48th NY Film Fest Grazes Reality with Its Docs

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 20 September 2010 13:02

Written by Laura Blum

Heading into its 48th campaign, New York Film Festival will once again carry the auteurist flag (from September 24th to October 10, 2010), , as it has since first mobilizing in 1963. The Festival, organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, prides itself on capturing the year's critical darlings in narrative fiction. So ticket buyers needn't brace for mediocrity when venturing beyond documentaries, as they’ve too often learned to do with NYFF’s downtown foil, the Tribeca Film Festival.

Happily, the reverse logic doesn't apply, and non-fiction -- both in the main slate and as various sidebars -- rides with honor at the venerable uptown Festival. This year's documentary lineup holds some especially bold choices.

History, the economy and cultural and political icons -- commanding subjects of the modern age -- lead the charge. Andrei Ucijâ's portrait of former Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceauşescu is especially worthy of a salute. At 319 minutes, its length alone is heraldic.

Then there's the matter of the film's title: The Autobiography of Ceauşescu. The dictator allegedly permitted his official life to be filmed for an hour a day throughout his 25-year tenure, yielding state-shot footage that serves as home movies. Ucijâ's conceit – which favors the collective lens for the individual narrative – underscores the irony of using propaganda reels to tell Ceauşescu’s story from his Eastern bloc POV.

Along the way a succession of global leaders take their bows, from Leonid Brezhnev, Charles De Gaulle and Alexander Dubcek to Mao Tse Tung, Queen Elizabeth, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. Taken together with the kitschy pomp and ceremony of state visits, the effect is strangely mesmerizing. No effort is made to interpret the charade with voiceover. Nonetheless, with sound, music and canny edits, Ucijâ manages to comment on the otherwise raw visuals.

Bookending the documentary is Ceauşescu’s mock trial by his soon-to-be assassins. The breach in first-person authorship begs the question of why footage of his and his wife's 1989 execution is absent, not to mention that of the massacre he unleashed in Timişoara amid mass protests that would lead to his downfall in 1989.  

Another documentary in the Festival lineup that serves up self-damning official images is Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today. While the film contains courtroom footage of the first Nuremberg trial, The International Military Tribunal, which was shot by the U.S. government, it’s the Nazi-filmed coverage of the Holocaust (introduced as evidence at the Nuremberg trials) that does the petard hoisting.  

The film follows the American, British, French and Soviet prosecution teams as they established their case against the Nazi brass. NYFF 2010 will screen a restored 35mm version produced by Sandra Schulberg -- whose father, Stuart Schulberg directed the original 1948 documentary -- and Josh Waletzky.

As will surely resonate with today’s viewers, the trials gave rise to the "Nuremberg principles" that in turn paved the way for court action involving war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity and the peace. Darfur is but one recent example of the ongoing need for such corrective, if not always deterrent, measures.

Director Charles Ferguson puts a different sort of criminal on trial in his Inside Job. Fingering the root causes of the recent crisis that has shaken American and world economy, he launches a historical who-dunnit beginning with the Great Depression and forging ahead with the infamous deregulation policies that sanctioned a mentality of devil-may-care. We learn how the meltdown could have been ameliorated, why it wasn’t and whom we should be mad as hell at and unable to take it from anymore. No policymakers or banks were harmed in the making of this compelling movie, but now that it's made, all bets are off.

Economists, Wall Street execs, journos, politicians and academics staff his braintrust of talking heads who shed light on what might otherwise be an impenetrable topic. With Matt Damon narrating, and such personalities as former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, tycoon philanthropist George Soros and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker weighing in, Ferguson plies a similar approach to that of his Oscar-nominated Iraqi expose, No End in Sight, leaving viewers armed with the necessary information to act, if they so choose.

On a lighter note – though still dark enough to be kosher-for-festival – NYFF invites film-goers to wake up and literally hear the music with Michael Epstein’s account of John Lennon following the legendary Beatle’s arrival in New York in 1971. Even die-hard fans who've seen everything available on John and Yoko stand to encounter fresh footage and interviews in this fall-and-rise portrait of a life cut unacceptably short.

And what footage it is. As personal as the archival materials in The Autobiography of Ceauşescu aren't, here the audio-visuals practically travel through Lennon's blood vessels. They give us a privileged glimpse into the demons the cultural icon wrestled with as a lover, a husband and a functional psychology.

Interestingly, Yoko Ono emerges as the keeper of Lennon's sanity and the key to his creative self -- far from the popular view of her as the troll who manned his gates. If ever a man was redeemed by love, Lennon was that changeling. And if ever a documentary exonerated a villain, Lennon NYC is that testimony. 

Unless that man is Elia Kazan and that documentary is Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones' A Letter to Elia. In all of one hour, the late director who named members of the Communist Party to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, transcends 60 years of pariah status thanks to the profound creative and emotional debt felt by Scorsese, who considers Kazan his artistic "father."    

Scorsese speaks from the soft viscera as he guides us through such highlights of the Kazan canon as On the Waterfront, East of Eden, A Streetcar Named Desire, Gentleman's Agreement, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A Face in the Crowd and America, America as well as filmed interviews of the director. Resonating with themes of estranged brethren, immigrant outsiders and class aspirations, the younger New York hyphenate identifies the pivotal moment in Kazan's career -- following his political flame-out -- when he embraced an intensely personal cinema and graduated from being a "director" to a "filmmaker."  

Another tribute to a cinema great is Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff. Here too Scorsese attests, however briefly, to the influential role of an elder craftsman -- joining other talking heads and the overwhelming filmed evidence to establish the cinematographer of such Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger classics as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death and dozens of other gems as a master. (A Matter of Life and Death will also be screened at the Festival, in 35mm and not HD, as is the case with Craig McCall's documentary, in a Cardiff mini-sidebar.)

A highlight of Cameraman splits the screen between The Red Shoes and Raging Bull to compare Norma Shearer's dancing with Robert De Niro's boxing. Cardiff's legacy is there for the tracing as we double-reference his technique of capturing the actor's state of mind and kinetic POV, plus his signature style of expressing character with color. 

Cardiff, who was still working away at 94 when death forced him off the set in 2009, brought a painter's sensibility to his work on both sides of the camera, as cinematographer and director. The film is book-ended by clips of him receiving an Academy Award for cinematography, the first ever.  was indeed a winner.

In another Festival sidebar, documentary grandee Frederick Wiseman gets an airing of his latest work, Boxing Gym. The film takes us into the sweaty Texas precincts of Lord's Gym, where former boxer Richard Lord coaches a motley assemblage of wannabe punchers from all walks of local life.

These days no self-respecting festival can expect to showcase non-fiction without straying into the hybrid wilds. Robinson in Ruins, a faux documentary by British filmmaker Patrick Keiller, exemplifies the trend. This cinematic musing gives out geographic and psychological coordinates as Keiller’s invented other self, the wandering observer Robinson, makes his fevered way across the military bases and opium fields of England and his imagination. The film, which recruits Vanessa Redgrave for the task of narrating, is the latest sampling of the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic wit.

If time feels suspended in Robinson in Ruins, it whooshes by in the docudrama Carlos. That’s no small feat, considering the version NYFF is screening spans 319 minutes. Documentary defenders will rightly argue that this dramatization of terrorist Carlos the Jackal’s revolutionary resume cannot be considered in a non-fiction roundup. Yet, as Andrei Ucijâ said at the Festival’s Autobiography of Ceauşescu press conference, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace taught him that fiction can be truer than reality, and the same can be said of Olivier Assayas’ superb multi-episode thriller spanning 16 countries and dangling snatches of archival footage.

The full NYFF program is available at: http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/2010.

New York Film Festival
September 24 to October 10, 2010
Walter Reade Theater
165 W 65th Street, Upper Level Plaza (between Broadway and Amsterdam)

Alice Tully Hall
1941 Broadway (at 65th Street)
Lincoln Center
New York, NY 10023

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