No other documentary this year balanced a complex relationship between subject and filmmaker with an equally complex investigation of the problematic of that very relationship while providing an unerring portrait of the white American lower class. Yes, Steve James may have spent a little too much in his portrait of the former “little brother” Stevie’s troubles letting us in on the documentary power dynamic (and making sure we know he’s aware of them) but it’s a give and take that needs reiteration from time to time, lest we forget that documentary is more than just following quirky individuals around with a camera. Sadly, its failure at the box office shows that even knee-jerk liberals have given up and now only pay lip service to interest in class issues.
—JR

back to top

Most Woefully Under-viewed Documentary in the “Year of the Documentary” Part 2:
An Injury to One

Summer saw the very limited release, here in New York, of the most exceptional documentary of the year: An Injury to One. Wilkerson’s monumental film, which documents the history of Butte, Montana, focusing on the death of union organizer Frank Little, murdered by Pinkerton detectives hired as strike-breakers, breaks the Gordian knot that had rendered so much of American filmmaking utterly immobile: the difficulty of locating a politically committed American cinema. While there have been isolated pockets of activity in the past few years (the superlative work of Jim McKay comes to mind), Hollywood has left the political to the ham-fisted likes of Oliver Stone. According to the industry, politics is what closes on Saturday night. The independent filmmaking world has been even more disconnected, relentlessly choosing Freud over Marx, time and again, as their guiding avatar, continually depicting the dysfunctional family without ever documenting the dysfunctional society. An Injury to One has found its way out of the box of boring, talking-head documentaries; no narration by Martin Sheen here, and no interviews with tweedy professors of labor history. An Injury to One is as auteurist as a film can get: written, directed, photographed, and narrated by Wilkerson, it is less a film than a direct broadcast from his skull, a mournful, empathetic, angry elegy to the lost political radicalism of early 20th century American life and a blueprint for a future American art that looks to reclaim the political.
—SA

back to top

Most Woefully Under-viewed Documentary in the “Year of the Documentary” Part 3:
Love and Diane

The three-minute plus standing ovation given to Jennifer Dworkin’s compelling inner city documentary at 2002's New York Film Festival seemed to signal some sort of imminent cultural and social revolution. As it turned out, it was just the usual white liberal guilt: when the film was received its minuscule release it was all but ignored in favor of Long Island pedophiles, spelling bee nailbiting, and fucking birds. A gorgeous, expansive epic tracking one family’s struggles with welfare, AIDS, drug rehabilitation, and public housing over the course of several intimate years, Love and Diane put right up there on the screen an image of what life is really like for the majority of working Americans. Honest and devastating, but ultimately uplifting in ways that fiction can only contrive.
—MK

back to top

Most Woefully Under-viewed Documentary in the “Year of the Documentary” Part 4:
Stone Reader

Stone Reader chronicles director Mark Moskowitz’s quest to resurrect an out-of-print novel, The Stones of Summer, and its hermetic author, Dow Mossman. What begins as the curious fiddling of a bibliophile becomes a campaign to get The Stones of Summer back in print (His efforts weren’t wasted—stacks of Mossman’s novel were on display this Christmas at Barnes & Noble, who brought out a new hardcover edition on their imprint). Moskowitz tracks down Mossman’s agent, teacher, and even pulls his manuscripts out of storage at the University of Iowa. He eventually finds the homely author, whose appearance shatters any romantic idea of the solitary writer the audience may have been carrying since first reading Salinger.

Ultimately, though, Moskowitz’s film is more about readers than writers. Stone Reader explores the triangular relationship between a book, its reader, and the other people who have shared the experience of reading it. At times, the film feels like an excuse for Moskowitz to chat with other book lovers about his favorite novels. His interlocutors include noted literary scholars John Seelye and Leslie Fiedler, as well as Richard Gottlieb, who edited Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. There’s something amusing about seeing these figures on screen. Their appearance seems incongruous, an unexpected invasion of the movie theater by a different set of geeks. One critic derided Stone Reader as “NPR + pictures,” failing to recognize this as a noteworthy quality. These are men passionate about literature—rare birds in America, outside of urban centers and university communities. When Stone Reader shows us the elderly Fiedler, Moskowitz and a friend picking nostalgically through a bookshelf, and the director’s son hunched over a favorite book, it’s asserting an alternative masculinity to beer-commercial machismo.
—Michael Garofalo

back to top

Most Woefully Under-viewed Documentary in the “Year of the Documentary”: Part 5
The Weather Underground

The Weather Underground is the story of The Weathermen (a name taken from the Dylan lyric, “Don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), a terrorist group that attacked the U.S. government from the late Sixties through the early Eighties. The Weathermen splintered from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), believing that violent measures were necessary to stop the Vietnam War (long before Al-Qaeda, The Weathermen bombed the Pentagon). The film creates the dilemma of whether or not to applaud these brilliant, handsome young people. After all, people died because of their actions, even if the cause was noble.

Thankfully, The Weather Underground never fully resolves the question, leaving the audience to ponder its implications. History tells us The Weathermen were unsuccessful, their story one of decline and disintegration. But in today’s political climate they can hardly be dismissed as insignificant. Dissent in this country suffers from neglect and disuse. Although the American protest tradition leads directly back to the nation’s founding, “radical” has always sounded foreign to American ears. We’ve largely reserved hatred, fear, and often the death penalty for some “other”—from Sacco and Vanzetti to the present-day equation Arab male equals terrorist—even as the likes of John Brown or The Weathermen have blasted into view. The Weather Underground puts an American face on terrorism, and not the bearded visage of John Walker Lindh. It represents terrorism not as an aberration of the Arab mind, but as something born of frustration and impotence, something that can happen anywhere the traditional avenues of dissent prove ineffectual.
—MG

back to top

Most Woefully Over-viewed Documentary in the “Year of the Documentary”:
Capturing the Friedmans

How pitiful for 2003 to have been heralded as Year of the Documentary by the mainstream press. While it’s encouraging to see heretofore unknown filmmakers receive recognition for toiling in less marketable realms, it was unfortunately primarily thanks to the worst tendencies of the documentary form: glorified National Geographic specials and prurient voyeurism. While there’s no denying the visual splendor of Winged Migration or the gutter punch of Capturing the Friedmans, there was ultimately nothing revelatory in either of them, besides the vulture-like audience gravitation towards them. Of course multiplexers (and critics) ignored the toil and uplift of Jennifer Dworkin’s Love and Diane in favor of Moviefone tycoon Andrew Jarecki’s intrusive “Jews on Parade” audience baiter. While Jarecki obviously never could have intentionally succumbed to the pitfalls of typecasting, the widespread acceptance indicates that his film plays directly into the fantasies and fears directed toward traditional Jewish stereotypes —whiny Lawn-Guy-Land hausfrau, nattering beetle-browed jokester son, and of course, child-devouring patriarch. Yes, these people are real; but let’s not mistake this “investigation” as anything other than entertainment. And what does most mainstream-accepted entertainment do best but pacify its audience with long-hardened, unchallenged tropes?
—MK

back to top