Subject
Camilla Hall, Jennifer Tiexiera (2022)
A documentary about people who featured in other documentaries and about the ethics of filming real lives: Subject can hardly fail to absorb but it’s unsatisfying, increasingly questionable cinema. The narrative includes, as context (and padding), brief clips from other films – a huge number of them, as the length of the list in the closing credits confirms. Most are ‘pure’ documentaries, dating from Nanook of the North (1922) and Grass (1925) all the way through to Free Solo (2018) and For Sama (2019); there are occasional glimpses of mockumentary (I’m Still Here (2010)) or of drama that blends non-fiction and fiction (Nomadland (2020)). The heart of Camilla Hall’s and Jennifer Tiexiera’s film, though, comprises interviews with individuals involved in six particular documentaries – in chronological order of their year of release, Hoop Dreams (1994), Capturing the Friedmans (2003), The Staircase (2004), The Square (2013), The Wolfpack (2015) and Minding the Gap (2018).
With one exception, Hall and Tiexiera don’t interview the directors of the six documentaries: the whole point of the exercise is supposedly to learn about the experience of, and impact on, the people these directors put on the screen. Opinions on the issues involved in that process are offered by Subject’s other talking heads, who mostly are documentarians, along with a few critics and film historians. The exception among the featured documentaries is Minding the Gap, which ‘chronicles the lives and friendships of three young men growing up in Rockford, Illinois, united by their love of skateboarding’ (Wikipedia). The threesome includes the director, Bing Liu; when another member of the trio began to talk about being physically abused in childhood by his father, Liu decided that his own experience of abuse, by his stepfather, needed to be part of the narrative, too. Minding the Gap (which I hadn’t seen – ditto Hoop Dreams and The Square) includes at least one sequence in which Liu talks with his mother about what his stepfather did. From what he tells Hall and Tiexiera, it seems this on-screen airing of the problem didn’t improve Liu’s and his mother’s relationship.
By way of introduction, Subject notes the occasional commercial success of documentaries in the pre-streaming age (Bowling for Columbine (2002), March of the Penguins (2005), An Inconvenient Truth (2006)). Later, there’s talk about how Netflix viewers today expect instant, ‘high-intensity’ entertainment from their documentary choices. That’s right enough: I every so often check the latest Netflix true-crime menu to find something that appeals and watch it as a guilty pleasure – aware, that is, of lapping up as entertainment someone’s else actual trauma, which is (usually) soon forgotten. But there’s no traction between this theme and the Hall-Tiexiera selection of documentaries, five out of six of which were released in cinemas. The Staircase, at least in its original version (aka Death on the Staircase), was a pre-Netflix television series. What differences there may have been for those concerned between appearing in multiple TV episodes, rather than in a theatrically released one-off, isn’t explored.
This is pretty typical of Subject’s shallow approach. Tricky issues are raised – issues you don’t expect to be resolved but that you do expect to be discussed more than they are. One film-maker makes the sweeping statement that the human subjects of a documentary should, as a matter of course, be consulted by festival programmers before a decision is made whether to programme the film. There’s no expression of an opposing view or any examination of what the consequences would be when a subject objected to the film’s representation of them. If the festival went ahead and showed the film regardless, the consultation would look like a token gesture. If the festival withdrew the film in response to a subject’s objections, wouldn’t that put the film-maker concerned on the receiving end of a form of censorship? Subject illustrates the ethnological agenda of Western European and American documentary pioneers; another bold assertion, that documentaries should now generally be made by people on the inside of a situation, since they’re bound to have a better understanding of it than a director approaching it from outside, also goes unchallenged, no doubt because it’s linked to a call for greater diversity in documentary-making. The possibility that a skilful, sensitive outsider’s treatment might yield insights that insiders hadn’t previously been able to see, is ignored.
Hall-Tiexiera’s interviews with Subject’s subjects are more absorbing when two people involved in the same documentary have distinct views about whether the film was a good thing. The novelist Michael Peterson, whose alleged murder of his wife is the core of The Staircase, was keen from the word go for the police investigation and his trial to be filmed: he says he knew he was innocent but didn’t trust the American justice system to confirm it (he was right about that). He also knew that Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, the French director of The Staircase, had just made Murder on a Sunday Morning (2001). More recently, Peterson has written an autobiographical memoir, Beyond the Staircase, because ‘that’s what writers do’. Margaret Ratliff, his elder daughter[1], regrets the experience of The Staircase; she and her sister, Martha, were in their very early twenties when it was filmed – in no position, Margaret thinks, to query or contest what was happening. In contrast, Mukunda Angulo and his mother are both positive about the experience of The Wolfpack (a film that I did think exploitative). It clearly helps that, as director Crystal Moselle hoped would happen when she made The Wolfpack, Mukunda is today working in the film industry. We see him and Moselle now meeting up again, old friends.
While Jesse Friedman and his mother, Elaine, both resent Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans, the tone of their resentment differs. Elaine is a bit hard to follow as she likens Jarecki’s invitation to being offered the apple in the Garden of Eden then says ‘you know the outcome is going to be bad’. She’s more incisive recalling that Jarecki was planning a short film about children’s birthday party entertainers in New York City, including her eldest son, David, until he learned that David’s father, Arnold, and younger brother, Jesse, had been imprisoned for sexual abuse of children; and that David had made numerous home videos of the Friedmans’ family life before his father and brother were arraigned[2]. Jesse Friedman, now in his fifties, despairs that his life and public image are defined by the events of several decades ago and by crimes he insists he didn’t commit. In saying this, Jesse (who suggests an older, gaunt version of Jake Gyllenhaal) doesn’t clearly distinguish his 1980s notoriety and the years he spent in prison from the impact of Capturing the Friedmans (his father had committed suicide in jail and Jesse had been released by the time Jarecki’s film appeared). Jesse’s wife Lisa, who got to know him through watching Capturing the Friedmans, is more ready to acknowledge what Andrew Jarecki has done to help her husband, including funding Jesse’s retrospective appeal against his criminal conviction.
Ahmed Hassan makes a compelling contribution to Subject but he’s a somewhat incongruous figure in it. Jehane Noujaim’s The Square (not to be confused with Ruben Östlund’s dislikeable 2017 drama of the same name) deals with the Egyptian Revolution at Tahrir Square in 2011 and its aftermath. Hassan worked as a cameraman on the film but ended up a major on-screen presence in it. He became a kind of revolutionary poster boy and a person of interest to the Egyptian authorities as well as to filmgoers: now in his mid-thirties, he is living in exile. While it’s true that, like his fellow interviewees, he found his world turned upside down after appearing in a high-profile documentary, Hassan’s case is so different from the others chosen by Hall and Tiexiera that his circumstances don’t highlight ethical questions of the kind that Subject is mostly concerned with – the balance of power between film-maker and subject, the issue of whether subjects should routinely be paid for appearing in a documentary, and so on.
The matter of remuneration is brought effectively into focus in the case of Arthur Agee, one of the protagonists of Hoop Dreams. That film, directed by Steve James, is ‘the story of two African-American high school students … in Chicago and their dream of becoming professional basketball players’ (Wikipedia). When James and his fellow producers (Peter Gilbert and Frederick Marx) approached the families of Arthur and William Gates, they made clear the boys wouldn’t be paid for appearing in the film, explaining that their documentaries never made money. When Hoop Dreams proved an unexpected box-office hit, James et al felt compelled to change their minds. Arthur Agee has a balanced view of the film’s success, recognising it as a blessing and a curse. The cut of the profits he received enabled the Agee family to move out of Chicago housing projects into suburbia; Arthur launched a foundation promoting higher education for inner-city youth and the ‘Hoop Dreams’ sportswear line. At the time Hoop Dreams was made, Arthur’s father, Bo, was a drugs addict. He appears in the film, to his son’s embarrassment, turning up to join in a basketball practice before wandering off to pay a man standing courtside for his latest fix. Bo subsequently sorted himself out; Subject includes footage of him telling a church congregation how he was saved. A few years later, he was murdered. Arthur Agee says he’s bound to wonder if his father’s death was a consequence of the wealth and celebrity that Hoop Dreams brought his family.
While all the main interviewees are worth hearing, it’s frustrating that their testimonies aren’t worked into the narrative so as to build a complex picture. Subject, with its baton-passing structure, comes across as a where-are-they-now piece inflated by multiple questions that are flagged but not grappled with. It’s only in the closing stages that threads are somewhat drawn together by rapidly juxtaposing the main participants. While Mukunda Angulo is now happily involved in film-making (‘not documentaries’), Ahmad Hassan can’t get a foothold in the industry and has recently had to sell his camera. After her father’s continuing legal travails, covered in the episodes that Jean-Xavier de Lestrade added to his original series, the last straw for Margaret Ratliff was the TV dramatisation of her family’s story, starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette, which aired on HBO Max a matter of weeks before Subject premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. Ratliff is a gracious woman; her exasperation that the makers of the dramatised Staircase asked if she’d be willing to talk with the actress who would be playing her, is palpable and very understandable although its connection with Hall-Tiexiera’s primary themes is tenuous.
Plenty of interesting things come up on the margins of Subject. One of the present-day film-makers’ more striking suggestions for an enhanced ethical approach to their field of endeavour, is building into production budgets a line for post-production therapy costs – therapy for people in front of and behind the camera: the suggestion is made semi-humorously but not frivolously. By the time Hall and Tiexiera are starting to wrap things up, though, Subject has become problematic through the directors’ failure to acknowledge that they too are making a documentary. They may feel the producing credits on their film certify they’re 100% non-exploitative: Margaret Ratliff is named as a producer; Arthur Agee, Mukunda Argulo, Jesse Friedman and Ahmad Hassan are all co-producers. It’s not, however, as simple as that, as illustrated by a startling directorial choice that emerges late on. The closing contributions from Jesse and Lisa Friedman explain that they’re getting divorced. She can no longer cope with his chronic post-traumatic misery (‘I can’t sacrifice my whole life … I’m choosing my life over his life’). There’s no doubting this eleventh-hour revelation has impact and is poignant – both Jesse and Lisa are desperately sad about what’s happened to their marriage – but it’s jarring in a film that purports to be about the importance of not using real people as dramatic commodities. Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera presume that they’re outside the scope of their own inquiry but they presume wrongly.
4 May 2024
[1] Technically, Peterson became the legal guardian of Margaret and Martha after they were orphaned as teenagers.
[2] Jarecki did, however, make the short as well – Just a Clown (2004).