There’s a moment late in The Chair (1962), part of DOC NYC’s essential tribute to Ricky Leacock, when it becomes apparent that you’re watching great art, not merely a work of great artistry. After forty-five or so minutes of unblinking, “fly-on-the-wall,” tension-building reportage that captures a daring capital punishment appeal in intimate detail, the filmmakers jolt the audience with an unexpected blast of subjectivity. The courtroom arguments have been completed and the principals involved wait for the governor’s decision to either commute the death sentence of one Paul Crump on the basis of his “rehabilitation,” or let it stand. Prior to this moment, the film has hewn closely to the perspectives of its main characters: a young defense lawyer; his opponent from the district attorney’s office; in limited moments, Crump himself. But as the wait begins, the film cuts away from the “as-it-happens” of direct cinema to juxtapose images of each character passing the time. The defense lawyer bowls, the prosecutor golfs, Crump waits pensively. Yet, we’ve seen all of these shots before at different points in the film’s chronology. The brief sequence is cleverly manufactured to heighten suspense; Leacock and company have shown us an event as it happened, yes, but here reveal the truth of all documentary practice: this “as-it-happens” is wholly filtered and reconstructed by filmmakers.
Excited about the opportunity to dive into the history of this thing we call documentary, I’ve been gorging on Leacock throughout the first half of the second annual DOC NYC festival. The Chair was paired with the short The Children Were Watching (1961) which puts viewers in the thick of clashes over school integration in New Orleans and offers the exhilarating, stomach-churning feeling of watching history unfold. That uncanny sense carries over into Crisis, another look at the battles over integration, this time carried out on a national scale. Children focused on average folks who would be well lost to history were it not for the filmmakers’ cameras, but the characters in Crisis are no less than JFK, RFK and intractable Alabama Governor George Wallace, who’s vowed to physically block the entrance of two black students to the University of Alabama. It’s another expertly crafted, suspenseful piece of work, but feels most valuable for the decidedly non-historic moments it captures: Bobbie Kennedy having trouble with his multiple office phones; Wallace playing a quick game of catch with a neighborhood boy; Jack Kennedy looking honestly flustered in the face of the White House’s limited options for defusing the crisis.
Crisis was paired with Primary (1960), another medium-length film that followed JFK and Hubert Humphrey as they battled to win a then-crucial, but now-forgotten Wisconsin primary election. Elections, as it happens, look surprisingly similar through the decades—one could easily have substituted in Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. My look at Leacock’s work was rounded out by Louisiana Story, his earlier collaboration with Roger Flaherty. Watching this 1948 film, with so different an intensity from the direct cinema pieces he produced a decade later, brought its own shock of recognition—the film’s quiet poetry, naturalism and casual blending of the scripted and everyday brought to mind contemporary heterodox filmmaking, most especially the superlative Alamar (2010). There are surely myriad examples of this kind of hybridized work littered throughout the history that separates these two films (Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer springs to mind), but, for a second it felt like the later film picked up a thread left untouched and dusty for half a century. I’ll catch up with Leacock’s hi-8 video diary Les Oeufs a la coque de Richard Leacock in my next dispatch.
**
It wouldn’t be a documentary festival without a missive from the mind of Werner Herzog; DOC NYC has two, or, well, one-and-a-half. Into the Abyss, which investigates a triple homicide in Texas not to prove innocence or guilt or make a strong case for or against capital punishment (it does do some of these things, but polemics are not its main goal), but to unpack the interactions of poverty, upbringing and violence in a particular corner of Texas. It becomes an indictment of an America where a certain strata seems all but destined for life in prison, a look at society running itself aground. It’s also a great chance to remind oneself of Herzog’s considerable filmmaking chops. Too long have his gifts for the off-kilter observation and his easy, ingratiating manner with interview subjects been subsumed by his Wacky Uncle Werner persona in a string of softball natured-focused works. Films like Encounters at the End of the World, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the vastly over-esteemed Grizzly Man and The White Diamond (the list could go on), all clearly express the Herzog-ian worldview, but, looking back over them, for all their successes, also feel a bit of a piece. After Into the Abyss, seeing Herzog slip easily back into this mode with Happy People: A Year In the Taiga, his re-mix of Russian filmmaker Dmitry Vasyukov’s four-hour documentary about Siberian trappers, was a bit of a letdown. It features lovely footage, a great new score, compelling characters, and an all-too-expected voiceover reiterating well-worn Werner themes. It left me longing to feel the rush of enthusiasm for the material the Herzog described in his impassioned introduction.
Last, but certainly not least, My Father Evgeni, by Russian emigre Andrei Zagdansky. It’s a simple tale of a father and son made up of few elements: archival footage tracing the rise and fall of the Soviet state; lushly photographed images of New York, present-day Kiev and an abandoned film studio; family video; some letters from father to son read aloud that push the narrative along. These pieces are woven into a pleasurably drifting biographical tale that spans decades in the lives of Evgeni and Andrei. It’s supremely personal but thankfully never maudlin. I especially appreciated how Zagdansky presents each new piece of newsreel, and in voiceover offers commentary: “Here, I was X years old.” The filmmaker is not in the frame, these aren’t home movies, at least not exactly. His choice of syntax highlights the complicated familial relationship to images (both the deceased father and son were filmmakers) and history (and images and history to each other) that runs throughout the film. Its low-key aesthetics are decidedly unfashionable, but I enjoyed its reverie-inducing spell all the more for it.
