CONTACT US 
|
 |
||||
Jessica Yu’s Protagonist
Form Evolves But Truth Remains The Festival’s opening night film was a prime example. Animated figures voiced by prominent actors reenact the protests in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10, offering a candy-colored cartoon-tinged retelling of history that’s sure to rankle traditionalists. “We knew we wanted something different, and this is a film that’s about youth, and it’s a film about theatricality,” explained the Festival’s Director of Programming John Cooper. “We also like its style. Brett uses great animation and great music, and I think the film as a whole has a lot of the components that make up independent film.”
Morgen’s previous Sundance entry, The Kid Stays in the Picture, which he co-directed with Nanette Burstein in 2001, is similarly vibrant, with extensive visual manipulation of archival photographs to recount a storybook version of the life of Hollywood producer Robert Evans. Some critics complained then about departures from truth, but others celebrated the fact that the film is entertaining, noting that documentary films often fail to find audiences because they lack the visual and narrative thrills of their fictional counterparts. “I believe that allegiance to fact is fundamental to documentary filmmaking,” said Sundance programmer David Courier, who worked on programming the docs in this year’s Festival. “That said, documentary filmmakers are still telling a story. And there is always going to be a subjective element to any storytelling. What do you include? What do you leave on the editing floor? Subjective choices are being made throughout the process,” he continued, noting that any non-fiction film reflects the artistic temperament of the filmmaker. “From animation to puppets to re-enactments, documentary filmmakers are using refreshingly creative techniques to enhance their vision of the truth.” Puppets? Courier is referring to Jessica Yu’s Independent Film Competition: Documentary film Protagonist, which is based on the narrative structure suggested by ancient Greek writer Euripides. For the film, Yu interviewed four men whose lives took dramatic turns such that they gradually became the very kind of people they despised. She intercuts talking-heads footage of their often wrenching accounts with images of puppets, which act both as a chorus and as stand-ins for the men. In one particularly moving sequence, a man recalls an attack by his abusive father; his voice-over accompanies the haunting images of puppets enacting the scene, which gains its visceral power in being an indirect representation of a factual event. “Something amazing would happen when people projected their own experiences and feelings on the fixed masks in Greek drama, and a similar thing happens in the film with the puppets,” Yu said. For the Independent Film Competition: Documentary film Zoo, director Rob Devore also worked with volatile material – intimacy between men and horses – and in this case used stylized reenactments, with careful attention to color, framing, and sound, to achieve a particular emotional tenor that suited the story he was trying to recount. In Nanking, filmmakers Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman also had very strong material – the murder and rape of thousands of Chinese people during World War II. In this case, the filmmakers opted to use many techniques to recount the event, mixing archival photos and actors who read the accounts left by participants, for example. However, in every instance, the filmmakers clearly explain who each actor represents.
For the poetic World Cinema Competition: Documentary film Acidente, co-directors Cao Guimarães and Pablo Lobato, like Yu, started with an unusual premise. “We chose the most beautiful and interesting names of the cities in the state of Menas Gerais in Brazil,” said Guimarães, who explained that they then crafted a poem from the names, which in turn became destinations for the filmmakers, who brought the poem to life by shooting for a single day in each city. “There are fictional elements and documentary elements mixed together,” Guimarães said. “In the city called Happy Waiting, for example, we photographed a dog sleeping. Then we put a small piece of meat in front of his nose. When the smell came to his brain, he woke up and he was very happy. Here, this was not just by chance; we provoked reality.” Guimarães and Lobato were less interested in factual documentation than in capturing a sense of each city, and indeed, Guimarães described his filmmaking process as akin to writing. “It’s in the tradition of cine ecriture,” he said, adding that with a great film, whether fiction or non-fiction, “you feel yourself suspended such that you forget for awhile about yourself, and then you rediscover yourself, but differently.” Danish filmmaker Eva Mulvad did not provoke reality, but she did make specific choices in the production of her often visually elegant portrait of Malalai Joya and her election to the National Assembly in Afghanistan in the film Enemies of Happiness, screening in the World Cinema Competition: Documentary. “I chose to work with a cinematographer who usually does fiction, and I chose her on purpose because a lot of things that we see from Afghanistan are very shaky, very reportage style, and I wanted to do another kind of film, to show the beauty of the country and what it is like to be there,” she said. “I’m educated in the tradition of [Frederick] Wiseman and [the] Maysles and I love their work, but I think my generation wants to steal from the fictional way of telling stories.” She continued, “Documentary film has this dusty image, maybe because we see a lot of historical stuff in school. But we’re filmmakers first and foremost, and for me, I want to take things a bit further, into entertainment. We have to think about the audience.”
Courier echoes the significance of the audience, explaining, “Some would say that this shift has happened because the public wants to be entertained while being enlightened. Documentaries live on the cusp of entertainment and social consciousness and filmmakers have become increasingly more creative in finding ways to marry the two.” As varied in style as the fiction grouped within the rubric of creative non-fiction, the expressive documentaries at Sundance this year move from the essayistic exploration of chance encounters in Acidente to the critical analysis rendered in often poetic form in Jennifer Baichwai Manufactured Landscapes. In each case, however, whether via animation, puppets, reenactments, or poetic license, the effect not only embodies the creative temperament of the film’s makers, but underlines the act of interpretation inherent in any rendering of reality. |
READ MORE FEATURES...