DOCUMENTING THE DIRECTOR
It’s no secret that over the past few years, while “entertainment news,” bite-size reviews, and other forms of promotion in all the media have been steadily expanding, serious film criticism in print become an increasingly scarce. (I’m not including academic film interpretation, a burgeoning if relatively sealed-off field that has by now developed a rhetoric and a tradition of its own–the principal focus of David Bordwell’s fascinating book Making Meaning, published last year.) But the existence of serious film commentary on film, while seldom discussed as an autonomous entity, has been steadily growing, in some cases supplanting the sort of work that used to appear only in print.
Other more interesting documentaries adopt some or all of this show- and-tell format only to subvert it. Orson Welles’s Filming Othello (1978), for instance, features several clips from Welles’s Othello (1951), but most of them were re-edited by Welles himself; Michael Powell’s Michael Powell (1986)–a brilliant self-portrait made for British TV and Powell’s last film–has the director in effect traipsing through his own films in the process of commenting on them. (Other subversive examples include Jon Jost’s short Godard 1980, Mark Rappaport’s video Mark Rappaport: The TV Spin-off, made the same year, and Julia Solntseva’s Golden Gate [1969], about her late husband Alexander Dovzhenko, which includes not only clips from Dovzhenko’s films but also her own partial realizations of some of his unfilmed scripts.) A fine example of a documentary that essentially dispenses with this show-and-tell format is Thom Andersen’s Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1976), a film theorist’s analytic meditation on the life and work of his subject.
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We cut to Brocka directing a scene from a movie. We learn shortly that Brocka is making the film in exchange for the producer having paid his bail bond when Brocka was arrested in 1985 for his part as a negotiator in a transit strike. He goes on to describe his difficult childhood, his varied background (including work as a monk in a Hawaiian leper colony), his homosexuality (and the controversial impact of homosexual themes on a few of his films), the Philippines and its film industry, his unbridled hatred for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, and his growing activism; and what impresses one the most through this extended and illustrated conversation with Blackwood are his courage, intelligence, and candor. When clips from his films are shown–apparently filmed directly off a screen or moviola–Brocka translates the dialogue, explains the plots, and offers self-critical comments to Blackwood while we see them. The film assumes as well as demonstrates a direct continuity between Brocka’s passion as a director and his passion as a human being, and while the results can’t completely take the place of seeing a Brocka film, they provide an absorbing and comprehensive introduction.
The same can be said for Paul Joyce’s British documentary Motion and Emotion: The Films of Wim Wenders (1989), which will be showing May 17 and 18, although in this case the film’s principal value is as criticism rather than as information. This almost never happens in American show-and-tell documentaries, which usually try to hide their biases rather than state them overtly–the way that the Sturges film handles its disdain for The French They Are a Funny Race, for instance. Motion and Emotion, on the other hand, conveys its point of view about what’s questionable as well as praiseworthy about Wenders’s work; and without being either malicious or polemical about it, it offers the best ideological critique of Wenders that I’ve ever encountered, much of it coming from critic Kraft Wetzel (who remarks in the course of a fascinating discussion that Wenders will be remembered as the Christian Democrat of the new German cinema).
