Hot Docs

TAKE ONE, Sept-Dec, 2003 by Lindsay Gibb

DURING THE BIG SPRING SARS scare of 2003, the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival decided to push on despite cancellations from foreign filmmakers and distributors. Nevertheless, this year's box-office sales had doubled last year's figures before the festival had even unspooled a single film. Hmmm... maybe that would make a good documentary subject for next year; however, finding an interesting subject is only part of the filmmaking process. Some stories that may not look good on paper are magnificent on screen when the filmmaker is able to inject some style into the filming of an otherwise tedious tale. This year there were many unconventional documentaries at Hot Docs, some more worth), than others.

One film that attracted a good deal of praise was Stefan Nadelman's Terminal Bar. The short, experimental, digital video utilized photos from the filmmaker's father's collection to tell the story, of the bar he (the father) used to run and the patrons who came in and out of his life. The stories, told through the elder Nadelman's voice-overs, reflect his memories of each photo. We see the evolution of characters from young, bright-eyed regulars to beat-up-looking old men. The way the film is crafted is much more than just a slide show or PowerPoint presentation. Photos float across the screen, break into pieces and come together to form new faces and new points in time.

Victor Kossakovsky's Hush!, a more extreme case of visual storytelling, is an almost silent picture shot from the point of view of an apartment window in St. Petersburg, Russia. There are no voice-overs and no explanations, just an 86-minute edit of a year in the life of the street outside the filmmaker's apartment. Comedy is found in little things such as the street cleaners sweeping dust around the streets, and hardly achieving any effect at all. The ridiculous nature of everyday things parallels with the beauty of other normal occurrences: rain bubbles in puddles, a pigeon ruffles its feathers on the window ledge and lovers playfully push each other around until they fall into a huge puddle in the middle of the road.

A second experiment in documentary narrative was screened before Jonathan Karsh's My Flesh and Blood, which was the opening night gala. Judging by the description of Jay Rosenblatt's I Used To Be a Filmmaker in the program notes, it could have been a sappy ode to his baby girl, Ella, but it turned out to be a funny play on the technical side of filmmaking as told through images of the filmmaker raising baby. The words "Fade Out" set up a shot of the crying child slowly weakening as she drifts into sleep, "Foreshadowing" means little Ella is discovering her shadow on the fridge door and "Flashback" is Ella looking reflective, as the camera fades into her ultrasound video and back to the present.

Apart from being a film of a father and daughter with little sentimentality involved, I Used To Be a Filmmaker was also one of the rare cases of the filmmaker appearing as a character in his own movie who wasn't self-centred. Unfortunately, there were a number of films where the appearance of the filmmaker was distracting. John Haslett Cuff's use of himself in Crimes of the Heart, while not extraneous, is definitely self-centred. In fact, the entire film is really just about him and why he sabotages his relationships with women. Though slightly annoying, at least Crimes of the Heart doesn't profess to be anything but a film about an unapologetic narcissis. The worst case of the visible documentarian is where the filmmaker keeps popping up when the film is supposed to be about something else. Claudia Heuermann's A Bookshelf on Top of the Sky is an example of an otherwise engrossing film about the fascinating and talented jazz musician John Zorn. But Heuermann constantly interrupts her film by talking about her ever-changing plans to make the movie we are watching. In a film about an interesting subject, the tribulations of the filmmaker herself pale in comparison.

Nick Broomfield, who was honoured with a retrospective and Outstanding Achievement Award, has based his career as a documentarian on the use of himself as a character in his films. Although his presence usually adds humour, his style can be disruptive. In Biggie and Tupac, his latest effort, the interview with Suge Knight, the rumoured conspirator in the death of rap stars Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, benefits from Broomfield's voice-overs about how scared his cameraman was to be in the presence of this dangerous founder of the Death Row recording label. In fact, without this insertion, the scene would have simply been Knight's "message to the kids." He refused to talk about anything relevant to the point of the documentary. But despite the moments when Broomfield's presence seemed necessary, there were too many scenes of him driving around in his car and talking to the camera about how his documentary is coming along. His 1984 film Chicken Ranch is better at telling its story of the women who work at a legal, drive-in brothel in Nevada. We don't see or hear from Broomfield until the subjects of the documentary make him a character, and by then it's the end of the film.