Keyframe Anthology - Global Peace Film Festival Edition by Fandor

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MANAKAMANA Mergings Directed by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, Manakamana is a movie filled with dizzying paradoxes. The straightforward setup involves a series of eleven uninterrupted shots filmed from the interior of a cable car traversing a Nepalese mountainscape. It’s a premise that’s simple but not simplistic. It is pleasurably gentle and quiet in tone and yet visually resplendent; a diverse procession of humble real life characters populate its foreground while a verdant, rolling mountains cape rolls majestically behind them. —Kevin B. Lee “Manakamana is simple in conception, but the reactions it evokes in viewers will be complex and multifaceted.” —Los Angeles Times

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The Art of Documentary: Albert Maysles

Documentary Unbound: LEVIATHAN

Video: Steadicam Money Shots in RIVERS AND TIDES

STORIES WE TELL with Sarah Polley

Love, Conquering: CHRIS AND DON: A LOVE STORY

Ross McElwee and the Man Behind the Man Behind the Camera

The Art of Filmmaking: Les Blank

Sweet Returns in the Search for ‘Sugar Man’

Ten Things Gleaned from Agnes Varda’s THE GLEANERS AND I

Rewind: Joe Berlinger’s CRUDE

The Art of Filmmaking: Errol Morris

By Jonathan Marlow

By Max Goldberg

By Kevin B. Lee

By Michael Fox

By Michael Guillén

By Robert Avila

By Jonathan Marlow

By Jesse Ataide

By Susan Gerhard

By Jonathan Marlow

FROM EDITOR-IN-CHIEF SUSAN GERHARD

“Truth” is, indeed, stranger than fiction— and purveyors of the documentary form are finding increasingly exciting ways to turn true stories, be they personal histories, actual investigations or longform observations, into our most fascinating films. There is no handbook for the making of documentary films, a category that was once as easy to file as it was to dismiss: “documentary” filmmakers are folding in as much if not more innovative craft into their pieces as their siblings on the fiction side. And, in fact, many of our favorite filmmakers, from Werner Herzog to Sarah Polley, live on both sides of the contested fact-andfiction divide. Over the past few years, Keyframe has been pleased to speak with and learn from the best in nonfiction filmmaking. What we share with you here represents a tiny slice of the action.

The Art of Documentary: Albert Maysles ‘Closeness with humanity is lacking in so much of the media. Love—true love—is almost not there at all.’ BY J O N AT H A N M A R LO W

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of documentary films will have heard the name “Maysles” at some point. Albert Maysles and his brother David are responsible for several of the best—and most widely seen—documentaries ever created. Their working relationship was rather ideal: Albert was the cinematographer and David recorded the sound. After his brother’s passing in 1987, Albert Maysles has continued with his own extraordinary projects (often in association with a rotating cast of collaborators) as well as shooting for numerous other filmmakers. Thanks to some miraculous scheduling by Maysles Films’ Distribution Manager Sylvia Savadjian, I ventured up to Harlem during a recent visit to New York to speak with Albert Maysles at the Maysles Documentary Center office (in the building adjacent to the Maysles Cinema). If this all suggests a deep association with the creation and presentation of great documentaries, it should. Jonathan Marlow Originally, the notion was to talk with you when you ventured my direction after a cross-country train trip. That seems to have been postponed. 3

Above Albert and David Maysles on the shoot for Grey Gardens (1976) with subjects “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Beal. Read the full article on Keyframe Watch it now on Fandor: Meet Marlon Brando Fandor co-founder and Chief Content Officer Jonathan Marlow has been affiliated with numerous film exhibition institutions, film festivals and film distribution companies. He is also known to host occasional screenings throughout the world showcasing remarkable films that are generally unavailable elsewhere.

Albert Maysles It has been three months now and we’re still asking for permission [from Amtrak]. We figured and submitted that we needed twenty days but all they want to give us is seven. We cannot make the film in seven days. They think in terms of Hollywood films. Perhaps they don’t know what a documentary is. Marlow Evidently not. Maysles They don’t understand the need for spontaneity. We don’t use lights. It’s a small crew. What is also weird is that thirty years ago I started to make a film on trains. We got permission the same day! The guy that gave me permission is not working there anymore, unfortunately. Marlow This is a project that you and your brother David worked on together? Maysles Yes, briefly. All trains in half-a-dozen countries. Just walking through the train filming people until I find someone. I already have a section of the film In Transit which you can see on the Maysles Films website. It is about a woman who right away told me why she was on It is celebrities. It is war rather than peace. Conflict rather than solving problems...How can we know what it is to be poor without actually being with people who are poor? ALBERT MAYSLES

the train as I’m filming. When she was three years old, she lost contact with her mother. She has never seen her mother since. She is now twenty-six with two kids, on the train to see her mother for the first time. Why? Because she had just got a call from a woman in Philadelphia [who said], ‘I’m your mother. Get on the next train.’ Luckily, I just happened by. I filmed the whole get-together. They’re hugging each other and finally the mother turns to me and says, ‘Isn’t she gorgeous?’ Marlow This was all by chance? Maysles Yes. It is also the kind of closeness with humanity that is lacking in so much of the media. It is celebrities. It is war rather than peace. Conflict rather than solving problems. Love—true love—is almost not there at all. That is the element that I put into all of my filming: love and understanding. It generates a feeling in the viewer of what is actually going on in the lives of people. Their experience becomes the experience of the viewer. Given the right kinds of situations, it can be of great benefit and revelation. How can we know what it is to be poor without actually being with people who are poor? Being in their home. Seeing what goes on without prejudicing things. Your subjects can see it in your eyes right from the first moment. The presence of the camera is not really a problem because people would rather be filmed anyway. You are hoping that they are always sharing that experience. Giving that person the kind of attention that everyone should get (but few of us do get).

Marlow To what extent does that relate to your pre‑filmmaking experience? You did not initially intend to be a documentary filmmaker. Maysles Right. I always had this background at home where my mother used to say, ‘Don’t squint at everybody.’ That is very helpful advice. I have never had any complaints from anyone I have filmed after they’ve seen the film. And I’ve done a lot of filming! To answer your question, I became a psychologist. That, I am sure, is helpful in being capable of understanding what is going on and letting things happen. Having an open mind. I do not use narration. I do not have to fall back on narration because it is already in the material. The film tells its own story. The viewer can make up their mind from feeling that they are actually there. In fact, it is even better than being there because if the cameraperson has a poetic sensibility, he or she is much more in tune with what is going on than the average person. The viewer benefits from that sensibility.

Anatomy of the Filmmaker by Sarah Ginsburg, courtesy of the artist and the Non-Fiction Cartel, a working collaborative whose purpose is to support, create and enhance short form, documentary media making in the New England area.

Documentary Unbound Leviathan breaks the mold. BY MAX GOLDBERG

When asked about their decision to film much of Leviathan using SLRs and GoPros, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel explained that they lost many of their larger cameras to the sea. One doesn’t doubt it after seeing the film, but this account elides their broader rejection of the traditional tools of the trade: not only tripods, but narration, exposition, the entire edifice of perspective. Embodiment is a first principle for much of the work produced out of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (Castaing-Taylor is the SEL’s Director), but Leviathan goes considerably further in treating experience as a kind of reckoning. The film moves with the force of a great storm. Castaing-Taylor and Paravel collected material off the coast of New Bedford, “the very waters where Melville’s Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick.” It doesn’t seem just to say that Leviathan documents industrial fishing when the subject is so manifestly overpowering. Perhaps better to say it derives from industrial fishing—or that it places itself in industrial fishing’s devouring path. We watch the men onboard doing repetitive labor; fish in their death throes; and the ship itself as an organism, ingesting fantastic loads of sea-life and depositing the bloody remainder back to the sea (we swim along thanks to those GoPros). While lacking interviews or voiceover, the danger of the environment—to body and soul—is utterly palpable.

Read the full article on Keyframe Watch it now on Fandor: Leviathan Max Goldberg is a film critic and writer who recently completed a project processing the films and personal papers of Warren Sonbert at the Harvard Film Archive.

Before anything else, we hear the clamor of metal and water. An image emerges in the boundless blackness of the sea. The ship’s deck is a slop of orange, green and more blacks; we glimpse a patch of blue dawn in the distance, but not where we expect. A taut chain drags out from the darkness—a kind of birth, perhaps. Inscrutable orders are barked out from the area behind the camera. The crisis of perception is visceral, nothing like the theoretical gambits one typically associates with critical ethnography. Of course it’s business as usual for the New England fishermen, who have spent the last several years battling for federal disaster relief. A retired Coast Guard officer stood up after a screening at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and applauded the film’s realism. I don’t think he wasn’t talking about the formal elements, but something deeper, something to do with extremes. “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear/ element bearable to no mortal,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop in “At the Fishhouses,” another work invested in the sea’s sublime “indifference.”

Video: Steadicam Money Shots in Rivers & Tides Benefiting from Steadicam shots in a film about artist Andy Goldsworthy’s work, Rivers and Tides is more than just a documentary. It is ‘cinema.’ BY KEVIN B. LEE

It may seem peculiar to say that the most interesting thing about a documentary is its use of Steadicam shots, though this probably reflects more on my personal viewing tendencies than the overall qualities of the film in question. As soothing to watch as it is stimulating to reflect upon, Rivers and Tides is a portrait of British environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy, who creates time-sensitive installations from materials taken from nature: stone and and wood, leaves and water. Director Thomas Riedelsheimer balances sequences of Goldsworthy diligently at work with his life in his home village of Penport in Scotland, while giving Goldsworthy ample room in the soundtrack to share his thoughts on how he taps into the ephemeral creative energies found in nature, crafted with the help of time and the elements. All of this makes the film one of the more enjoyable films about art in recent memory.

See Kevin B. Lee’s video essay on Keyframe Watch it now on Fandor: Rivers and Tides Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, critic and programmer with a growing collection of critical work in the video essay format.

And yet, I keep thinking about those Steadicam shots. They take up about eleven minutes, or one eighth of the film’s runtime, and are scattered throughout the film as cinematic punctuation marks. These moments take the world of the film into a distinctly different dimension from the more humble, matter-of-fact footage of Goldsworthy at work or enjoying time with family and neighbors. These kinds of shots stand out so much in this movie that they beg the question of what they are doing in the film. There are many ways to look at these shots; a term that applies in multiple ways to describe them are “money shots.” Money, in that they are almost certainly among the more expensive shots in the production, given the costs of renting or acquiring Steadicam equipment (there’s also one helicopter shot that operates like an elevated Steadicam, gliding across a lengthy Goldsworthy installation along a highway). They are also “money” in that there’s a kind of purchase, an acquiring of status. These shots indicate that the film is more than just a documentary, it is “cinema,” at least in the sense familiar to those who love the likes of Tarkovsky or Malick, whom these shots clearly emulate. But their intermittent and not-entirelyseamless integration in the overall film can’t help but bring up an inadvertent comparison between one type of image and another: the raw and the cooked, and whether and how the two might co-exist in one film.

Stories We Tell with Sarah Polley A deep dive into family history nets much more than a ‘home movie.’ BY MICHAEL FOX

In a very real sense, the Canadian actress and director Sarah Polley has grown up in public. The daughter of actors, she began her career as a child, achieving prominence in the television series Road to Avonlea before she reached her teens. Her sensitive, strong performance was crucial to Atom Egoyan’s masterpiece, The Sweet Hereafter (1997), and led to roles in films by David Cronenberg (eXistenZ), Doug Liman (Go), Michael Winterbottom (The Claim), Hal Hartley (No Such Thing) and Isabel Coixet (My Life Without Me). Her next screen appearance is a pivotal part opposite James Franco in Every Thing Will Be Fine, Wim Wenders’ parable of guilt and forgiveness shooting later this year. Polley started directing short films in the late nineties and, while still in her twenties, adapted Alice Munro’s short story about an elderly couple grappling with the effects of Alzheimer’s for her beautiful and unexpected feature debut, Away from Her (2006). She followed with another 13

Read the full article on Keyframe Michael Fox is a film critic and journalist who has contributed to more than fifty regional and national publications since 1987, including Variety and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is a member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.

evocative exploration of the nuances of marriage, Take this Waltz (2011), starring Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen. Her fascination with the ups and downs of long-term relationships is decidedly unusual for a young filmmaker, and provides all the evidence one needs to recognize that there are darn few promising directors as mature, serious and playful as Sarah Polley. It derives from her parents’ marriage, we discern from her amusing, thoughtful, wise and poignant first-person documentary, Stories We Tell, and her mother’s death from cancer just days after Sarah turned 11. As you might glean from its title, Stories We Tell is as much about memory, family myths and the art and practice of documentary in the 21st Century as it is about the curious saga of the Polley clan. The marvelously creative and uncommonly smart film opens May 10, 2013 in New York, and in numerous cities in the coming weeks. We met the gargantuan talent and diminutive person that is Sarah Polley on an unseasonably warm late-April day after Stories We Tell screened in the San Francisco International Film Festival. Michael Fox Do you draw a distinction between narrative and documentary, or is the line blurred? Or do you just think in terms of ‘movies?’ Sarah Polley I think I draw a distinction generally. I would certainly generally choose to see a documentary before I would see a narrative fictional film. I think I’m generally just a bigger fan of the medium of documentary. I think I was a lot more frightened to make a documentary than I would have been to make a narrative fictional film because I love documentary so much, it’s a lot more intimidating for me.

Above Filmmaker Sarah Polley

Fox Because you hold documentary to a higher social purpose? Polley I just enjoy them more. The truth is I could watch a terrible documentary and still be entertained for two hours, whereas if a film is fictional and bad I feel like I want to pull my fingernails out. (Laughs.) Fox Why do you think you can watch a bad documentary? Polley There are still real people in it, and I find real people a lot more fascinating than actors. Fox But I doubt somehow that you can watch reality TV. Polley I don’t, because it feels exploitative generally and manipulative, and not actually like we’re just watching people in their lives. It feels much more of a construct. Fox You know the critic David Thomson? Polley Very well, yeah. Fox We were talking last year when his latest book, The Big Screen, was published, and I brought up documentary and he said, ‘I just think of documentary as another genre of film, one in which they cast nonprofessionals.’ Just another form of entertainment. Polley Yeah. I don’t necessarily dispute that. I just like it more than the other kinds of [filmmaking].

Love, Conquering Old horse, young cat: a conversation with Don Bachardy of Chris and Don: A Love Story. BY MICHAEL GUILLÉN

Lost in the hubbub surrounding the California Supreme Court’s 2008 decision affirming gay marriage was reflection on the countless couples of decades past who had committed themselves without official sanction. The intergenerational partnership of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy was perhaps one of the most infamous of those hard-fought-for partnerships. Their lifelong relationship is affectionately documented in Chris & Don: A Love Story, which Variety’s Robert Koehler described as “focusing on the texture and sweetness of a particularly beguiling real-life gay love saga.” At The House Next Door, Keith Ulrich— fortunate to have been one of Bachardy’s models—further discerned that the film’s “overall sense” is “of an ultimately unbreakable love’s consecration.” Reactions to the couple were not, as one can imagine, universally positive. The otherwise enlightened Dr. Evelyn Hooker—Isherwood’s landlord at the time he met Bachardy—expressed 16

Read the full article on Keyframe Watch it now on Fandor: Chris and Don: A Love Story Michael Guillén is a film critic and enthusiast whose work can be found in a variety of publications, including his own, theeveningclass. blogspot.com/ and who travels between Idaho, California and many other locations.

disapproval of their relationship, and evicted them from their beloved garden cottage. (So much for her scientific praise for the social adjustment of self-identified homosexuals.) And Joseph Cotten—who the documentary suggests would never dream of confronting Isherwood directly—was fond of singling Bachardy out at parties to dispense vitriol about “half-men.” But reviewers of Tina Mascara and Guido Santi‘s affectionate documentary Chris & Don: A Love Story have responded warmly to the remarkable relationship it reveals. The documentary is composed of an astonishing wealth of home movie footage and archival photography; interviews with Leslie Caron, John Boorman “and even Miss Liza herself” (as Rod Armstrong understated it at the film’s San Francisco International screening); and tender and insightful animated sequences where Isherwood and Bachardy’s animal alter-egos—an old horse and a young cat, respectively—reveal the complicated and nuanced dynamic of their love for one another. The film’s final animated sequence confirms the necessary belief that love conquers death. Michael Guillén What was it in you that encouraged you to open up to share your love story?

I’ve been so fortunate to meet all the people I’ve met. It was all through Chris. It was he who allowed me, urged me, and pointed the way to my vocation. DON BACHARDY Don Bachardy I do feel an obligation—since I’ve had such a lucky life with so much happiness in it—I do feel an obligation to share that with others. Why horde it all and keep it all for myself? Those years with Chris were fantastically satisfying for me and I like sharing my success with others, encouraging them to believe that, yes, they can have a wonderful, happy relationship in their lives maybe. Guillén When I was young and in my twenties and had first moved to San Francisco, your relationship with Chris—which was already well-publicized at the time—was an inspirational model for me. Bachardy I also feel an obligation to point out that Chris and I had our hurdles too. It wasn’t all roses and happy talk. There were periods of dissatisfaction. I wanted to counter the tendency to glorify and sentimentalize our relationship because I feel that—if people realize that it wasn’t all roses for Chris and me, that we really had to work at making our relationship last—that’s more encouraging. When young people hear that we had our struggles, they too shouldn’t be discouraged if they’re having struggles in their own relationships.

Guillén There’s this curious alchemy that occurs within a young person when they—at first— admire others from a distance before they finally ‘cook’ the elements within themselves, mature, and step forward to meet others on equal standing. That, in itself, is maturation; but, as an artist, you took it further. You created significant portraits in a signature style. You’ve pretty much drawn just about everybody who’s been anybody. Bachardy I’ve been so fortunate to meet all the people I’ve met. It was all through Chris. It was he who allowed me, urged me, and pointed the way to my vocation. Once I discovered it, he was inexhaustible in his efforts to find the kind of acceptance for me that would encourage me and that proved so helpful in securing commissions. As a portrait artist, you’re obligated to show pictures of people who are recognizable. I can do a perfectly good likeness of my nextdoor neighbor but how many people are going to be able to appreciate that as a good likeness? A portrait artist has to find well-known subjects. Chris was so helpful in that pursuit.

Ross McElwee and the Man Behind the Man Behind the Camera Talking to self-reflexive documentarian par excellence Ross McElwee. BY ROBERT AVILA

With his 1986 feature, Sherman’s March, Ross McElwee became an internationally recognized filmmaker. He also helped establish a still emerging genre of American filmmaking: the personal documentary. For McElwee, and Sherman’s March, the personal documentary takes over where the “objective” documentary collapses. That is to say, with wry, understated humor and quirky earnestness, Sherman’s March begins by conceding defeat: For reasons overtly personal but subtly social, McElwee—our narrator-protagonist—abandons his earlier conventional documentary project to treat General William Tecumseh Sherman’s notorious campaign of total war against the Confederate South. Sherman’s March instead places the filmmaker at the center of its far more desultory action, as he traipses around his native South, intermittently tracking a documentary subject gone awry while pursuing a series of romantic flirtations and affairs with various Southern women. This may sound like mere solipsism, but the personal turn becomes, in this and other McElwee

Read the full article on Keyframe Watch it now on Fandor: Sherman’s March and Photographic Memory Robert Avila is a freelance writer and publishes a theater column in the San Francisco Bay Guardian three times a month. He also regularly contributes to other publications, reviewing film, literature, music, dance, and non-fiction.

films, a vehicle for wider investigations, including an inquiry into the very nature and contours of the South as a geographical, social, political, historical, even ideological subject. This is indeed a personal matter to the filmmaker, long since a transplant to the Boston area, where he was trained as a filmmaker by the likes of “direct cinema” pioneers Ed Pincus and Richard Leacock at MIT’s Film Section, and has taught filmmaking at Harvard since 1986. Indeed, seven full-length personal documentaries later, McElwee continues to mine the rich (personal and public) legacy of the past and the contradictions of the present, most recently in 2012’s Photographic Memory. In March, McElwee was in Berkeley to attend a retrospective at the University of California’s Pacific Film Archive. He sat down to speak for an hour or so before the first day’s program, which included work from Harvard colleague Robb Moss (Riverdogs) and a discussion with film scholar Scott MacDonald, whose latest book, American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn (UC Press, 2013), deals extensively with both filmmakers. As McElwee explains below, the conceit of Sherman’s March in fact advanced an aesthetic taking shape already in his previous short films, especially Backyard (1984). Robert Avila Are you doing a lot of retrospectives these days? Do you find yourself increasingly being studied in that way? Ross McElwee Yeah, it’s a little frightening sometimes. But I’ve had a bunch of retrospectives in the recent past—well, since Photographic Memory came out. I think there’ve been half a dozen, in Europe and here. Like it or not, it forces you to look back on your work. And, with my work, it is a kind of accretion of a life. Whether one likes that particular life or not is open to discussion, but it’s been interesting, because you see people and places appearing again and again. Plus I repurpose shots from one film, put them into another film, so there’s this 21

complex building going on. I think programmers have become interested in that. Sometimes different cultures too. I did one in Korea. They’re very family-oriented of course, and I think the film had a kind of resonance there. Just two months ago there was a complete retrospective in Italy, in Milan, and then it traveled to Rome and Bologna. The Italians also have a particular take on family. So I’m not only watching these films being projected one after the other—I do have to introduce them and then talk about them each time—but also thinking about it. You’re accumulating this kind of record of your life, some version. So the answer to your question is yes, it’s been happening. People have also been writing about them, as a sort of sum total rather than individual films—although it’s been very important to me that each film stand on its own. Avila It surprises me a little to hear you say that the retrospectives forced you to look back on your films, because they seem to me to be something made to be looked at again and reflected upon, almost like a scrap album or a journal or a diary. McElwee I think what [a retrospective] does is force me to think about them as public things, things that are in public spaces, whereas scrapbooks and journals are usually very personal things. You’re seeing them slightly differently when they’re being presented in public. It’s not that I wasn’t interested, but I’m also very busy, and taking the requisite two hours to stop everything and look at an old film of mine just on my own is not something I would ever do or have done. Actually, it does seem kind of odd when I say that, but it’s true. Whereas I certainly take that time to look at other people’s work. My students, for instance, or films I’m interested in seeing; I go to films all the time. I don’t ever designate two hours to look at my own stuff—yet I’ve had to more and more because of retrospectives. 22

The Art of Filmmaking: Les Blank Bay Area filmmaker Les Blank dies at 77; a 2007 interview celebrates this prolific maker of documentaries on food, music and culture. BY J O N AT H A N M A R LO W

In more than three-dozen completed documentaries and numerous other fragments and outtakes from films that may never be finished, no one portrayed the perspective of artistic subcultures as uniquely nor as well as Les Blank. Whether it was music or filmmaking or cooking or any other notion that attracted him, Blank had a remarkable talent for capturing a side of his subjects that reached far beyond the efforts of his contemporaries. After a number of conversations in the years after I relocated to the Bay Area, Les Blank handed me a box filled with VHS copies of nearly every film he’d ever made (with the exception of A Poem Is a Naked Person which I had the pleasure of finally seeing—with Les in attendance, as required—at Ross Rock’s New Nothing Cinema a few years ago) and I immediately proceeded to re-watch them all. Most I had either seen at assorted screenings in Seattle (primarily at programs that I had presented for the purpose of seeing these films with an audience) or, in some instances, documentaries I had rented from Scarecrow Video once upon a time. Seeing them again, all together, was one thing. Talking with Blank a few days later about four decades of filmmaking was something I will never forget. He was generally very reserved 25

Above Les Blank documenting the production of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982). Read the full article on Keyframe

when talking about his films. Fortunately, on this occasion—in the days before All in This Tea was scheduled to premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival—he was more interested than usual in talking about his work. Jonathan Marlow I guess that there is no better place to start than the beginning. What was the influence of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal on your student film, Running Around Like a Chicken with its Head Cut Off? Les Blank Bergman’s Seventh Seal was the film that finally ignited my desire to be a filmmaker. Before that, I liked films but I’d never imagined there was a possibility that I would go into filmmaking. When I saw his film and experienced what I experienced emotionally, I figured that this was it. I had to head in this direction. I didn’t know what steps to take but I would work that out later. The scene where the knight taps the figure on the shoulder, he turns around and it turns out that it’s a corpse… that made a big impression on me. That’s what I was getting at when I have a similar situation in my film. Marlow Did you first see The Seventh Seal when you were in college or when you were living in Florida? Blank I’d gone to college in New Orleans for four years and got a degree in English. Then I came to Berkeley to go to graduate school in English, thinking that I would keep struggling to be a writer even though, at that point, everything I submitted got rejected. If I failed at that, I thought that I could always teach English. But I was having trouble with my emotions. My first marriage had broken up, I couldn’t concentrate and I dropped out. I just bummed around trying to get work but no one would hire me. After I saw that film, I went to visit the theater department professor who I liked when I was in my last year of school there. He told me that there was a new program in the theater department that offered a Master of Fine Arts in playwriting. All you had to do was write a play instead of a thesis and I saw this as a steppingstone into film because I would be able to write stage plays and work with actors. It seemed

Above Les Blank’s film The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1971).

more interesting than flying planes and going to war. It was between the Korean and Vietnam wars. So I did that and, after two years there, I got recommended to go to the USC film school. I got a graduate fellowship there for two years. Marlow Was your original intention to make narrative films? Blank Yes. I was going to try to follow in the lines of writer/directors like [Luis] Buñuel, [Ingmar] Bergman and [Vittorio] De Sica. Marlow Your second film was on Dizzy Gillespie. Had you seen Dizzy perform while you were going to school in New Orleans? Blank I like New Orleans jazz. I like traditional jazz. Modern jazz, I could take it or leave it. I wasn’t a total fan of it. When someone asked me if I wanted to work on a film on Dizzy Gillespie, I said, ‘Who’s he?’ Marlow You were already in Los Angeles when, with God Respects Us When We Work, But Loves Us When We Dance, you documented the Easter Sunday Love-In, the subject of your third film. What made you decide to bring a camera to that event? Blank I was supporting the family. I’d gotten married again and my new wife had a baby [filmmaker Harrod Blank]. I had to support us so I had to take whatever I could find that would bring in some money. Industrial filmmaking was what I did. I did films that promoted business and industry, primarily training films and educational films. One of my million employers had an office on Sunset Strip and every lunch-time I’d go out to have my lunch. I would see these Flower Children walking around barefoot, handing out flowers and smiling at people and I wondered, ‘What’s going on here?’ I learned that they’d just started having these weekly gatherings on Sundays called Love-Ins and I went to one and found it interesting. I borrowed my boss’s camera and shot a few 100’ rolls of film, three minutes each roll. Maybe I shot six or seven at one of these events. Meanwhile, one of my schoolmates at USC had a job at the local PBS station, KPFK, and he told me that they were interested in the Hippies, too. I went over there and showed them the footage that I had shot and they said, ‘This is great.’ There was a huge Love-In coming up on Easter Sunday, 1967. The one’s that I’d been watching and partially documented were fairly small gatherings. The station didn’t have any money but, if I agreed to shoot this new one for no pay, they offered to pay for the negative. They would process it at the lab and pay for making a work print, provided I edited the footage into a half-hour piece that they could broadcast. Then they’d give me back the negative and I would own the film. All they wanted was just one broadcast and they would put their own music on, which they did. I went along with that and, again, borrowed my boss’ camera. Thanks to him, I don’t know if he ever knew it or not. I went out and shot one day, Easter Sunday, from sunrise to sunset, shooting non-stop and got the bulk of what’s in that film.

Anatomy of the Filmmaker by Sarah Ginsburg, courtesy of the artist and the Non-Fiction Cartel (thenonfictioncartel.com).

MacArthur Winner Laura Poitras’s Unexpected Path to The Oath As attention gathers around Laura Poitras for her deserved ‘genius’ designation and feature-in-progress on the government’s domestic spying operations, we look back at her discussion of 2010 film The Oath. BY JESSICA SAPICK

The Oath, a documentary from filmmaker Laura Poitras (My Country, My Country and Flag Wars), focuses on an unusual family drama in the lives of Osama Bin Laden’s former bodyguard, Abu Jandal, and driver, Salim Hamdan. Poitras followed Jandal for two years in Yemen, bearing witness to the anger and guilt he felt about his brother-in-law Hamdan being detained at Guantanamo. Poitras, who showed the film at festivals including the San Francisco International (SFIFF), studied filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute and now teaches filmmaking at Yale University. She won the Sundance Film Festival’s Excellence in Cinematography Award when this interview was conducted in 2010 and was previously nominated for an Academy Award, an Independent Spirit Award and an Emmy Award for My Country, My Country. She is currently at work on a collection of films about post-Sept. 11 America. I spoke with Poitras 29

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: The Oath Jessica Sapick Jess Sapick interviewed Laura Poitras when she was an intern for the San Francisco Film Society. She now writes professionally as a marketer for Google Glass.

two years ago in San Francisco, where she talked about the filmmaking process and how her journey with Jandal and Hamdan took her in unintended directions. Jessica Sapick You went to Yemen in search of a story about an innocent person returning from Guantanamo. Instead, you met Abu Jandal, and the story changed. How did this change affect the timeline, budget and overall production process? Was the team supportive of the decision? Laura Poitras I think if I’d been on assignment to tell the original story, it would have been a problem because I would have felt like I’m not delivering on the story I was sent to tell. But because I had a couple fellowships when I went there, I had the freedom. The story was allowed to change. There was not really that much questioning of it. I certainly questioned it as an artist. I had to grapple with what does it mean? They’re very different stories: an innocent person versus Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguard. There was never any need to justify it to anyone like a funder at that point in the process, because I was on fellowship. Then I was like, I just need to trust my own instincts. I tend to, because I do my own camera work. I can go alone and just be really patient. And this film really would never have happened if I’d been with a crew and somebody was looking at their watch and counting out the hours because there was so much time of just waiting and just being there and saying, ‘OK I’m still here, I still want to get this.’ When I made the film in Iraq (My Country, My Country), I was shooting a lot, so I felt busy, but it

wasn’t until I was like ninety hours into the shooting that I felt like I was getting what I needed to [for] the film. But I was busy. With this film, there was a lot of downtime, which can be very corrosive. It was like, ‘Is this going to happen? I’m not quite sure, there’s not enough access right now.’ It was just about saying, ‘Look, I think the story’s going to yield what we want, it’s just not going to do it on the timeline that I want.’ I’ve been through this process enough times to have the faith that it was going to be worth being patient for. But it could have not worked. It wasn’t until a year in when I said, ‘OK, this is really going to come together. I’m going to be able to finish this film.’ And if it hadn’t, it happens all the time where you go down this road and you just for whatever reason can’t complete it. But because I do my own shooting, it gives me somewhat more: I can get on a plane, I have a camera and I can live in Yemen. It wasn’t like I was paying a DP or a sound person a day rate while I was waiting. But I did bring in Jonathan Oppenheim, the editor, very early in the process. And he’s extraordinary. It was definitely such a hard story to tell that I didn’t want to carry the burden of it alone. I really wanted somebody else to sort of dig in. So we needed funding for that. The editing was certainly out of proportion for a typical documentary because he was working on it for so long. It was actually what was needed in this film. Overall, on one hand it took a little over two years to make, which really is not that long for a documentary. But it felt like much longer because there was so much waiting. The final budget was around $700,000. And it was first through fellowships and grants and then ultimately ITVS came on. I think that there was a concern, once I knew that the story wasn’t going to be about this innocent returnee–it was going to be this much murkier anti-hero taxi driver–I thought we’re not going to get funding. This is kind of dangerous territory. But I was really surprised. Sundance Documentary Fund came on board, Chicken and Egg, Creative Capital; there was so much support. So it was great, because I thought that the door was closed because people will say this work is great, we just can’t get behind it. It’s too sensitive.

Sweet Returns in the Search for ‘Sugar Man’ Surprise is the refrain in the story behind the story of pop mystery Rodriguez and filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul. BY J O N AT H A N M A R LO W

[Editor’s note: director Malik Bendjelloul died May 13, 2014, and we revisit this conversation from the previous year with both Bendjelloul and the star of his feature documentary, Rodriguez.] Truth is stranger than fiction (or so it is said). Yet, generally, fiction is stranger than truth by design. Or it should be. But on rare occasions, truth really is stranger (or at least some version of the truth). Such is the story of Rodriguez, a singer-songwriter that nearly became the ‘next big thing’ in the early 1970s. And then he didn’t. And then he did, halfway around the world from his home in Detroit (not that he knew about it at the time). Searching for Sugar Man is this story, directed by first-time feature-length documentary filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul. The film opens in Los Angeles and New York City today. Jonathan Marlow Happiest of birthdays to you [this conversation occurred on Rodriguez’s 70th birthday]! You’re flying to Seattle this evening? 33

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Rodriguez In a few hours. Mr. Bendjelloul was in Moscow a week-and-a-half ago where he won an award for the film. And then he was in Prague. We just came back from the Hamptons and Alec Baldwin presented the film. I also did a gig there. Marlow You performed after the screening in the Hamptons? Rodriguez Yeah. It was a small one. It was only a half-hour presentation but it was good. And then we did Chicago. Marlow Are you working with the same backing band at each show? Rodriguez Oh, no. This time I did it solo. I was in New Jersey two weeks ago and I did a 5,000 seater. Ray Davies from the Kinks was there. Ann Wilson was there. Joan Armatrading was there. I continue to pursue my music career. Marlow I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t fond of the film. But I had a copy of Cold Fact long before I knew of the documentary’s existence. Rodriguez: It all worked out somehow, eh?

It was an incredible sense of triumph. It was quite something. It was a highlight of my life. RODRIGUEZ

Marlow There’s a moment during your performance in South Africa when the bass-line kicks in from ‘I Wonder.’ That’s such a great moment in the film. It builds very nicely up to that. A triumphant moment. Rodriguez It was an incredible sense of triumph. It was quite something. It was a highlight of my life. Marlow I’ve read a bit about the way that you came to hear the story of Rodriguez. Traveling to South Africa and getting a grasp of something that seems hard to believe. That a singersongwriter from Detroit who released two failed albums in the 1970s became hugely popular in South Africa, Tanzania, New Zealand, and Australia. Malik Bendjelloul I quit my job in 2006 and went traveling for six months in Africa and South America looking for stories. In Capetown, I met Stephen ‘Sugar’ Segerman and he told me the story of Rodriguez. It was a beautiful story. Maybe the best story I ever heard. It was a beautiful, fantastic story.

Marlow Presumably, the order in which you filmed the interviews was considerably different than the order in which things appear in the documentary. Bendjelloul Yes. For the first forty-two minutes, he’s considered to be a dead artist. Like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. People are going to know that he is alive when the film is released because we’re doing a press tour. At this very moment… Marlow I know. I’m a part of it! You’re ruining the surprise… Bendjelloul Ruining the whole thing. But then I realized that it doesn’t really matter. Marlow No. With great storytelling, it doesn’t really matter. Bendjelloul Everyone knows that the Titanic is going to sink! [Laughter.] Marlow Exactly. Bendjelloul There are many stories where you actually know what was going to happen. Marlow But I don’t think that you’ve overplayed your hand. It’s more the experience of the people who believed that he was gone…. Bendjelloul Right.

Anatomy of the Filmmaker by Sarah Ginsburg, courtesy of the artist and the Non-Fiction Cartel (thenonfictioncartel.com).

Ten Things Gleaned from Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I, a documentary about modern day scavengers, is a fitting culmination of the idiosyncratic and highly personal ideas she has experimented with throughout her career. BY J E SS E ATA I D E

TO GLEAN v. gleaned, glean·ing, gleans 1. To gather (grain) left behind by reapers. 2. To collect bit by bit. It might be hard to imagine now, but Agnès Varda has not always been the revered filmmaker she is now. In the forty years leading up to The Gleaners and I, Varda was generally considered a talented but secondary figure of the French New Wave. Varda was mentioned only twice in the 372 pages that make up James Monaco’s pioneering study, The New Wave, which is indicative of the general marginalization of Varda’s work in many historical accounts. Her work was hard to get a handle on or neatly categorize, and occasional high-profile successes (1962’s Cleo from 5 to 7, 1985’s Vagabond) often came off as anomalies in a career primarily devoted to idiosyncratic, highly personal projects. This all changed with The Gleaners and I. Its international success sparked a reexamining of Varda’s career and work and, by the time the autobiographical The Beaches of Agnès was released eight years later, her reputation as a beloved “grand dame of cinema” was undisputed. Some forty-five years after her debut feature as a precocious, twenty-six-year-old first-time director, Agnès Varda was finally recognized as a cinematic treasure, a master of the medium. 37

Read the full article on Keyframe Watch it now on Fandor: The Gleaners and I Jesse Atalde Jesse Ataide writes on film at Memories of the Future.

[Excerpted here: Two of ten gleanings from a grand dame of cinema. Read the rest online at fandor.com/keyframe] A Movie Like an Artist’s Gallery In many respects, The Gleaners and I is a fitting culmination of the projects, ideas and experiments Varda committed herself to over the course of her career. If, as Amy Taubin has astutely pointed out, Varda’s work can be viewed as “portraits of people and places,” then The Gleaners and I serves as a kind of a gallery exhibit of precisely observed miniatures and cameo portraits (which is unsurprising considering Varda’s more recent focus on installation work). After setting out to discover whether or not the historical act of gleaning for food in fields still occurs in contemporary France, Varda comes into contact with a fascinating array of people, many who warrant entire documentaries of their own. She manages to weave together a historical and sociological examination that at once seems sweeping in scope and minute in its gaze. And along the way she almost inadvertently crafts another portrait: a revealing, intimate self-portrait. There is definitely a reason why there is an “I” in the title alongside the gleaners.... The Cinematic Gleaner Drawing a parallel between the gleaning process and her own filmmaking methods, Varda almost singlehandedly manages to alter the way that her films are discussed and analyzed. By characterizing her filmmaking as a form of gleaning, she captures the spirit of chance and the unexpected that informs the structure of not only this film, but nearly all of her films. Varda is the first to admit that this comparison can only be stretched so far—filmmaking is not just a matter of passively accumulating but also actively transforming—but it is a metaphor that remains not only irresistibly evocative but unavoidably appropriate.

Rewind: Joe Berlinger’s Crude ‘Even if it were legal, what I saw was an incredibly immoral act being committed.’ BY SUSAN GERHARD

From upstate New York to Arkansas to the San Francisco Bay Area and far beyond it, Joe Berlinger’s films, many with co-director Bruce Sinofsky, have been fascinating, cinéma vérité-style entertainments. Though they’ve investigated crimes big and small, paved the way for new reads of verdicts and, surprisingly enough in the case of the two Paradise Lost films, built movements, the films have never been prosecutorial in style or didactic in nature. They are primarily curious about relationships, misdeeds and the bizarre trappings of very specific subcultures. They don’t default to talking heads, statistics, graphics or the essay format, yet they’ve solved some of the gnarliest puzzles imaginable. Berlinger’s 2009 Crude: The Real Price of Oil could be seen as departure, given its antagonist is Chevron, and it does include a seated interview or two. But its power comes from its measured to approach to all sides. Its primary target is a surprise—in that it implicates American culture as a whole for remaining ignorant of moral crimes being committed elsewhere. I spoke with Berlinger back in 2009, before so many more chapters in the ongoing Crude story had been written, as Berlinger prepared for a trip west. 40

Read the full article on Keyframe Streaming now on Fandor: Crude: The Real Price of Oil Susan Gerhard is Keyframe’s Editor-InChief

Susan Gerhard This is a big story here [in the San Francisco Bay Area]. How did you first enter into it? Joe Berlinger I’ve been joking, saying I got dragged kicking and screaming into this film. I never imagined it would become a Sundance-worthy film festival favorite. And now it’s getting a semisuccessful theatrical release. It’s getting nice reviews. But when I started it, I never thought it was going to be part of my oeuvre. Steven Donziger, the American plaintiff’s consulting attorney—the big loud guy—came knocking on my door. We have a mutual friend. He was shopping for a filmmaker. Not that he was going to pay for a filmmaker. He came to my office, was very passionate. And as he was talking all my filmmaker red flags started going off about how this was not something I’d want to get involved in. This was before I knew about Pablo Fajardo. This was before I knew that there were judicial inspections that were actually going to take place. All I had was a lawyer who came to me talking about this thirteen-year struggle and how Chevron was delaying it, and how there might be a trial. As a cinéma vérité filmmaker who likes to film things in the present tense, I was saying this sounds more like a news story; you might be better off going to 60 Minutes or something like that. (It was after Sundance that 60 Minutes did its piece.) There was no press on this at the time, so he was really desperate for someone to cover it. That was one red flag. The other red flag was, as you know from Paradise Lost, even though my films have a point of view they are generally about larger issues. I embrace ambiguity. I trust my audience, and think truth will rise to the top. That’s not generally the style for these kinds of political/human rights type of documentaries.

Somebody like Steven, because he has a clear agenda, I thought would be more comfortable with that other kind of film, the kind of film that I don’t make, with the heavily narrated one point of view that gets reinforced over the course of the film. To me that’s a less persuasive film at the end of the day. It preaches to the converted as opposed to allowing the audience to come to it. My other hesitation was: Any good film needs a juicy character. I didn’t think I could build a film around Steven. I didn’t know about Pablo. My last hesitation was financial. Brother’s Keeper was the last time I rolled the dice financially. I was twenty-eight years old at the time. I put every penny into the making of that film. We rolled the dice and it turned out positively for us [his filmmaking partner at the time was Bruce Sinofsky] —it established our careers. Even though my films are on worthy social issues, ever since then I have vowed not to make a film unless I know who’s paying for it. Or at the very least, unless I know a distribution outlet is attached. I was very upfront with Steven. But he was very persuasive. He convinced me to come down to the Amazon. He wasn’t paying for me, but he was convinced if I only saw the pollution, I’d have a change of heart. Because I was up for an adventure, I went on the trip. If you want to take the time to take me on this trip, I’ll go. We went down, and Day one, the pollution is mind-boggling, ten times worse than he described. 42

I think one of the big failings of the film is its two-dimensionality, because when you’re down there, when you smell it and see it with a 360-degree eye…. this once pristine paradise, one of the few places on earth to survive the last Ice Age….that biodiversity and human diversity I witnessed under extreme assault. I was embarrassed to be an American. Even if it were legal, what I saw was an incredibly immoral act being committed. I felt a sense of outrage and a sense of responsibility. As an American, as a filmmaker, as a human being—despite all my hesitations—I was being put into this place by the universe. I’m somebody at a certain level of his career. It’s time to give something back. The second day of the trip, the feeling was smashed over my head as we went down the river to the Cofán community that you see in the film. When I got out of the canoe and saw village people preparing a meal using vats of cheap industrial tuna form another part of the world—these are water-based people who’ve lived in harmony with nature for god knows how long forced to eat canned tuna from another part of the world because the fish in the river are all dead. You walk the village and there’s a sense of despair, diseases that didn’t happen many years ago, and, literally, no fresh drinking water. I went back to New York, tucked my two children into their individual beds, went to one of the four faucets in my house to get fresh drinking water, and thought: How can I turn my back on these people. At the time, that feeling was like: Let me point a camera and see where this goes. Maybe I’ll hand some footage off to somebody else. I still didn’t imagine it would be a film.

I think one of the big failings of the film is its two-dimensionality, because when you’re down there, when you smell it and see it: this once-pristine paradise, one of the few places on earth to survive the last Ice Age under extreme assault. I was embarrassed to be an American. —Joe Berlinger

The Metallica film was also that way: I started off on assignment because I was out of work. I called up Lars (since Paradise Lost, Lars, the drummer for Metallica and I had become very friendly). I was scrounging for work. I said, ‘Got anything?’ They were about to go into the studio. I called Elektra and convinced them …. let me shoot a little b-roll. I never imagined it would be the epic drama that it turned out to be. For this film, I made the commitment to go down on a second and a third trip. As soon as I gave into that feeling, magically things materialized. On my second trip, it was Pablo Fajardo. Guy walks into a room, and you just feel his authenticity and heroism. He’s a special guy; you feel it. I felt it at that moment. What an incredible character, just from cinematic viewpoint. Impoverished oil-field worker, pulls himself up by his bootstraps, gets himself educated, is outraged, wants to help his people and finds himself in his first law case against the fifth largest company in the world. I didn’t expect that at the beginning. It clicked. Now I have my central character. On my third trip, it became clear to me that actually these inspections, which sounded dry, weren’t. On the third trip, the inspections were beginning, and I was pinching myself. Shit, this is very dramatic. Lawyers in jungle gear in massive pollution sites, arguing their cases. The kind of sites that if they were in the United States they’d be fenced off and considered Superfund sites. It’s really dramatic, and now I have my present-tense narrative thread. Even though my original instinct was to be a nice guy. I can be a nice guy but I can actually make this film. Even the money—I’m gainfully enough employed that if I want to, as a hobby, go down and help these people by filming, I can. Even that concern went away, because within a year, after putting together a trailer of the material I shot, the money came relatively easy. I knew I had a film. It started out with nobler intentions and humbler expectations. It’s turned into an incredible lifechanging journey.

The Art of Filmmaking: Errol Morris Knowable. Unknowable. Errol Morris. BY J O N AT H A N M A R LO W

There is no definitive antonym for “hagiography” but such a word (if it existed) would be appropriate for The Unknown Known, Errol Morris’ portrait of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The film documents the early political life of Rumsfeld, first as a congressperson in the 1960s (representing his home state of Illinois) through him troubled (and troubling) time in the G.W. Bush administration. Known for his candor (for better and worse), Rumsfeld ruminates on many facets of his career, not least of which are his

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‘snowflakes,’ numerous memos on a variety of topics. Morris gets Rumsfeld to read many of these aloud and these writings form a narrative (and occasionally visual) thread that carries the documentary along. I spoke with the filmmaker at the Telluride Film Festival. Jonathan Marlow Inevitably, people will compare The Unknown Known with The Fog of War. Errol Morris Yes. I think that is inevitable. Although, as I tend to point out, The Unknown Known is far more like my previous film, Tabloid, than Fog of War. Marlow You mean insomuch as both feature a subject who is in complete denial of what they’ve done? Morris How could you say such a thing? Marlow But that is not the connection that most audiences would make. Morris We have to dispossess them of that notion. 47

Marlow The obvious difference can be found in the subtitle to The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. There are no lessons that are learned in The Unknown Known. Morris There is one very significant lesson. When I asked about the possible lesson he learned from the horrible end of the Vietnam War, he said that the lesson is, ‘Some things work out, some things don’t.’ Marlow Fair enough. That is a disturbing lesson to learn. Though it doesn’t seem as if he has learned that lesson. Or any lesson, really. It’s an acceptance of the fact that certain things, regardless of how well you want them to go or how much effort you put into them, will go poorly. Morris Of course, I include the famous press conference where he says, ‘Stuff happens.’ I asked him, after he does this very odd thing with respect to the [Arthur] Schlesinger memo, he denies that these techniques migrated to Iraq and Afghanistan. After I read him the memo, he said, ‘I would agree with that.’ But, in fact, the memo has just contradicted everything that he has said previously. Then I say to him, ‘Are you saying stuff just happens?’ He says, ‘Well, in war… ’ Basically, he says, ‘Yes.’ Marlow Which is… troubling. Morris Troubling? Marlow I’m trying to soft‑pedal. In a sense, he is representative of an entire administration and its efforts at deception. He was just the most…. In a sense, Rumsfeld is the most obvious in his use of language to create a particular effect. His pedantic use semantics, primarily. He’s using language in entirely inaccurate and inappropriate ways. Changing things on a whim, notable in the discussion that forms the title of the film. He inverts his own definition for the combinations of ‘known’ and ‘unknown.’ Morris Yes. I had a screening at MIT and a mathematician came up. This was just before we finished the film. I had rough‑cut screenings and they said, ‘A lot of what he says is a contradiction. It’s P and not P,’ and I said, ‘Yes. Yes, I know.’ Then they went on to say, ‘Well, from a contradiction, you can prove anything,’ and I said, ‘Yes, that also has occurred to me.’ There’s a kind of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ quality to it. My wife—the smart one in the family—said McNamara is the Flying Dutchman, traveling the world, searching for redemption and never finding it. Maybe he thinks he’s found it but I don’t think he’s found it. I think he remains as tortured as ever. Rumsfeld? The Cheshire Cat. All that’s really left at the end is a smile. Marlow Right. The grin.

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