Category: Documentary

By Joe Bendel. Ornette Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for musical composition and performed live on Saturday Night Live. Although neither event is covered in Shirley Clarke’s classically idiosyncratic documentary-profile, viewers still get a memorable sense of the artist and his music in Ornette: Made in America, which opens in New York this Friday at the IFC Center, as part of Milestone Films’ Project Shirley restoration and rerelease program.

Explaining Coleman’s place in the jazz world would take some doing, especially in 1985, before his late career Grammy and Pulitzer accolades finally came cascading in. Coleman was one of the pioneers of the Free Jazz movement, whose legendary engagement at New York’s Five Spot club sharply divided the jazz world. However, you will not find his creation story here. Instead, Clarke’s approach to Coleman the man and the musician is deeply rooted in the then-current moment, yet is also rather timeless.

In the mid 80’s, the establishment (broadly defined) was just starting to understand that Coleman was a force to be reckoned with. As the film opens, the mayor of Fort Worth presents Coleman with a copy of the key to the city (the original, he explains, had been sent up into space or something), in the hours before the alto saxophonist-multi-instrumentalist will debut Skies of America, a major new composition integrating a symphony orchestra with his avant-garde electric combo Prime Time. Hizzoner’s speech might strike New York hipsters as a bit corny, but his drummer-manager-son Denardo is quite pleased his father is finally being recognized.

In fact, there is something all-encompassing and Whitmanesque about Coleman’s deeply blues-influenced music that is perfectly represented by a title like Skies of America, as well as the mayor’s patriotically Texan remarks. Shrewdly, Clarke uses this fairly accessible work as the musical centerpiece for the film, much like Sonny Rollins’ concert premiere of Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Orchestra dominates Robert Mugge’s Saxophone Colossus.

There was probably no documentarian better suited to Coleman’s personality and aesthetic than Shirley Clarke. Her style of filmmaking perfectly reflects his music—fragmentary and baffling to the willfully uninitiated, but with a strong compositional conception underlying it all. Her visual sensibility might be far from infallible (a kid with an iPad could put her space age special effects to shame these days), but she demonstrates a rock solid command of Coleman’s acutely syncopated rhythms, and had a keen insight into his creative milieu.

Indeed, except for perhaps Clint Eastwood, no filmmaker can equal Clarke’s position as a filmmaker whose work promotes and is informed by America’s great original art form. The Connection, which launched Project Shirley, is a milestone (if you will) of independent filmmaking, in large measure due to Freddie Redd’s absolutely classic tunes. Likewise, her viscerally naturalistic social issue drama, The Cool World, derives considerable power from Mal Waldron’s soundtrack (which in turn was rerecorded by Dizzy Gillespie’s combo for the official OST LP version). There was even the non-narrative short, Bridges-Go-Round, featuring the music of Teo Macero. Ornette is sort of a summing up of her jazz evangelism, shining a spotlight on one of the most controversial yet at the time underappreciated artists to ever set foot on the bandstand.

Time and again, Clarke alternately emphasizes Coleman’s blues roots and hardscrabble early life (even filming young actors portraying the alto saxophonist in dramatized vignettes of his formative years) and his compulsively forward looking – almost futuristic – orientation. The fact that most of Coleman’s philosophizing makes little to no sense is hardly important. No, he never really explains his theory of harmolodics in Ornette and she wisely never pushes him.

The Coleman seen in Ornette matches the accounts I have personally heard from musician-friends who have had conversations with him and say it was the coolest thing ever, even though they have no idea what he said. Any film conveying that experience is worth seeing, but Ornette has considerably more to offer. A highly entertaining time-capsule of a jazz documentary, Ornette: Made in America is recommended for anyone who wants their ears stretched a bit when it opens this Friday (8/31) at the IFC Center.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on August 28th, 2012 at 12:15pm.

By Joe Bendel. Shooting footage in twenty-five countries around the world, documentarian-visual essayists Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson must have met thousands of fascinating people. Yet, you will not meet any of them on a personal level in their latest 70mm spectacle. Their aesthetic favors the people en mass and dehumanized over messily unpredictable individuals. As their follow-up to 1992’s Baraka, director-cinematographer-co-writer-co-editor Fricke & producer-co-writer-co-editor-co-musical director Magidson’s Samsara takes viewers to some awe-inspiring sites all over the globe, intending it all to signify the great cosmic wheel of life, as the title translates from Sanskrit. Those who want to see it should see in a theater, the way it was meant to be seen, when Samsara opens today in New York.

Think of this as The Wall for politically correct Volvo-driving health nuts. Deeply steeped in Eastern religious traditions, Samsara captures some amazing images, such as the opening Balinese dancers, the archaeological wonderland of Petra, and the Tibetan Buddhist monks of Thikse creating impermanent sand mandalas. It would probably deepen any viewers’ appreciations to hear the dancers discuss their incredibly disciplined collective choreography, or to have the monks explain what the mandalas symbolize according to their faith, but Fricke and Magidson are not going there. There will be no talking and no text in the film.

Samsara brings to mind an old airline commercial from years ago, in which a charming old Southwestern artist tells viewers that the young painters who move to New Mexico and are blown away by the landscape are missing the point—it is the people who are really interesting. Fricke & Magidson are like those landscape painters, duly filming the sweeping awesomeness of nature. Yet, in a way, this makes things so much neater and tidier. When images of the disfigured are contrasted with scenes of armament factories, we cannot help but get the unsubtle message. Yet, the more we knew about individual cases might make it far harder to indulge in sweeping generalizations.

Some of the sequences in Samsara are absolutely arresting, like the shots of the Bagan temples in Burma, which did indeed grant the filmmakers access, after quite a bit of diplomatic and bureaucratic hoop-jumping. Sadly, when North Korea said “no,” Kim really meant “no,” so Fricke and Magidson were unable to film one of the giant choreographed stadium airangs. That’s too bad, because it would have fit right in with the rest of Samsara.

Without question, Samsara is lovely to look at (except when it is being deliberately ugly). There was obviously a conscious intent guiding the assemblage of the images, but they are still just images. Ultimately, the film is all surface and precious little substance. Any deeper meditations it might spur are solely due to viewer’s highly individualistic responses to the natural, sacred, and profane visuals it presents. Recommended just for those who enjoyed previous wide-screen picture books, like Baraka and Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (on which Fricke served as cinematographer), Samsara opens today (8/24) in New York at the Landmark Sunshine.

LFM GRADE: B-/C+

Posted on August 24th, 2012 at 10:37am.

By Joe Bendel. A prestigious Wall Street firm specializing in Treasury securities, Cantor Fitzgerald suffered more losses on September 11th than any other organization, including the New York Police and Fire Departments. The numbers are staggering: 658 of their 960 New York employees died that morning. However, Cantor’s story did not end there. Filmmaker Danielle Gardner, whose brother Doug was one of the 658, documents CEO Howard Lutnick’s efforts to support the anguished Cantor families while desperately working to keep the firm afloat during its darkest hours in Out of the Clear Blue Sky (see clip above), which is currently screening as part of the 2012 DocuWeeks New York.

Had it not been the morning of his young son’s first day of school, Lutnick surely would have been at Cantor at the time of the attack. With offices several floors above the initial impact zone, Cantor employees never had a chance. Rushing to the scene only to witness the Towers’ collapse, Lutnick and a handful of senior staff began scrambling to determine who survived. With the enormity of their loss weighing on him, a distraught Lutnick became the public face of the tragedy. Yet, as some family members lashed out Lutnick in frustration, the media turned on Cantor, hard.

Blue’s stories of grief and remembrance are truly heartrending. Surprisingly, though, it is also a compelling business documentary, providing an inside account of Cantor’s fight to survive during the precarious days following the fateful Tuesday. Their resourcefulness is quite extraordinary, conducting Twenty-First Century financial transactions with scrounged office supplies. Of course, the stakes were high. Had the firm folded, Lutnick’s ability to help Cantor families would have been severely limited. Indeed, that behind-the-scenes look at Cantor’s tenacious rebound is what sets Blue apart and above other well meaning 9-11 documentaries.

As a member of their ranks, Gardner clearly earned the trust of Cantor families, eliciting some unusually eloquent testimony from her interview subjects. While there are many emotionally charged scenes, the film never feels intrusive or exploitative. (The only exception might be Lutnick’s tearful television interviews recorded within days of the attack, which have already been replayed innumerable times in the media.) Indeed, Gardner deftly walks the tightrope, directly conveying the rawness of survivors’ pain, without reveling in it.

While the media does not cover itself in glory for uncritically recycling complaints against Lutnick, the overall film is scrupulously nonpartisan. Too many misguided people would prefer to forget or deny the horrific events of September 11th. Worse still, some might even be inclined to dismiss Cantor as an instrument of the “1%” amid the current polarized climate. Blue acts as a valuable corrective to such impulses, reminding viewers the Cantor employees lost at the World Trade Center were all individuals from diverse backgrounds, who left behind friends and loved ones. Poignantly engaging but also quite an enlightening portrait of corporate resiliency, Out of the Clear Blue Sky screens through Thursday (8/16) at the IFC Center in New York, with a week’s run at the Laemmle Noho to follow (8/17-8/23) in Los Angeles, as part of this year’s DocuWeeks.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on August 13th, 2012 at 1:39pm.

By Joe Bendel. Theodor Herzl once advocated mass Jewish conversion to Christianity, but would nonetheless become a unifying leader for the Jewish Diaspora. Profoundly concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism, his fears would be dreadfully justified in the years soon following his death. Yet, they provided the early impetus for the Zionist movement that ultimately led to the founding of the State of Israel. His life and mission are documented in Richard Trank’s It is No Dream: The Life of Theodor Herzl, which opens this Friday in New York.

Herzl believed that if an anti-Semitic wave could sweep across France, the cultural capitol of Europe in the 1890’s—and it was—it could happen anywhere. Never particularly religious, covering the Dreyfus Affair as a journalist forced Herzl to take stock of his own Jewish heritage and seriously address the increasing volume of European anti-Semitism. His early ideas proved impractical on further reflection, but the notion of a sovereign Jewish state (not original to Herzl) remained a viable option.

For the remaining years of his life, Herzl became the preeminent leader of the movement to forge a Jewish homeland, making his case to some of Europe’s most influential power brokers, including the Kaiser. For Herzl, the only question was where. Eventually, the colonial territory entrusted to England by a League of Nations mandate, known at the time as “Palestine,” became the obvious choice, given the Jewish people’s deep roots to the region. However, Herzl was appalled by the backwardness and poverty of the British Mandate during his first visit. Still, this did not disqualify the small tract of land from consideration. Arguably, it made even more sense on several levels.

Produced by Moriah Films, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s film production subsidiary, Dream is a welcome and necessary antidote to malicious attempts to make “Zionism” a dirty word in the media. Trank and co-writer-co-producer Rabbi Marvin Hier clearly illustrate the alarming nature of anti-Semitism during Herzl’s lifetime, largely leaving unspoken (but ever-present in viewer’s minds) the enormity of the Holocaust, which would tragically vindicate all his fears.

Narrated by Academy Award winner Sir Ben Kingsley, with fellow Oscar winner Christoph Waltz giving voice to Herzl’s letters and writings, Dream has a fair amount of star power for a serious historical documentary. With an elegant score composed and conducted by the Emmy winning Lee Holdridge (whose credits including Moonlighting), Dream is a pretty prestigious package, but the real attraction is Herzl’s short but epic life-story, which will probably come as a revelation to many viewers outside the Jewish faith. Though perhaps not the target market, it is those viewers of good will not especially schooled in Jewish history who would get the most out of the film.

Consistently fascinating and never dry, Dream tells a compelling story that remains only too timely for the world today. Well paced and informative, It is No Dream is recommended for general audiences, regardless of religion or political affiliation, when it opens this Friday (8/10) in New York at the Quad Cinema.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on August 8th, 2012 at 1:05pm.

By Joe Bendel. A Catholic requiem in a concentration camp might sound like a problematic endeavor. So it was, but not necessarily for the reasons one might assume. It was actually the programming choice of a group of prisoners, led by a remarkable maestro. The story of the Terezin performances of Verdi’s Requiem and the subsequent on-site re-staging for survivors decades later are documented in Doug Shultz’s Defiant Requiem, which screens as part of the 2012 DocuWeeks in New York and Los Angeles.

Verdi’s Requiem is a draining chorale work, in many ways. It would not seem like a natural piece of music to unwind with after a hard day of labor—slave labor to be more accurate. However, these were far from normal times for the Terezin (a.k.a. Theresienstadt) concentration camp captives. These Czech citizens had been swept up by the conquering National Socialists and held at Terezin until they were deported to a death camp. Nonetheless, many died at Terezin due to the inhuman conditions, but a determined young conductor harnessed the power of music to keep their spirits up.

Gathering those interested around an old upright providentially discovered in the basement of his barracks, Rafael Schächter started his make-shift chorus off with Czech popular songs and Smetana operas, but he eventually coaxed them into the Requiem. The key might have been his translation of Verdi’s Latin into Czech. As Murry Sidlin, the conductor of the commemorative Requiem concerts observes, the Requiem’s lyrics hold tremendous meaning for anyone unjustly denied their liberty and dignity. Rife with prophesies of judgment from above, Verdi’s opus is not just a requiem. It became a J’Accuse—an indictment of the National Socialist crimes so bold, only the International Red Cross inspectors could miss its significance.

Yes, the Requiem was performed at that Terezin, the concentration camp temporarily remodeled into a Potemkin village to fool the Red Cross. It was there that Sidlin brought members of Catholic University of America chorale ensemble and a full orchestra, for an emotional performance.

In fact, mounting Verdi’s Requiem and telling the story of Schächter has become a mission for Sidlin, who serves as the film’s musical director and one of its primary commentators. It is an important story, but the film also fosters a greater appreciation for Verdi’s work. Wisely, Shultz takes a rather traditional documentarian approach, largely approximating the shape of Sidlin’s music-with-historical-context concert presentations of the Requiem, filling in here and there with tastefully recreated scenes in the rehearsal cellar and some animated sequences adapted from surviving Terezin drawings. This is hardly the place to get experimental, after all.

Granted, anyone who knows anything about the Holocaust and the fate of the Terezin prisoners in particular will sadly know exactly what to expect from the film. Nonetheless, it deepens our understanding of life at Terezin and offers up an example of music as an instrument of survival. Frankly, hearing some of the stormier passages promising divine justice will likely make viewers’ hair stand on end. Highly recommended precisely for such memorable moments, Defiant Requiem screens through Thursday (8/9) in New York at the IFC Center as part of DocuWeeks New York as well the week of August 17-23 during DocuWeeks LA.

Posted on August 6th, 2012 at 12:58pm.

By Joe Bendel. They are called Jamaats. In Muslim areas of Southern India, these neighborhood old boys’ networks supposedly apply sharia law. However, in practice, they regularly provide cover for abusive and even homicidal husbands. At least, such appears to be the case based on the evidence presented to the upstart women’s Jamaats. Deepa Dhanraj documents the efforts of the women’s Jamaat leaders to redress gender based injustices in Invoking Justice, which screens during this year’s Asian American International Film Festival in New York.

As per Indian custom, Islamic law officially supersedes secular law in the provincial south. It is a nice set-up if you are a man, particularly if you and your cronies are on the community Jamaat. If you are a woman, though, the system is literally rigged against you. However, a small but growing number of Muslim women have challenged the institutionalized misogyny by forming alternative women’s Jamaats. While their legal standing is rather iffy, especially by the local standards, the civilian police force has to deal with them. This often means the men’s Jamaats must as well, albeit rather grudgingly.

The kinds of cases women’s Jamaat activists investigate are frankly shocking, including several cases of spousal murder and one abused wife and mother desperately trying to divorce her pedophile husband. The women’s Jamaat founder Sharifa Khanam clearly knows the Koran and uses it to shame their male counterparts. Yet, on a fundamental level, they still acknowledge the primacy of Islamic law over civilian authority. Indeed, this begs an obvious question Dhanraj does her level best to ignore: is religious-based law compatible with any meaningful notion of justice? Indeed, viewers might well wonder if non-Muslims living in Tamil Nadu have any recourse for legal redress, whatsoever.

To be fair, Dhanraj largely adopts the observational approach, only sparingly mixing in traditional on-camera interview sequences. We see the Jamaat case-workers do the leg work and build the trust of families seeking their assistance. Tellingly, it is not just women who petition the women’s Jamaats for help, but often the male relatives of women who have been battered and even killed.

Invoking is certainly eye-opening stuff. However, if ever there was a film that could have benefited from a little confrontational showboating, it would have been this one. Ultimately, viewers will feel justice is not being served in Tamil Nadu and may well suspect the situation is even worse than it appears in Dhanraj’s documentary. Still, capturing courage on-screen is always a worthy endeavor. Earning a moderate recommendation for those concerned about the state of women’s affairs in the Islamic world, Invoking Justice screens this coming Saturday (8/4) at the Chelsea Clearview, as part of the 2012 AAIFF.

LFM GRADE: B-/C+

Posted on August 3rd, 2012 at 11:35am.