtman’s documentary addresses the wave of Bolivian immigration to Buenos Aires. This relationship between Bolivia and Argentina is at once close and distant. Spanish is the lingua franca between the two countries and the north of Argentina which borders Bolivia is, culturally, similar. But Bolivians retain a fierce identity in their music, dress and traditions which marks them apart. There has been a steady stream of immigration from the Andean country to Buenos Aires. A Bolivian man shows his almanac with photos of an early Bolivian community established there in the sixties. Rejtman films in Bolivia, Buenos Aires and, in the closing sequence, on the border. It’s an observational doc, made of long sequences which show Bolivians dancing or processing. The complexities of immigration aren’t addressed: this feels like a Porteño spying on a secret world that exists within his city. There could be said to be a cross-reference here to the Bolivian labourers in César Aira’s novel, Ghosts. The distance which the camera imposes means that its subjects remain mysterious, semi-alien beings, walking the streets but carrying a different flame in their chests.

pax in lucem (w&d emiliano mazza de luca, w. alejandro díaz lageard)

Pax in Lucem is an affectionate and informed documentary about the life of Torres Garcia, who was the great grandfather of the co-writer and narrator, Alejandro Diaz. As such it occupies what is now somewhat well trodden ground in Uruguayan documentary filmmaking: the investigation of the family heritage. However, the story of Torres Garcia is complex and perhaps not so very Uruguayan, as he left the country at the age of 16 and only returned when 60. In a sense his story is one of perpetual confrontation with ruin and failure, as the commercial ventures he embarked on in New York and Paris ended on the point of bankruptcy. As the film recounts, the return to Montevideo was almost a choice of last resort, even if he was subsequently venerated as a prodigal son on his homecoming. The film is constructed around the process of recreating a work, Pax in Lucem, that was destroyed when the Museo de Arte Moderno in Rio caught fire. Some 60 of the artists’ most important works were lost in the fire, and the director talks emotively about this loss, as he follows the process of trying to recreate the original artwork. As such the film morphs into a meditation on originality, and is all the stronger for this philosophical desvio. 

los últimos (w&d sebastián peña escobar)

Los Ultimos is a discursive documentary based around the work of a couple of mardy botanists who are doing what they can to preserve the Paraguayan forests, which, as one might imagine, are being culled, like every other great forest in the world. Much of the film is predicated on the viewer’s relationship with the two men at the heart of the film: Ulf, a German national living in Paraguay, and Jota, a Paraguayan expert on birdlife. They are a craggy, cranky team. Ulf, in particular, has perhaps a predictable take on late capitalism and the conspiracies which surround it. If you don’t engage with this pair, the movie loses much of its bite, and there is a meandering element to the documentary, which in part captures the scale of the forest, but in part might be said to work against the urgency of the film’s message. 

clorindo testa. (w&d mariano llinás)

WTF is Clorindo Testa? If you don’t know beforehand, you’re not likely to emerge from Llinás’ film much the wiser. In a similar vein to Citarella’s Las Poetas Visitan a Juana Bignozzi, also from the Pampero stable, the director uses the commission of a film about the Argentine architect as a vehicle to interrogate the very idea of the documentary biopic, stripping out most of the bio in the process. The result is playful, frustrating, laugh-out-loud funny, and inevitably polarising. People come to the film to find out about Clorindo Testa, and leave either dazzled or ennervated by Llinás and his Rioplatense playfulness. It may be an acquired taste (but then so is cinema these days, and documentaries even more so), but there’s something enchanting about Llinás’ determination to go against the grain. When he shows the work-in-progress to friends and ex-wife, the ubiquitous Laura Paredes, they criticise him for making a film about himself, whilst he lurks at the back of the shot, raising his eyebrows. It’s all very arch, very offbeat, but it’s also great to see someone being given plata and taking the attitude that he’s going to do what he wants with it, even when everyone is telling him he’s in the wrong. In a medium that is so much formed by the compromise of artistic vision and the importance of treading a populist line, Llinás and Pampero remain a shining light on behalf of maverick self-indulgent genius.