Film review

  • Subject

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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).

  • What Happened, Miss Simone?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Liz Garbus (2015)

    It’s not unusual nowadays – when, say, a celeb gets a 10 on Strictly or an Ordinary Person wins professionals’ plaudits on Masterchef – for the happily incredulous recipient to ask/exclaim, ‘Like, what happened?!’  The question that gives this Netflix documentary its title is neither rhetorical nor euphoric.  Part of a quote, used by Liz Garbus as an epigraph, from a 1970 Maya Angelou essay, the question really means, ‘What went wrong?’  It’s an apt title, for two reasons.  First, plenty of viewers (this one included) will start watching Garbus’s film with an idea that Nina Simone (1933-2003) belongs in the artiste maudit category but with only a vague idea as to why.  Second, the generous supply of interviews with Simone featured in What Happened, Miss Simone? is enough to make viewers feel the question is being addressed to the woman herself.  The several answers to it that the film supplies, come from various other talking heads but also, in no small part, from Simone’s own seeming candour in these interviews.

    Born in North Carolina, the sixth of eight children, Eunice Kathleen Waymon played piano in church in her early years and showed precocious talent.  At her first classical recital at the age of twelve, she refused to continue playing until her parents, who had been made to give up their seats for white people in the audience, were allowed to return to the front row.  Eunice developed an ambition to be recognised as the first female African-American classical pianist, a keen awareness of racism and, related to both those things, a sense of isolation from both Black and white contemporaries.  Although her family was poor, funds were raised locally to allow her to pursue her musical studies, at high school and, for a short time, at Juilliard, where she prepared for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.  She was always convinced that Curtis rejected her application on racist grounds and always disappointed not to fulfil her chief ambition:  she was big enough to play Carnegie Hall but still regretted she wasn’t playing Bach there.

    Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone when she got a job playing piano at an Atlantic City night club in the mid-1950s.  Her new name – the ‘Nina’ from Spanish for ‘little girl’, the ‘Simone’ in honour of Simone Signoret – was primarily a disguise:  she was playing ‘the devil’s music’ and knew her parents would disapprove.  The night club management insisted that she sing, too.  Thanks to her extraordinary contralto voice, her career as a jazz and blues performer soon took off:  her first hit single in the US, in 1958, was her version of ‘I Loves You, Porgy’.  What Happened? doesn’t make clear exactly when the Waymons learned about their daughter’s new identity or what they thought of it.  There’s no mention either of her short-lived marriage to a white man called Don Ross but her second husband, an African American, is a major figure in the narrative.  When Simone first met Andrew Stroud, he was an NYPD vice squad officer; soon after they married in 1961, he became her manager – a resourceful, energetic manager, to put it mildly.  Stroud claims in the film that it was he who made the 1963 Carnegie Hall engagement happen; Simone claims that he overworked her.  There’s no doubt that he also beat her.

    The couple’s only child, Lisa, born a year after her parents married (and an executive producer on the film), recalls an incident in their car when her father smacked her mother in the face and made her head bleed.  Interviewed in 2006 (he died in 2012), Stroud breezily explains that the head wound was caused by his ring; when they got home, he patched his wife up and the wound healed after a day or two – he’s rather proud of his first-aid skills.  He got increasingly fed up, though, with Simone’s passionate involvement in the Civil Rights movement and its growing influence on her music, including ‘Mississippi Goddam’, the song she wrote in response to the racist murders in 1963 of Medgar Evans and of the four Black girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombings in Birmingham, Alabama.  Al Schackman, her long-serving, highly valued guitarist and loyal friend, recalls that Simone told Martin Luther King to his face, ‘I am not non-violent!’  Garbus leaves open the question of how much this propensity for aggression was fuelled by rage at white American racist brutality, how much a kind of compensation for Andrew Stroud’s abuse of her.  What clearly emerges is that Lisa, particularly in her teenage years, was on the receiving end of verbal and physical violence from her mother.

    Malcolm X and his wife Betty Shabazz were the Stroud family’s neighbours in Mount Vernon, New York (Garbus interviews two of the Shabazz daughters) and Simone, largely through her involvement in Civil Rights, rubbed shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes et al.  Becoming part of this Black cultural elite was surely gratifying, given her original musical aspirations; at the same time, her uncompromising politics and some of her public behaviour turned Simone into a property too hot for the conventional entertainment world to handle.  She was in effect exiled from the rewards enjoyed by soul sisters of the next generation like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, from a degree of security and a status that, according to Andrew Stroud at any rate, Simone continued to covet.  Her financial situation wasn’t helped when she and he divorced in the early 1970s.  She asserts in one of the interviews that, as her manager, Stroud held the purse strings and left her with nothing.

    Al Schackman remembers that, from very early in her professional career, before marriage or political activism, ‘something was eating at’ Nina Simone.   What that something was, is a mystery that persists for most of the film.  In the mid-seventies, after leaving for good what she now called ‘the United Snakes of America’, Simone lived in Liberia; she describes her time in Africa as the realisation of a dream but it didn’t last long.  From her early forties to the end of her days, she made her home in Europe – Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, France again.  What Happened, Miss Simone? begins with footage of her performing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976 – or on the verge of performing.  She waits until the packed house is completely silent before she’s prepared to begin; as she gazes out at the audience, she seems both disengaged and disoriented.  By the time Garbus reprises this sequence, at the appropriate point in her chronologically ordered narrative, Simone’s attitude on the Montreux stage is just the latest example of her bizarre behaviour or remarks.  Following MLK’s assassination in April 1968, she speak-sings an elegy, in which she asserts that ‘they are killing us one by one’.  The ‘us’ include, as well as King and Malcolm X, Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry.  Since both the latter died of cancer, it’s a puzzle as to who ‘they’ are.

    It’s not until the early 1980s when Simone is at her lowest ebb – musically, financially and psychologically – that another loyal friend, a Dutchman called Gerrit de Bruin, takes her in hand, setting her up in a new home in Nijmegen.  A doctor diagnoses bipolar disorder and prescribes Trilafon.  While it’s fair enough for Liz Garbus to delay this important medical revelation, she downplays some of Simone’s other demons to the point of omission.  Watching the film, I was struck that the protagonist didn’t seem to have what you think of as the usual drink-and-drugs dependencies.  You don’t need to Google for long to discover that in fact she did – that booze in particular was behind some of her eccentricity as a performer:  in Paris in the early 1980s, says Wikipedia, she was ‘Often … too drunk to sing or play the piano properly’.  Lisa Simone’s testimony notwithstanding, Garbus also downplays what Wikipedia euphemistically terms Nina’s ‘volatility’.  There’s nothing, for example, about an ‘incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier at gunpoint to take back a pair of sandals she’d already worn’ or the suspended jail sentence she received in 1995,  when ‘while living in France, she shot and wounded her neighbor’s son with an air gun after the boy’s laughter disturbed her concentration and she perceived his response to her complaints as racial insults’.  Even so – and even though Liz Garbus’s film-making isn’t formally imaginative – the assemblage of archive footage, photographs and music is more than enough to ensure that What Happened? is always compelling.

    In 1987, Simone’s popularity unexpectedly revived, thanks to the Chanel advert accompanied by her version of ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’.  With the notable exception of the air gun incident, her last years seem to have been relatively pacific even if her medication was a mixed blessing.  Gerrit de Bruin and other friends who made sure she kept taking Trilafon knew it would gradually impair her motor skills and cause slurring of her speech.  Two of What Happened, Miss Simone?’s highlights are her piercing, exhilarating renditions, both from the late 1960s, of  ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ (Simone’s own composition, named for a collection of Lorraine Hansberry’s writings) and ‘Ain’t Got No, I Got Life’ (which Simone devised from two numbers in Hair).  It’s a shame to think that, on an emotionally more even keel, she eventually lost her startling ardency as a performer.  It’s something of a relief, too, though, if Nina Simone herself felt less wretched, and less angry, as a result.

    30 April 2024

Posts navigation