For over two decades, socially conscious documentary, event cinema and a whole lot of partying coalesce annually at Steel City’s Sheffield Doc/Fest. A showcase for the coming year’s most important documentaries (The Stuart Hall Project, Blackfish and Joshua Oppenhiemer’s remarkable The Act of Killing all screened at last year’s festival), Sheffield Doc/Fest sets the tone for factual film programming here in the UK. Editor Simran Hans reports with her highlights.
Documentary is a populist format; a way of communicating often complex issues in accessible, consumable ways. Though some of the films on show at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2014 may seem conventional in their approach, much of this year’s selection is surprisingly subversive – particularly in its celebration of intellectual pursuits.
In Steve James’ (Hoop Dreams) Life Itself, a documentary about late American film critic Roger Ebert, popular culture is examined through an intellectual lens. Handled with a lightness of touch and suffused with the paternal warmth that Ebert’s writing exuded, James cements his central character as an authoritative liberal and learned moralist. Ebert was famously popular with celebrities, journalists and everymen alike; perhaps this is because his version of criticism embodied the liberal American dream – to not only write, but to publish.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism and a strident civil rights activist, Ebert’s politics filtered into his writing, occasionally leaving him unable to untangle his personal moral compass from the aesthetics of film criticism (see his review of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet). James spends time talking to those who knew Ebert as a young man, celebrating rather than indicting the injection of the personal that often made Ebert’s writing richer and more relatable than that of his contemporaries. The film attempts to close the gap between the ‘serious’ film criticism of periodicals like Film Comment, and the gentle populism of his TV show Ebert and Siskel by emphasising Ebert’s journalistic approach and cult credentials (Ebert wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). By refusing to see rigorous criticism and Hollywood populism as binaries, James’ film, like Ebert himself, occupies a comfortable middle ground.
More radical celebrations of criticism also appeared throughout the Doc/Fest programme, with key cultural figures in the Western world of 20th century philosophy and ideas taking centre stage in Regarding Susan Sontag, The New York Review of Books: A 50 Year Argument and Concerning Violence, a dramatisation of Frantz Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’. Given that longform nonfiction is becoming less and less prevalent as it competes with the bite-sized fragments of philosophy and activism propagated by modern-day social media platforms, it feels revolutionary to see these particular texts championed. In The New York Review of Books: A 50 Year Argument (dir. Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi), Scorsese discusses his fears that the longform essay is already a thing of the past, setting up the film as a curative for his teenage daughter’s generation. “Our only truth is narrative truth,” reads neurologist and NYRB contributor Oliver Sacks’ opening quote — a documentarian sentiment that exists as a powerful statement about the importance of correctives. Composed of archive footage of its estimable writers (a beautifully succinct clip of James Baldwin on racism cuts to the core of the NYRB’s ethos) and talking heads that include an ageing, acid-tongued Joan Didion, still as sharp as she ever was, the film also uses still portraits to illustrate its contributors. However, though the NYRB is undoubtedly a leftist publication, Scorsese and Tedeschi do little to corroborate its liberal credentials. Bizarrely, they use the apolitical Occupy Wall Street movement to position the journal in present day literary culture, an inefficient framing device that attempts to connect the review with human rights in only the broadest of senses. By distancing itself from the journal’s proud liberalism, the film never quite ends up feeling as revolutionary as the publication it claims to celebrate. Still, though Scorsese and Tedeschi keep their politics at arm’s length, they certainly hold these texts close to their hearts – and it is thrilling to see this ‘sensuous’ world of ideas depicted onscreen.
Equally thrilling is Concerning Violence, Goran Olsson’s follow up to The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. Taking key passages from Fanon’s original text and laying the words atop archive war footage in clean white font, Olsson’s film is also a ‘teaching text’ A self-proclaimed act of ‘decolonisation’, the film opens with a sophisticated preface by postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who situates this challenging text in a contemporary context, pointing out the way its attitudes towards women might jar with new readers. This bracing, skilfully constructed archive film explores the central conceit that ‘colonialism is violence in its natural state.’ Indeed, violence is rife as Olsson draws images from the Swedish National Archives of mine workers striking in Liberia to the Mozambique Liberation Front. These images are, at times, nauseatingly graphic, with mutilated children and babies with amputated limbs featuring in one of the film’s nine chapters. However, it is the subtly smug remove with which a pair of Swedish immigrants discuss their African subjects’ need for a church over a school or hospital that slices to the marrow. Those who are familiar with Fanon’s work will be aware of its dense nature and yet Ms. Lauryn Hill’s (of Fugees fame) oral delivery ensures that his unembellished prose has never been clearer – or more cutting.
A less satisfying resurrection of mid-century liberal intelligentsia is Nancy Kates’ Regarding Susan Sontag. The film provides a comprehensive enough overview of the cultural critic’s life and work – although Kates is altogether more interested in the salty details of Sontag’s sexual exploits. Philosopher, feminist and avant-garde filmmaker, Sontag’s left-of-centre sentiments are very much aligned with those of The New York Review of Books: A 50 Year Argument’s (indeed, she was a prolific contributor). However, while Sontag was and is a gay icon – her essay ‘On Camp’ being perhaps her best known piece of work – the film suffers from spending too much time trying to out an increasingly private woman who chose not to disclose her sexual preferences.
Finally, the cerebral pursuit of astronomy is at the centre of Berit Madsen’s glossy, feel-good film Sepideh. A serious, intelligent 16 year-old from Iran’s Fars province, Sepideh is intensely passionate about the astronomy, inspired by her idols Anousheh Ansari (the first Iranian to travel to space), her late father and Einstein. An unconventional hobby even in the most open-minded of communities, her dreams of stargazing are quickly dashed by both an unsupportive uncle is and the gatekeepers of a coveted scholarship. Encouraged only by her astronomy tutor, a progressive surrogate father-figure who urges her “not to marry before [her] life has peaked”, she must adopt a single-minded approach to success. However, at times, her polished narration feels a little too articulate to be wholly believable; in an overly neat plot twist, Sepideh successfully makes contact with Ansari, who pledges to help her achieve her goals. It’s difficult though, to remain cynical in the gloriously hopeful face of the film’s eponymous heroine, who closes out the film by declaring that “Nobody can stand in my way.”
