September 13–20, 2001

movies

Screenpicks

by Sam Adams

Cinéma Vérité: Defining the Moment

(Premieres Mon., Sept. 17, 9 p.m.; Sat., Sept. 22, 2:30 p.m.; Wed., Sep. 26, 1:30 p.m., 11 p.m.; Sun., Sep. 30, 2:35 a.m., Sundance Channel)

Clear one thing up right at the start: the "moment" in the title of this 1999 documentary refers not to the birth or the duration of cinéma vérité, but to the process itself. As this voluminous overview makes clear, vérité is now enjoying its fifth decade in vogue, surpassing any attempt to pin it to a single set of historical circumstances. "Defining the moment" is a good description of what cinéma vérité filmmakers set out to accomplish; using new lightweight cameras and portable synch-sound equipment that pioneer Robert Drew persuaded Time-Life to spend $1 million developing, filmmakers like Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers, Karel Reisz and Frederick Wiseman (who calls cinéma vérité a "pompous and pretentious French term that doesn’t mean anything") staged an assault on the narration-driven instructional films which had passed for documentaries up to that point. As Drew says in an archival interview (one of many), he realized that documentaries had been "boring" up to that point because they were essentially lectures; he wanted to turn them into dramas. The new possibility of filming outside a studio without synchronized sound suddenly gave nonfiction filmmakers the chance to let a story appear to tell itself, to enter a situation with no predetermined structure and let events unfold, finding the story in the editing room instead of merely creating pictures to illustrate a script.

Director Peter Wintonick and producer/cameraman Francis Miquet (creators of Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media) have roped in a dazzling array of interview subjects, including all of the above and Barbara Kopple, Jean Rouch, Michel Brault, Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroiter besides. The film’s financing by Canada’s National Film Board leads to an over-representation of filmmakers from the Great White North, and the sheer number of interviewees inevitably results in a frustrating shortage of observations from any one subject. And the film’s closing minutes, which make a case for the enduring and widespread influence of the vérité style on the culture at large, aren’t particularly convincing: Barbara Kopple may have a few Homicide episodes under her belt, but that and the success of The Blair Witch Project don’t mitigate the fact that documentaries are still routinely ignored by all but specialty audiences. The best case for vérité’s success is made by Cinéma Vérité itself, albeit in reverse. Every time the film cuts away from an interview to an explanatory passage, the interest level drops. Too bad the filmmakers didn’t learn the lessons of their own film.

As it often does, Sundance Channel is using Cinéma Vérité as the springboard for a mini-festival of docs, including airings of the oft-seen Dont Look Back and Harlan County, U.S.A., Leacock and Joyce Chopra’s short A Happy Mother’s Day, Frederick Wiseman’s The Store and the rare showing of William Greaves’ 1968 Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which will be reviewed next week.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

($29.99 DVD)

Like Star Wars, Apocalypse Now and, oh, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, John Ford’s 1962 Western contains one of those lines that has worked its way into the culture, even if not everyone can identify the source. Valance is often referred to as an anti-Western along the lines of Ford’s The Searchers, but when Carleton Young’s cynically realistic newspaper editor proclaims, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," he’s actually justifying mythmaking, not deconstructing it. True, the film’s story unravels the legend on which the whole career of Jimmy Stewart’s Plains politico is based, but we’re confronted, finally, with the proposition that most people are better off not knowing the truth. (Picture Stewart as an idealistic young screenwriter and Young as a savvy movie producer and you’ve got the dynamic about right.) As the seasoned gunman who tries to show Stewart’s new arrival the tricks of surviving in the near-lawless town of Shinbone, John Wayne is less wooden than usual, but he and Stewart are so consciously used as archetypes — Wayne the borderline-anachronistic man of honor, Stewart the naive, headstrong face of the civilized future — that they’re rarely called upon to act. Though he’s similarly playing to type, Lee Marvin ravishes the part of the villainous Valance, who’d as soon whip a man to death as spit in his eye.

The Tailor of Panama

(24.95 DVD)

John Boorman’s wicked satire was all but buried on its theatrical release; despite career-high performances by Pierce Brosnan and Geoffrey Rush, the film’s black-hearted, sailor-mouthed anti-imperialism was probably not perceived as the easiest sell to American audiences, and it came and went without most people knowing it even existed. Which is a real shame, not just for the immense pleasure of seeing Brosnan torpedo his Bond image as a thoroughly corrupt British spy who mercilessly manipulates Rush’s Panamanian suit-cutter. (On his commentary track, Boorman calls Brosnan a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body.) Rush has tricks of his own up his finely cut sleeves; despite his claim to Savile Row training, he’s actually an ex-con who fled England to reinvent himself, meaning he’s as much of an ace liar as Brosnan. Boorman’s surprising decision to cast most of the film’s Latino parts with non-Hispanic actors (Jon Polito, Mark Margolis and even The General’s fair-haired Brendan Gleeson) actually makes a kind of sense, since the film is largely about how poorly non-Panamanians understand the country, even though they largely control its fate. Also included on the disc is Boorman’s original ending, which, despite reports that he’d been forced to change it, he explains was actually reworked at his insistence. In fact, the new ending manages to be even more cynical than the original, although it does lack the delight of Brosnan’s utterly profane death scene.