Rock Hudson's Home Movies

In Rock Hudson's Home Movies, filmmaker Mark Rappaport conducts a revisionist analysis of the famed Hollywood actor's cinematic career, with Hudson's films revisited with the hindsight knowledge that he was gay and would eventually die of AIDS. It's an essay-film that consists almost entirely of clips from Hudson's films, crudely recorded with videos, often from TV, giving them a raw, overexposed, desaturated appearance. This strips aesthetics out of the equation, shifting the focus entirely onto the dialogue, the situations, and the unspoken subtext underlying Hudson's screen persona. The film is, by turns, fascinating, provocative, amusing, and very often deeply silly and misguided, as Rappaport's quest to read gay subtext into seemingly everything Hudson did onscreen yields both clever insights and obvious stretching.

The film is on its strongest ground in the examination of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies of the late 50s and 60s, films like Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back, where the plot would often center around Hudson assuming dual identities, one a sexually voracious macho man and the other a prancing wimp. Obviously, Rappaport finds these films rich in subtext about questions of gay identity, and it's not hard to see why. By deftly editing together scenes and chopping up the dialogue, he even manages to suggest that the "gay" onscreen Hudson found himself admiring the more "macho" Hudson. These films, under Rappaport's dissection, seem to toy with Hudson's sexuality, creating densely layered meta-situations where, as Rappaport's onscreen narrator Eric Farr points out, a gay man passing for straight is asked to play a straight man who pretends to be gay. It creates a twisted, hall of mirrors situation that the film compares to the funhouse conclusion of Welles' The Lady From Shanghai, with Hudson essentially having an onscreen affair with himself — or at least finding himself in situations where Doris Day suspects him of it.

Though Rappaport makes some interesting points along these lines, the film is continually mired down in the filmmaker's insistence on finding gay subtext everywhere he looks. At times, it's blatantly obvious that he's taking lines out of context even when one doesn't know the original films he's referencing. Two cowboys staring each other down for a shootout becomes gay cruising for Rappaport. Hudson's interrogation of his nervous son-in-law in Giant: likewise. Even the pronouncement that "Hamburg is the gayest city in Germany" gets edited into the film as though it's more evidence of Rappaport's thesis, even though he later somewhat sheepishly has to admit that the more innocent usage of the word was still the dominant one at the time of these films. Nothing escapes Rappaport's revisionism. When, in what is obviously a clip from early in Hudson's career, a man in a skeleton mask and black cloak bursts into the room as Hudson kisses a girl, Rappaport takes it as foreshadowing of the actor's eventual death from a sexually transmitted disease. It would be laughable if moments like this weren't in such outrageously poor taste, and of such dubious value as a form of film analysis. It's bad enough when Rappaport tries to read psychology into the characters Hudson played onscreen, characters who Hudson himself had no real hand in creating. Much worse are the moments when the film treats Hudson's cinematic legacy as a prediction of his eventual death, as though that revealed anything beyond Rappaport's own morbid fascinations.

In fact, much of what Rappaport reads in terms of gay subtext could be much more persuasively explained as more general expressions of sexual morality in the movies. One of the film's most tightly edited montages is a selection of Hudson's onscreen kisses with his leading ladies, and Rappaport points out that nearly every one is interrupted in some way, cut off by one partner or the other or else disrupted by some intrusion. For Rappaport, this is confirmation of Hudson's homosexuality written into his films — how, who knows, since as the narrator acknowledges, Hudson had nothing to do with any of the actual content of his movies. These kisses suggest a discomfort with heterosexuality, a perfunctory stab at playing an expected role by a man who must hide his true self. At least for Rappaport they do.

But such tropes are to be found everywhere in the cinema, particularly in the classic Hollywood era, and they're hardly restricted to gay actors. What Rappaport goofily calls "kisses interruptus" have always been a common device for both comedies and dramas — in the former, the break-off of the passionate moment is played for humor, while indecision about romance, characterized by moments of giving into passion and moments of regret, has always been a central theme in melodramatic works. One can easily imagine a montage of similar incomplete kisses with completely straight actors: it's such a common narrative element that reading it as having anything to say about Hudson's homosexuality is ludicrous. Rappaport is so intent on seeing gay meaning in everything that he often seems blind to alternative possibilities, to other readings, simply forcing everything to fit into his reductive schema. Many of the continuities he detects could be explored in terms of genre, or along auteurist lines, or as storytelling clichés, but Rappaport isn't interested in broader criticism, only in proving his pet theories.


In analyzing Howard Hawks' Man's Favorite Sport?, Rappaport emphasizes how Hudson's character is continually humiliated for not being a manly man, for not knowing "how to fish," which is an obvious euphemism for being sexually inexperienced — and, Rappaport believes, also a euphemism for Hudson's sexuality. In some ways, he's got a point, as there's a thin line between making a film about a man who's sexually inexperienced and one about a man who's simply sexually inexperienced with women. But Rappaport goes further, suggesting that Hawks (no stranger to homoerotic subtexts) and his screenwriters, like many others in Hollywood, had it in for Hudson, that they were purposefully mocking his sexuality in this film and others like it. This thesis quickly gets tied up in knots trying to justify itself when dealing with the question of Hawks' comparable films with Cary Grant, many of them comedies of humiliation like I Was a Male War Bride and Bringing Up Baby. The latter is cited for Grant's famous "I just went gay" exclamation, while the former becomes a prime example of how Grant, when cast in these films, somehow avoided being too humiliated or debased, while Hudson (who was literally replacing Grant in Man's Favorite Sport?, a film originally intended for the older man) looks like "a sissy."

Rappaport asserts, somewhat lamely, that Grant, despite persistent rumors about his own sexuality, came off better because he was married multiple times, while Hudson only married once. It's a weak justification, and in fact Hudson's character comes off no more ineffectual in his Hawks appearance than Grant did in most of his comedies with the director — except in the sense that Grant was a far better comedic actor. Rappaport seems blind to (or indifferent to) the continuities between these films and others not starring Hudson. Instead, looking at Hudson's oeuvre in isolation, he treats it as though the actor had any control over the lines he said and things he did, as though there were not more important considerations affecting these films than the sexuality of the actors, and as though the threads he identifies here as gay subtexts were not running through all sorts of unrelated movies regardless of the sexuality of individual stars.

The film is further dragged down by the amateurish, stilted performance of Eric Farr, supposedly playing Hudson speaking from beyond the grave, narrating his own life story through the movies he starred in. Farr's awkward line readings only distract from any point Rappaport's trying to make, as does the whole conceit of a younger version of Hudson supposedly speaking in the first person about his sexuality like this. Farr seems to be there primarily because he's handsome, not that he actually looks anything like Hudson or has any actual acting talent. In any event, Farr, though distracting, winds up being the least of the film's problems. Rappaport ultimately buries his most interesting points about gay identity and gay cinematic representation beneath a smug insistence on seeing every onscreen male friendship as a latent gay relationship. The film often adopts an insufferable wink-wink tone not far from adolescent toilet humor, delighting in the discovery of "naughty" interpretations for everything from two soldiers discussing traumatic wartime experiences to a deadbeat father reuniting with his son. Worse, there's a kind of barely restrained contempt for women flowing through this film's own subtext. Rappaport's text frequently treats the women in Hudson's movies as empty-headed predators, and cruelly gives Cyd Charisse the introduction that "she had seen better days," calling her "Ms. Dracula on a talent search" when she snares Hudson for a passionate kiss. It's this kind of catty commentary, along with the film's obliviousness to anything beyond its narrow interpretative rubric, that prevents Rock Hudson's Home Movies from being the truly incisive Godardian essay it aspires to be.

Films I Love #36: Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

Some films are so revolutionary, so influential, that their sui generis originality and verve can still be felt even decades after their first impact, long after their innovations have been absorbed by subsequent generations. Dziga Vertov's Man With the Movie Camera is this kind of film, retaining much of its power and irresistable energy despite the nearly eighty years that have passed since its creation. Vertov created a moving portrait of city life in every sense of the word, both emotionally affecting and viscerally thrilling, built on the pulsing rhythms of its cutting and its perfectly calibrated shifts from frenetic passages to languid interludes. It's no accident that Vertov frequently returns to images of industrial mechanisms, since the rhythms of pumping pistons often drive this thoroughly modernist, industrial age film. The film encompasses an overview of the life of a city from its earliest spasms of wakening in the morning to the twilight calm of evening. Vertov was ambitiously trying to include images representing the entirety of human life and experience, from such mundane acts as getting up in the morning, going to the beach, going to work, to the big life-changing events of birth, death, marriage and even, cheekily, divorce. Vertov's film is a kaleidoscopic view of the life cycle itself, with so much detail and activity crammed into a twenty-four hour period, itself condensed into barely over an hour of images.

In order to represent such vitality and variety, Vertov was endlessly inventive with the formal properties of his fledgling artform. He superimposes images over one another, creating densely layered compositions in which the rhythms within the image are often as fast as the editing that joins images together. Some of Vertov's inventions are more playful — like the famous shot of a cameraman appearing to stand up from within a glass of beer — while others serve a propagandistic function, evincing Soviet principles about the nobility of labor and the proletariat. But mostly Vertov is concerned with composing his film as though it was a piece of music, thinking in terms of movements and rhythm rather than narrative.

The House Is Black

Forugh Farrokhzad's The House Is Black is a harrowing, horrifying, artfully made documentary, the only film made by the Iranian poet Farrokhzad. Her subject here is leprosy, and she looks directly, unflinchingly, at the devastation caused to the human body by this disease. She does not look away, not from the worst deformations this disease creates. Her purpose was to expose the cruel and unnecessary way that lepers continued to be treated in Iran, herded into isolated leper colonies where their disease went untreated, causing them to slowly and painfully disintegrate. Farrokhzad's film was intended to raise awareness about these conditions, and to stress that this situation need not be. A male narrator dispassionately lists facts about leprosy while Farrokhzad cuts quickly and abruptly between some of the most horrifying images of the disease's effect: limbs that seem to have been worn away, as though by erosion; noses caved in, creating crater-like gaps in the patients' faces; skin that flakes off, scraped away by a doctor's instrument. And yet the narrator says: "leprosy is not an incurable disease." He says it twice, once at the beginning and again at the end of this montage, repeating it to make sure that the meaning of his words is not lost. These people, suffering so greatly, could be cured. The unspoken implication is that their country, their government and their social structures and their medical system, have failed them. They could be cured, if only someone was willing to take the initiative to cure them, rather than herding them into isolation to prevent the spread of the disease and then forgetting about them.

There are two narrators in the film, the first the male narrator mentioned above, who appears sporadically to deliver straight facts in an objective tone. The second narrator is Farrokhzad herself, who delivers a lilting, poetic, religiously tinged voiceover. One of the most subversive undercurrents in the film is its subtle criticism of Islam, and religion in general, for failing to take a more compassionate and helpful interest in these forgotten and suffering people. Farrokhzad continually shows the lepers praying and giving thanks to God, and she purposefully contrasts their faith and devotion against the abjection of their condition. Again, her method is not to state her ideas directly, but to generate tension between a seemingly straightforward voiceover narration and the bracing power of the images she pairs with these texts.

In this way, she calls attention to the irony of the lepers' religious devotion, their continued praise of God even as they needlessly suffer and rot away. One man, leading the prayers, holds up his arms, which have been reduced to twisted and skeletal stumps, and prays to God with words that include "my two hands," hands he no longer has because of his disease. Other lepers unironically thank God for giving them both a father and a mother, even though most of them are here without families. There's a heartbreaking scene in a schoolhouse where a school teacher asks one of his pupils why they should thank God for giving them a father and a mother. "I don't know," the boy responds, "I have neither." There's something about this scene that makes it seem staged — it's too pat, too perfectly suited for the messages Farrokhzad wants to send — but it is a devastating critique of religion anyway. Why, Farrokhzad asks, do these people worship a God who has seemingly abandoned them? Why do they thank God for blessings that he has not bestowed on them? It is as though their religious fervor is abstracted from the actual conditions of their lives, as though they are hardly even thinking about the words they're saying.


Farrokhzad, though, is particularly attuned to the meanings of words. She was a poet, after all, and thus very sensitive to words and the disjunctions between language and reality. As a filmmaker, however, her skills are hardly just verbal. Her visual sensibility is relatively straightforward on the surface, and yet she creates rather complex effects with editing and the relationships between the soundtrack and the images. The House Is Black is entirely the product of her sole sensibility in a way that few films are: she not only wrote and directed the film but, crucially, edited it herself as well. Her editing is crisp and deliberate, and she frequently returns to images that have appeared already, inserting them into rapidly paced montages where their meaning is changed or intensified by the images around them or the content of the voiceover.

Two of the most poignant segments in the film are two sequences where Farrokhzad focuses on the ways in which life in the leper colony mirrors life in the outside world. The first is a montage of women prepping themselves, combing their hair or rubbing kohl around their eyes, making themselves "beautiful." It's a moving sequence, an indication of how these people, shut off from the rest of the world by their disease, attempt to retain some connection to their previous lives — and to the concepts of "beauty" and "ugliness" as defined by society. In another scene, Farrokhzad shows a group of children playing with a ball, all of them laughing and cheering, jockeying for position in the game they're playing, having fun, oblivious to the sores and deformities scarring their bodies. In their smiles and their body language, they look like any other children, cheerful and carefree as kids are supposed to be. But their distorted faces are hard to ignore, and Farrokhzad immediately cuts from this scene to images of older lepers, crippled and badly deformed, as though suggesting that these happy children will grow up into misery if their condition is not treated.

The House Is Black is a powerful, unforgettable film, a documentary whose forthright and unblinking look at life in a leper colony casts light on the suffering of people living in darkness, away from society's attention. Farrokhzad does not allow society to forget the lepers, does not allow her audience to look away or to take pity without also taking action. Her film does not merely wallow in suffering but calls for something to be done about it.

Alexander Kluge's Early Shorts, 1961-1964

Alexander Kluge's first film, co-directed with his friend Peter Schamoni, was the short Brutality In Stone. It's a tightly edited essay film, mixing archival footage with images of the remains of Nazi architecture, the lingering tangible evidence of Hitler's reign. The film advances the idea that architecture reflects ideology, an idea that the Nazis themselves were well aware of. They designed grandiose buildings, modeled after Egyptian pyramids and Mayan temples, massive structures that balanced spiritual fervor with bureaucratic anonymity. In these buildings, rows upon rows of tiny windows mirrored the tight arrangements of soldiers in formation. Even buildings, for the Nazis, were warlike, and Kluge and Schamoni explore this idea by filming the remains of the Nazi architecture in ways that enhance and accentuate the violence and austerity of these structures.

Buildings jut up into the sky. Towers loom above, thrusting powerfully against the clouds. Long corridors trail off to the horizon line, seemingly endless, lined with rhythmically repeating structures like guards stationed at intervals along the hallway. Everything is composed of hard, rigid lines, reflecting the horrible precision and the grandiose ambitions of the Nazi war machine. The soundtrack is a collage of elements: audio of Nazi speeches and rallies where it's available, transcripts where it's not; descriptions of Hitler's plans for reconstructing Berlin as a drastically reimagined capital city called Germania; Nazi music and samples of lyrics. Most horribly, there's a lengthy account of the way a concentration camp supervisor methodically organized and controlled the mass executions of prisoners arriving on transport trains. The voice of the speaker is flat and uninflected, and he describes in precise terms the time tables of the trains, which were perfectly paced so as to leave just enough time for the killings and the clearing of the bodies afterward. He describes how they would keep the crowds calm, how they'd quietly shoot any rowdy elements behind the building, how they'd keep a close watch to make sure that the mothers in the crowd weren't trying to hide their babies away before heading into the showers. The bodies were burned at night, so as not to tip off those arriving on the next transport. It is all so perfectly organized; they thought of every detail, every possible impediment to their work. It is swift and methodical, and all the more monstrous for its efficiency and precision.

Kluge and Schamoni pair this terrible efficiency with images of buildings designed by the Nazis, linking the horrors of the regime with the aesthetics of what they built and left behind. The hard lines, the grand size, the flat undecorated surfaces and tiny black window holes: it's an architecture of inhumanity, created on a scale far beyond the individual. It's an architecture of aggregation, reflecting a mindset that makes mass murder not only conceivable but routine. This short visual essay was an auspicious start to Kluge's career, already displaying the abrupt, associative editing and keen, analytical mind that would characterize his first feature Yesterday Girl.


Kluge's second film was the far more straightforward Racing, a documentary about an auto race; one guesses it was a commission rather than a project Kluge initiated himself. Nonetheless, he makes it his own. On its surface, the film is just a document of a race, and its imagery is relatively conventional: cars circling around the track, spectators cheering, lap after lap of the same images repeated. Kluge's presence makes itself known primarily in the wry voiceover commentary, which purports to be objective but actually slyly undercuts the images of the race. This narration toys with ideas like the interaction between human reflexes and intelligence and the increasingly complicated machines we operate. More subversively, Kluge probes the pacifying effect of populist entertainment, which provides a harmless distraction from politics and more important social issues, and he wonders aloud why this kind of entertainment so often flirts with death and violence.

Indeed, the race ends with a fiery car crash, which Kluge cuts to immediately after showing the winner crossing the finish line. In documenting a race and its aftermath, he subtly suggests that such spectacles are an outpouring of hostility and an expression of the public's desire for close (but not too close) confrontations with mortality. At the same time, these events take the focus of public discourse off of political matters, which is convenient for the ruling classes. Even in this brief and unshowy little film, Kluge suggests the outlines of deeper ideas beneath the commercial documentary form.


Transcript of a Revolution is another collaboration for Alexander Kluge. He's credited with writing the film while Günter Lemmer is the nominal director, but such distinctions don't seem to matter that much with this particular film. It's a strange work, essentially a mockumentary about a fake revolution in the fake West Indian island nation of Las Villas. It presents itself as a objective account of the events that led to the overthrowing of the country's brutal dictator, stitched together from radio reports that narrate the film. But the imagery is a patchwork of archival newsreel footage, sequences from old Hollywood films, and clearly staged scenes in which young men in sunglasses try to act like movie tough guys.

It's bizarre and, once its intent becomes clear, kind of hilarious, seamlessly blending together footage in many different styles and from disparate origins. The various kinds of film stock grate against one another from shot to shot, and the varying content of the images creates an internal tension between documentary and fiction. When real military maneuvers coexist on an even plane with the staged antics of amateur actors and clips from mainstream movies, the foundations of this cinematic reality become very shaky indeed. And yet on its surface the film plays it entirely straight, as though it was a true report on a conflict being waged in another country. It's also an absurdist nose-thumbing at dictators everywhere, a warning that revolution is inevitable. The film closes with the people of Las Villas, having won the battle, initially wary of their deposed dictator but, within the period of a few weeks, forgetting about him altogether.


Teacher, co-directed by Alexander and Karen Kluge, is another interesting documentary from the director's earliest years. This film starts as a wickedly funny report on a ceremony for the dedication of a new school building. Kluge condenses and briskly edits together a series of very similar speeches from various school and government officials, all of whom repeat virtually the same clichés, sometimes just parroting the same phrases but shuffling the words around. It's a wickedly funny satire, but Kluge surrounds it with more serious material, slowly building towards a rumination on what purpose teachers should serve, how they can fail their students, and what the ideal of education should be.

It's clear, of course, from the way he deflates the self-congratulatory nonsense of this ceremony that Kluge doesn't have a very high opinion of the current education system he's documenting. He does, however, appreciate the possibilities of education. The film's second half is thus dedicated to three stories of teachers who were prevented, in various ways, from really attaining the educational ideal they all aimed for. The first of these teachers was an idealistic man who, throughout World War II, taught at a rural German school where he fostered independent thought and creativity in his students; needless to say, the Nazis hanged him towards the end of the war. The second teacher also taught during World War II, and had the misfortune of seeing most of his class killed during attacks by the Russians; he finally escaped with only two of his students left alive, and quit teaching thereafter. The third teacher was a woman who continually pushed back her calling to teach, aware that in the less-than-ideal circumstances of World War II or the Communist years in East Germany, she would not be able to teach the way she would want to. The result was that, except for a brief period before the Communists forced her to quit, she never taught at all.

All of these teachers were oppressed and defeated by war, dictatorship and ideology. Kluge presents their stories with a calm voiceover, accompanied by period photographs. As in his first film, Brutality In Stone, Kluge is clearly very interested in the way that Germany's unique and horrible history has shaped and deformed the country's present. In the earlier film, he studied the lingering aesthetic effects of Nazi architecture, while here he traces the influence of World War II and its aftermath on the German educational system. He clearly longs for a system that would reward rather than punish the three dedicated, intelligent, resourceful teachers he cites here, and he regrets that history has conspired to keep such people down, to promote instead empty airbags like the school officials seen at the beginning of the film.


Kluge's final short before his first feature was another deadpan documentary (or, more likely, mockumentary?) called Policeman's Lot. This film presents itself as a chronicle of the life of the former policeman Karl Müller-Seegeberg, a man who had simply rolled with the many changes to beset German culture in the previous few decades. As a policeman, he had willingly served with the Communist-leaning Prussian guards, then had switched allegiances to the Nazis when they came to power, going to Russia to fight for Hitler. After the war, however, he just as willingly became a guard for the military tribunals, and even captured a fleeing Nazi prisoner. This is a man who takes pride in his professionalism, in his strict adherence to his duty — but he has no ideology, seemingly no preference about who's giving him his orders. He is willing simply to adapt to whatever circumstances come his way, to let history flow independently of his own life. He has no moral qualms about anything he's done; Kluge does not include the trite line about "only following orders," but that is the essence of this policeman's character. He is continually trying to "prove himself" anew as social conditions change: to prove himself a good Communist, then a good Nazi, then a good democrat.

He hardly seems to know what these words mean, only that they're new masters to impress with his professional skill. He is perhaps over-zealous in this, but he shows no remorse for the time when he accidentally killed a Nazi during a riot before Hitler's election, nor for the time when the Nazis had him shoot an innocent Russian woman, nor for the time, post-war, when he stumbled across a couple making love in a park and fired his gun into the dark at them. It is, ironically, this last incident that finally gets him dismissed from the police force. This, and not his earlier atrocities, is an inexcusable act because it happened in peacetime, and because he was for once not following orders but acting on his own.

Kluge documents this proud but broken man's life in the same fragmentary style he would soon employ in Yesterday Girl, integrating uncomfortably tight closeups (textural shots where every pore is a crater, every blemish a mountain) into a dense framework of vintage footage and other inserts. But his playful, satirical spirit comes out in Müller-Seegeberg's ironic closing line, expressed in a title card at the end of the film: "I would punch anyone in the face who did not act in a democratic way."

We Are the Lambeth Boys/March to Aldermaston

Karel Reisz was, along with filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, Michael Grigsby and others, one of the guiding intelligences behind the British Free Cinema movement of the late 1950s. The films produced and screened under the loose banner of this movement displayed a versatile surface realism coupled with an interest in inventive sound/image experiments, necessitated by the crude equipment then available for sound recording and sync sound. Indeed, Reisz's second film, the hour-long We Are the Lambeth Boys, produced as a television documentary for the BBC, was an early experiment in recording synchronized sound outside a studio setting for the first time in the UK. This film, a documentary about a group of working class kids of various ages, centered around a London youth club, lacks the ragged energy and vibrancy of Reisz's first film, the electric Momma Don't Allow, co-directed with Richardson.

Like that film, We Are the Lambeth Boys concerns itself with the young, with the ways in which they spend their time, with their nighttime escapes from the drudgery of work. The best moments of this second film are the ones that capture the same free-spirited vibe as its predecessor. Reisz loves to watch kids dancing, even if they do it awkwardly or badly, shuffling their feet and moving their arms pneumatically; they have no rhythm but they're having fun anyway, smiling and twirling, bodies coming together and then spinning apart again. The dancing sequences here are a blast, as they were in the earlier film. Reisz, like many of the Free Cinema filmmakers, also has a feel for faces, and he'll often pan across a row of gathered youths as they talk and chatter. His closeups have urgency and power, a sensitivity for people's faces and personalities, and he always seems to linger just long enough to capture the intricacies of a person's face, their tics and gestures and ways of expressing themselves. The documentary has a large cast of kids who drift in and out, none of them becoming recurring characters, none of them speaking directly to the camera. There are no interviews here, and the kids' names are tossed off in casual asides. Nevertheless, Reisz captures the personalities of several of his subjects, letting their faces and voices speak for themselves.

In this respect, this is a fine, admirable documentary, treating these working class kids, all of them taking on various tough jobs immediately after finishing high school, with respect and sympathy. But the film is also saddled with a rather generic and trite voiceover commentary by Jon Rollason, whose dulcet tones give the rather unfortunate impression of a public television nature documentary. His objective, distanced commentary makes it sound like he's commenting on some exotic phenomenon, observed carefully from arm's length, rather than the lives of ordinary British kids. One pictures him crouched in the bushes, whispering to a companion, "sssshhh, look, they're about to dance now." It's unintentionally funny to hear the awe with which he describes a simple night out after work, and his patronizing attitude is consistently at odds with the quiet dignity conveyed by Reisz's imagery.

This tendency is perhaps at its worst during the montage that attempts to convey a sense of what these kids, mostly seen at night at the club, do during the day. As Reisz's images capture the drudgery and boredom of jobs in factories and offices, doing repetitive and numbing tasks, the narration attempts to put a positive spin on things, to act as though these kids are doing jobs they enjoy or, at least, that the pleasures of nights at the youth club can compensate for the menial dullness of the working day. The narrator's jaunty attitude and distance from his subjects is distracting, especially considering the poetic verisimilitude of Reisz's depictions of working class life.


Free Cinema was always a particularly loose collective, with the filmmakers involved in the screenings insisting that they weren't really a movement but merely a group of unrelated filmmakers with similar aims and ideas about how to make movies. As a result, the actual organized Free Cinema screenings didn't last very long, but the movement inspired a great deal of subsequent British cinema, which picked up on the ideas advanced by these filmmakers. March to Aldermaston was one of the documentaries to come along in the wake of Free Cinema, obviously inspired by the naturalistic shooting and freewheeling approach of these filmmakers. Indeed, this anonymously made and produced film included, among its many technicians, cameramen, directors and editors, Free Cinema veterans like Anderson, Reisz and Elizabeth Russell.

It's a rather straightforward documentary account of a march for peace, a protest against the H-bomb. A large mass of people undertook a long walk from London to the town of Aldermaston, where British factories manufactured arms and nuclear weapons. The march, lasting several days over Easter weekend in 1958, was documented with a variety of cameras, some taking on a high vantage point above the crowds while others weave in among the lines of marchers, capturing expressive closeups or stopping for brief interviews with the participants. The style is loose and rowdy, and the music emanating from the crowd — most of it, surprisingly, bouncy Dixieland-style jazz, though there's also a smattering of the kind of dire, preachy folk songs one expects from a march like this — provides the soundtrack to the proceedings. The film is interesting as an historical document, but only sporadically successful as an actual work. Its voiceover (by Richard Burton) is overbearing and largely irrelevant, and because of the difficulty of capturing sync sound, the narration too often steps in to fill in the gaps; instead of hearing a speech, the audience hears the narrator say, "there was a speech."

The film is better when it sticks to simply documenting the march and spending time with the participants, some of whom explain in their own halting, unrehearsed words why they chose to take part. What's especially interesting here is the sheer variety of people who participate. The film definitively smashes any preconceptions of peace marches as hippie affairs, dominated by rebellious teens and slackers. This march is attended by a wide cross-section of British society, not only the young: parents, grandparents, laborers, teachers, conservative-looking ordinary people who are concerned about the future, for their kids and grandkids, in a nuclear age. It's moving to see these people protesting and to hear them express, in simple and direct terms, their feelings about nuclear weapons. It's fascinating to see so many people of different ages and classes coming together, and one struggles to imagine a similar variety of people at modern protests. This is pure democracy, with so many people willing to endure a long and grueling march to make their voices heard, to express their passionate feelings about an issue they all care about.

These powerful images are this documentary's most valuable asset, a glimpse into a past when all sorts of people engaged passionately in public political discourse, something sadly less common these days. Also interesting is the film's willingness to depict the fun, social aspect of this event, while refusing to judge the dancing, singing, merry young people seen here for actually having fun during a protest. The narration's best, most unpretentious moment comes as an answer to the criticisms of the young protesters as "unserious" and "frivolous." The narrator's rejoinder summarizes the most vibrant threads running through this interesting if inconsistent documentary: "There's no use being against death, if you don't know how to enjoy life while you've got it."

The Flying Doctors of East Africa/Handicapped Future

Werner Herzog's "documentaries" are generally known as strange, hybrid affairs, often incorporating nearly as much fictional material as his proper fiction features — thus, the common conceit of surrounding the word "documentary" with quotes when it's applied to this idiosyncratic filmmaker. But early in his career, Herzog made a pair of proper documentaries for German TV, films that set themselves apart from his other work in their polemical and educational purpose. Herzog himself viewed them not as artistic films but as more practical pieces of work, films made to fulfill a specific societal purpose. They are anomalies in his career, though neither is without interest or utterly devoid of typically Herzogian moments. The Flying Doctors of East Africa, made in 1969, is a report on the conditions of medical treatment in the African nations of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Herzog was in Africa working more or less simultaneously on this film, Fata Morgana and Even Dwarves Started Small, interweaving the production of this practical feature with his more personal work. The film has an obvious documentary purpose, to raise awareness about poor living conditions in Africa, and to chronicle some of the hard work being done by a multinational force of doctors and nurses to treat and educate these people living in unimaginable poverty.

There are thus several harrowing sequences depicting the rough, makeshift surgeries these doctors must perform, dealing with inadequate supplies, haphazard sterilization (during one surgeon, a priest stands nearby with a can of bug spray to chase away insects as they congregate by the operating table) and the ignorance of the locals to good hygiene or the use of medicine. Herzog documents all of this with a steady, unflinching eye, and as a report on the conditions of people living in Africa it is undoubtedly effective. It publicized the doctors' mission and probably helped to mobilize some support for what they were doing as well. This was the film's primary goal, and Herzog sticks to it with a single-minded simplicity that would rarely be seen in his personal work.

That said, he can't seem to resist finding ancillary points of interest within this material, and despite the uncharacteristically straightforward message and the generic British narrator who translates the English version of the film, the images here are unmistakably Herzog's. His interviews in particular are framed and staged in much the same way as the notoriously eccentric interviews dotting the second half of Fata Morgana. He shoots people from dead on, with a curiously abstracted distance that sets them off against their backgrounds and gives a faintly surreal edge to even the most prosaic scenes. It's hard to describe what exactly is so unsettling about these Herzogian interviews; the interview subjects are invariably stiff and awkward, alternately staring into the camera or uncomfortably and pointedly looking off to the side. When an Irish nurse speaks about the way that the natives ignore advice and interrupt treatment, Herzog frames her from a considerable distance, so that her white form is stretched across the frame from top to bottom. She speaks haltingly in English, as though it wasn't her first language, or as though she were reading from cue cards — which in Herzog's later, more stylized documentaries, wouldn't be out of the question.

The director also finds time to stumble across some particularly Herzogian non-sequiturs, and he includes several as interludes between the more serious segments. At one point, the voiceover describes how the local hyenas like to chew the tires on the doctors' airplanes, and have developed a taste for a particular Firestone type: "what makes this particular brand so tasty has not yet been discovered," the narrator deadpans, leaving a long pause for a rimshot while Herzog's camera lingers beneath an airplane's nose. There's also the weird shot of five missionary priests shuffling back and forth in formation along a dirt path, rearranging themselves as though obeying the arcane instructions of someone just offscreen. But Herzog never explains the shot, letting it just sit there in all its strangeness while the voiceover mundanely describes the priests' function in Africa. Moments like this suggest that even in a seemingly prosaic film like this, Herzog's active visual imagination and instinct for the unusual enlivens the film's straightforward reportage.


This is not so much the case, however, with Handicapped Future, a film that Herzog made two years later in order to raise awareness of the treatment of handicapped people in Germany at the time. This is surely the most polemical film that the avowedly apolitical Herzog ever made. It is utterly stripped-down in form, in order to communicate its message more directly. This message is a simple one, too: the treatment of the handicapped in 1970s Germany is utterly dire, and needs to be drastically altered if the children depicted in this film are ever going to have a happy, productive future. In interviews with children who are afflicted by various forms of disability — shortened or missing limbs, paralyzation, deformed bodies — and their parents, Herzog probes at the prejudice and societal ignorance these people encounter every day. With no real attempt to integrate children with disabilities into society, they are often shuffled off to institutions where they are cared for but not given any real opportunity to become independent, to do things for themselves, to become true members of society. Herzog finds many people who care for and help these children, genuinely good people trying to do their best, but he also finds a larger societal climate that is ignorant of the whole problem.

The film contrasts this situation against the treatment of people with disabilities in America at the same time. In order to do this, Herzog traveled to California to spend time with Dr. Adolf Ratzka, who had been afflicted with polio as a child and was as a result unable to walk and forced to spend his nights in an apparatus to help him breathe. Nevertheless, he is almost entirely independent thanks to an electronic wheelchair, a specially customized car with all the controls triggered by hand, and architectural surroundings much more friendly to the handicapped than those in Germany. Ratzka, who had moved to California from Munich, explicitly makes the comparison, describing how much easier it is to get around in his new home, where there are wheelchair ramps and elevators everywhere, and far fewer obstacles to his progress.

Herzog presents all of this with a flat, observational tone, with only sporadic overt commentary. The images of disabled children struggling to learn how to walk and balance themselves are heartbreaking, and it's obvious that Herzog intends them to be. It's hardly a true Herzog film, but it's a masterful piece of propaganda, and it reportedly did its job at the time. When the film was aired on German television, it apparently became a crucial factor in mobilizing activism and change within the systems designed to treat and care for the disabled in Germany. It presented not only an alternate way of doing things, but an alternate way of even thinking about such issues.

I Am Curious — Blue

I Am Curious — Blue is the second of Vilgot Sjöman's two Curious films, and like its companion piece (the Yellow version), it's an uneasy mix of sociopolitical documentary, sexual drama, and a metafictional treatment of the filmmaking process itself. In both films, Sjöman throws a lot of different material together in the hopes that some of it will work, and in both films some of it does. On the whole, though, Blue is just as dated and meandering as Yellow, a tired mish-mash of radical politics and sexual titillation that seldom ventures beneath the surface of the ideas it raises. In both films, all the actors play themselves, or at least characters who share the actors' real names. Sjöman himself is among the cast, as well as his somewhat reluctant lover and star Lena Nyman, who shuffles indecisively between Sjöman, Börje Ahlstedt (who's married and has a kid), and Hans Hellberg (who is also in another serious relationship, with Bim Warne). There's a certain droll humor to the way the film incorporates its metafictional elements, which inevitably appear abruptly at the corners of scenes: the camera will pan left across a dramatic scene and then suddenly reveal all the equipment and loafing crew members sitting off to the side watching the acting. In one of the better moment, Lena speeds by in a car along the highway, but the camera stops following her when it stumbles across Sjöman and the rest of the crew posed along the highway, singing and intently meeting the camera's stare.

There's less to like about the film's actual drama, which is rather rote and lifeless. Torn between at least two lovers, and also feeling somewhat committed to her director, the actress Lena decides to blow them all off, instead wandering off to the countryside, where she interviews various people she meets, scrawls revolutionary slogans on placards outside prisons, and meets a tough, pretty bar singer (Sonja Lindgren). The film never commits to any one mode, which would be fine if its individual components were interesting in themselves, which they're too often not. The interlude with Lindgren is a notable exception, a haunting and erotically charged sequence that culminates when a fascinated Lena witnesses a lesbian couple making love at a nearby house. The scenes of Lena and Sonja cavorting at a lake, and Sonja later intoning a poignant ballad while accompanying herself on guitar, have a sensual beauty and purity that the rest of the film struggles to match. Sonja herself is fascinating, her hard face and distant stare silently testifying of her eventful life; she's one of the only characters in the film who seems to have a real back story, a real life beyond the boundaries of the film frame, a soulful depth beneath the surface. Sjöman, more interested in political truisms and sexual melodrama, doesn't delve into or linger on these hidden depths, but to his credit, his camera does capture them faithfully.

In fact, Sonja embodies the film's themes better than any of the more pointed moments of political commentary. She's a single mother, raising a child in spite of the disapproval of others — a disapproval that, according to Lena's interviews, doesn't even exist, since no one is judgmental in the abstract, or else everyone knows the right answer and no one wants to admit that they still harbor sexist and unenlightened feelings. The interlude with Sonja suggests the kind of film Sjöman could have made, if he was interested: a warm and very human drama in which prosaic realities are used to illustrate and evoke more abstract political concerns. Instead, too often he approaches things from the other direction, with broad sloganeering and trite storytelling.


More interesting, in a kind of anthropological way, are the film's documentary elements, in the form of Lena's probing questions about the changing attitudes towards sex, religion, gender, class equality and income gaps, prison reform, overpopulation and birth control. It's a kind of time capsule of late 60s political and social thinking, tracing both the extraordinary shifts towards more permissive ideas and the continuing retrenchment of conservatism in other areas, such as the widespread impression that no further social change is needed to achieve equality. Lena simply walks up to people — at dances, on the street, at political rallies, at church — and asks them very pointed, politically charged questions that are clearly driving at foregone conclusions even before her hapless subject answers. Her interview with a young religious man is especially so blunt that one wonders if it's staged; she's shooting fish in a barrel, asking him about sex before marriage, contraceptives and world overpopulation until the guy, in way over his head, simply stammers to a halt and admits he's stymied. Even those viewers most unsympathetic to religion — and I'd consider myself an atheist — would have to start feeling pretty bad for the guy, who's badgered with the most inane of theological paradoxes and battered into submission by Lena's smug, superior attitude. We get it, Lena, you care about world hunger and you have sex before marriage. Aren't you special?

At her best, Lena's interviews are more probing and go after less obvious targets in much more clever ways. One of the better sequences is one in which a series of people are asked about their occupations and incomes, and the cumulative results are used to reveal income disparities between different jobs and different genders — most strikingly, a male schoolteacher admits to making double the salary of a female schoolteacher. These are not earth-shattering revelations — and surely they weren't in 1968, either, at least not to the film's presumptive, largely left-wing audience — but at its best I Am Curious presents these ideas with enough style and panache to keep things interesting. At its worst, the film degenerates into empty posturing and 60s radical chic, like a parody of what most people think of when they think of Maoist-era Godard. One gets the sense that Sjöman aspires to Godard, but he lacks his idol's ineffable wit; his "radical" poses are too often either aggravating or, even worse, simply boring.

Jag Mandir

Werner Herzog's documentaries are rarely just passive recordings of real events; Herzog engages directly with the material of the world, shaping and crafting "reality" into an expression of his own personality and obsessions. As a documentary filmmaker, he thoroughly acknowledges the amount of artifice involved in creating these supposed "documents" of something happening in the world. Herzog's oeuvre is often divided between his documentaries and his fiction films, but there are few directors for whom that distinction means so little — in almost all of his work, fiction and reality weave together in complicated ways. This is certainly true also of Jag Mandir, a documentary about a folk art festival arranged in a remote region of India, though this film finds Herzog in more of a straightforward, ethnographic mode than usual. The film is presented as a record of a festival arranged by the Austrian actor, singer and conceptual artist André Heller, at the behest of a Maharajah who wanted his young son to witness the glory of Indian artistry before such local traditions were erased in the face of "McDonaldization."

This is such a typically Herzogian concept that it's difficult to accept the film's premise at face value. Yes, one supposes that Heller really did put together this grand showcase of Indian folk arts, but some of the ideas behind the project seem imposed by the Europeans, Herzog and Heller, rather than originating with the Maharajah himself, who is silent throughout. Early on in the film, Herzog holds his camera on a long closeup of the Maharajah, followed by a shot of his young son, but the director never interviews either of them or allows their voices into the film. They are silent presences, their true intentions and ideas a mystery. The audience is forced to take Herzog's word for it about the project's origins and intent, and though this is par for the course for Herzog's slippery, obtuse documentaries, it's vaguely troubling that he never allows in any actual Indian voices in a film supposedly dedicated to chronicling Indian culture.

The film opens with a lengthy introduction by Heller, in which he describes the exhaustive process by which he gathered the best and most interesting artists and performers from all around India and brought them together for this show. His rhetoric is overblown, an exaggerated account of the wonders he found, many of which cannot appear in the film because there were over 20 hours of footage in total. Some of these seem intended to create a sense of mysticism and spirituality, like the anecdote about a magician who can make himself disappear — not seen in the film, of course, perhaps because he's already invisible. This intro, coupled with Herzog's own voiceover during the early segments of the film, positions the film as a view of these wonders through European eyes, an outsider's perspective on this Indian art and theater.


After these introductory maneuvers, the bulk of the film is dedicated to a simple document of the show itself. Herzog's voiceover goes silent after a while, as one group of performers after another takes the stage, dancing, playing music, juggling and displaying an array of marvelous costumes. The whole thing is pure spectacle: there is doubtless a deeper meaning, either religious or cultural, to these displays, but Herzog is interested only in the gaudy surface, the beauty of the choreography, the texture of the makeup and costumes. The music, rhythmic and complex, is non-stop, much of it created through the intersections of dance and instrumentation. In many of these complicated choreographed pieces, the dancers contribute to the music by clacking together sticks or swords or playing the bells and cymbals affixed to their bodies. The stylized movements of the dancers thus perform a dual function, simultaneously visual and musical.

Other performers appear in animal costumes, with dancing lions or monkeys swaying to the rhythms of the music. But the most impressive performance is probably the simplest, a traditional dance that Herzog excerpts at great length towards the end of the film: a mixed group of male and female dancers who continually rearrange themselves into delicately pulsating tableaux vivant, often only allowing the fluttering motion of their hands to disrupt the stasis of their arrangements. It is a hypnotic, beautiful slow motion dance, driven by stop/start rhythms and subtle choreography. This is an especially straightforward film for Herzog because it seemingly exists wholly to document moments like this, to display the grandeur and beauty of these rituals and traditions. Jag Mandir is an interesting chronicle of a cross-section of Indian cultural artifacts, a document of various modes of expression and art that may be going extinct or disappearing from the cultural landscape of their own country.

Films I Love #23: Balance Beams (Jonas Leddington, 2002)

Balance Beams is a documentary about the 2002 AMPLIFY music festival in Tokyo, Japan, curated by experimental music label Erstwhile Records, who later released the film as part of a box set commemorating the fest. This will probably seem like an obscure choice to anyone not already well-versed in the kind of music favored by Erstwhile, and it's not a film that got much notice outside of the insular community of electroacoustic improvisation. It certainly deserved more attention, though: there is no film that does a better job of capturing the unique philosophy and approach to music that characterizes the group of musicians documented here, who represent the best that this community has to offer. It is difficult to encapsulate this diverse body of musicians under a single rubric, but they are all improvising in a post-jazz context, often using either customized electronic devices or traditional instruments which are played in non-traditional ways. There is a strong emphasis on communication between collaborators, and throughout the course of this festival, all the players rotated through various ad-hoc groupings to allow them to respond to a number of different contexts. It is resolutely abstract and difficult music, free from melody, rhythm, and any other traditional markers of musical vocabulary.

In contrast to the difficulty of this music, the film is relatively straightforward in its aesthetics, and is at its best whenever it focuses exclusively on the musicians. It is not always the most artfully made film, though its aesthetic merits become clear during the long, very welcome stretches where Leddington's camera probes into the working methods of the musicians as they play. This is a very process-oriented film, fittingly for a genre of music where the process of creating sounds is of central importance. All of these musicians think carefully before making a sound, a fact that Leddington establishes early by opening the film with a snippet of Taku Sugimoto's infamously silent Guitar Quartet, which mostly consists of four guitarists sitting quietly on stage, hands poised above their guitars, waiting for someone to touch a string.

The rest of these musicians are not nearly as extreme as Sugimoto, but they do share his thoughtfulness and deliberation. It is therefore a rare pleasure to see guitarist Keith Rowe at work in revealing closeups that put the emphasis squarely on the techniques he uses to produce his sounds. Rowe places his instrument flat on a tabletop, surrounded by effect pedals, springs, handheld fans, radios, and assorted metal objects, all of which are used to excite the guitar's strings in interesting ways, creating textured sound fields. Throughout the film, Leddington explores the various means of sound production these musicians deploy: the alien squeaks and cries of vocalist Ami Yoshida, the sine wave samples of Sachiko M, the relatively traditional guitar of Burkhard Stangl, the eccentric percussive array of Günter Müller, the bare turntables and gadgets of Otomo Yoshihide. Balance Beams provides a perspective better even than the average audience member at one of these shows, creating an experience that is not just a document of a particular festival, but a summary of this movement's philosophy of sound and music.

TOERIFC: The True Meaning of Pictures

[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's film was chosen by Marilyn of Ferdy On Films. Visit her site to see her thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

Sometimes a piece of art, or an artist's body of work as a whole, will be as interesting for the questions it raises about the nature of art, of representation, of artistic intentionality, as for the artwork itself. This is definitely the case with the photos of Appalachian rural life taken by Shelby Lee Adams, the subject of Jennifer Baichwal's fascinating documentary The True Meaning of Pictures. To be sure, Adams' photos are enthralling in their own right. His photos document people who most of us would never otherwise see, people completely forgotten by the rest of society, their dilapidated homes located in isolated, lonely territory. They live in abject poverty, their faces living caricatures of the rural poor, the kind of people who are dismissed as "rednecks" or "hillbillies" by city-dwellers. Adams was born and grew up in this milieu, not in total poverty — he describes his childhood as "middle class for Appalachia" — but close enough to it to know that it exists, to know what it looks like.

His photos of these people, who he spends a great deal of time with, are interesting contradictions between subject matter and form. On the one hand, the people he's documenting are utterly downtrodden: they live in squalor, their houses built seemingly from whatever scraps of wood and metal they can find and sometimes papered inside with newsprint, their clothes ragged and dirty. And yet Adams' photos of them are disarmingly beautiful, with a profound formal and even theatrical quality. They are obviously staged and artificially posed, with Adams arranging his subjects into tight, formally interesting group compositions. The photos are beautifully lit, formally pristine documents of people whose lives are anything but pristine.

For this reason, Adams' photos have earned a great deal of controversy in the art world, which tends to view these strange pictures with equal parts admiration and suspicion. Baichwal's documentary does not take sides in the debate over Adams' art: she remains objective, often alternating between opposing viewpoints, allowing the argument to play out in front of her camera with all its thorny, complex issues. Foremost among these is the question of whether Adams is simply feeding into existing stereotypes — like the violent, inbred hillbilly of Hollywood legends like Deliverance — or if he is trying to document these people as they genuinely are. It's easy enough to understand both viewpoints, and in some ways Adams' photographs are juggling these two tendencies, simultaneously engaging with stereotypes and trying to find the real people whose faces and lives in a sense embody those stereotypical characters. Part of the issue here is the relationship between the artist's intention and the audience's reaction. The documentary's implicit central question, never quite stated outright but nevertheless at the root of its inquiry, is what matters more: what the artist thinks he's doing, or what the audience viewing the art think it's doing. And if it's the latter, which audience?


Indeed, Adams' photos inevitably bring up the subject of different audiences appreciating art in different ways. What's interesting about Adams is that, though he is often accused of exploiting or manipulating the subjects of his photos, portraying them in unflattering or stereotypical ways, by and large the people he actually photographs have no problems with his pictures, and indeed they love them and are completely comfortable with Adams himself. He is accepted as an insider, as one of them, and Baichwal includes a great deal of footage, much of it from Adams' own archives, of the photographer interacting with and spending time with the families he photographs. He considers them his friends, and the feeling seems to be mutual: he's viewed as a friend who comes over for barbecues and dinners, for trading old stories, and who just so happens to take some pictures of them as well. The film contrasts this impression of Adams with the views of several art critics who have varying degrees of reservations about this work. These critics wonder if Adams' work appears differently to audiences outside of the Appalachian communities that are being represented, if perhaps the average viewer of this photographs is in fact enjoying them simply because the images are so strange, so bizarre, so kitschy. One critic goes so far as to suggest that the actual Appalachian people do not have the visual vocabulary to understand that the photos are mocking them — he's careful to clarify his statement by saying that he doesn't mean to be patronizing, but he comes across that way nevertheless.

Still, the critics' objections to Adams' work do seem legitimate, though Adams himself is equally lucid and genuine in describing his desire to portray these people honestly and without politically correct censorship. Baichwal never lets either viewpoint get the upper hand, carefully alternating between different viewpoints, and letting the various people speak for themselves. The critics sometimes come across as smarmy and elitist, and Adams sometimes seems to miss the implications of his own work, but on the whole everyone in the film (including the Appalachian residents themselves) is given a chance to express themselves and to make their perspective clear. The result is a fair representation of an enormously complex controversy, one that perhaps cannot be satisfactorily resolved. Does it matter that Adams genuinely wants to document honest reality if the photos sometimes contribute to maintaining stereotypes rather than destroying them? Is Adams actually a documentarian, or is he trying to write his own inner emotions onto tableaux staged with real people? Does everyone see the same thing when they look at a photo? Baichwal wants her audience to walk away from the film asking these questions and many others, grappling with the nature of art and the role of morality in documentation and artistic expression.


There is however, one point on which I wish Baichwal had broken her objectivity in order to confront it directly. One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is one that goes almost completely uncommented-upon: the transformations in Adams' personality, diction, and attitude when he is with his Appalachian subjects as opposed to being interviewed alone. In front of Baichwal's camera, he is soft-spoken, with clear, precise diction and an art-school vocabulary, lucidly discussing his motivations and aesthetics in clean, nearly unaccented speech. When he is with the subjects of his photos, however, he lapses into the heavily accented, mumbling dialect that they themselves use. It's apparent that there are two sides to Adams, and that he — consciously or unconsciously — seeks to fit in whether he's in rural Appalachia or in more of an art world setting. Baichwal never calls him on it, never asks him to speak about how he changes himself in accord with his surroundings, and that's a shame. In light of the film's questions about the artist's intent and the effect of his work, it seems like it would have been a fruitful line of inquiry.

For the most part, though, Baichwal's documentary is an admirable attempt to engage with this controversial artist, his rich but often conflicted artwork, and the people who form his living subject. The film suggests great depths, dealing with complex abstract ideas through its concrete subject, and when its brief running time has passed, it leaves many questions and ideas hanging in the air, demanding they be considered.