10. “Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun?
With Travis Wilkerson‘s eccentric, itchy excavation of a shameful episode in his family history we’re confronted with the unusual case of a film that would have been a lot less interesting had it succeeded in its original aim. Ostensibly, Wilkerson is looking to make some sort of cinematic redress for an appalling act committed by his appalling grandfather, SE Branch who in 1946 murdered a Black man by the name of Bill Spann in the Alabama store of which Branch was the owner. But Wilkerson’s search for any record of Spann’s life, or any surviving relatives comes up empty — and what was he going to do if he had found them? Apologize? In the teeth of that existential vacuum, there is nowhere for Wilkerson’s mea culpa impulse, that some might see as insufferable performative wokeness, to go, and so he ploughs it back into the telling of the telling of the story, into the xeroxed, negative-flipped, free-associative imagery he uses, and into his own gravelly, self-reflexive voiceover (the film was originally live-narrated by him at Sundance). It’s uneven and often overreaching, sometimes borderline self-parodic, but to watch him feel his way back into a haunted, post-modern past, accompanied by his hard-boiled, noirish voiceover feels like witnessing a Don DeLillo novel unfold. And it exonerates Wilkerson from the film’s obvious potential pitfall of white saviordom, because this white guy is not provided anything to save. Wilkerson remains unforgiven because there’s no one left with the power to relieve him of his residual guilt, making ‘Did You Wonder’ one of the truest explorations of the unbridgeable gulf between racism’s immediate victims and even its most distant beneficiaries. Available now on iTunes.
9. “Crime + Punishment” [Review]
The story of the NYPD 12 — 12 officers of color who sued the department for illegal quota enforcement — is exactly the sort of racially-charged, socially-relevant news story that lends itself to documentary investigation. But the story of Stephen Maing‘s “Crime + Punishment” is really only half the story: the polished, premeditated presentation of this knotty, far-reaching tale of injustice, corruption, whistleblowing, and its repercussions is just as remarkable. Maing follows a few members of the 12 as they struggle with their superiors and with being dubbed “rats,” as well as the mother of a young Black man unfairly targeted by the covertly condoned racist quotas and an ex-cop-turned-investigator working on his behalf. But it’s how Maing, who is also the film’s DP, shoots and edits the footage, gathered over several years, that sets his film apart from the standard expose. From high floating drone shots, that make the city looks like a toy town beneath fluffy-clouded skies, to slick, street-level, nighttime sequences, to interview segments that feel more like portraiture than talking-heads, Maing co-opts just enough noirish glamor, accentuated by the occasional saxophone blare or soul song, to make cinematic heroes of these principled men and women. This is a bigger feat than you might imagine: the courtroom scenes are anticlimactic, there are no shootouts and the most dramatic active police work we see is a moment of de-escalation. But that relative calm is exactly the point: quotas are evil in part because they rely on a (white) population’s fear of a violent crime wave that simply doesn’t exist. By the close of the film some gains are made, but the long dark night of the soul for the NYPD is far from over, yet as Dostoevsky wrote in the book that gives it its name, “The darker the night, the brighter the stars,” and Maing’s glimmering doc gives its stars some deserved, if muted, shine. Available now on Hulu.
8. “El Mar La Mar”
It’s clear that the filmmaking alumni of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab — a name as portentously cumbersome as some of its wilfully obscure creations — take very seriously their remit to expand and innovate non-fiction cinematic forms It has given us Lucien Castaing-Taylor‘s broodingly immersive “Leviathan” and his borderline unwatchable “Caniba,” along with Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez‘ sublime “Manakamana” and JP Sniadecki’s clanging, rattling railroad dream “The Iron Ministry.” Sniadecki has left the Lab, and though its experimental ethos is still present in his new film, co-directed with Joshua Bonnetta, its intense topicality makes it possibly the most accessible offshoot yet, speaking very relatively. “El Mar La Mar” feels like it was made not by people, with our usual rhythms and expectations, but by a place — specifically by the Sonoran desert in which it is set, here imagined as a stretch of literal no man’s land rendered in unpeopled landscapes. The only human sounds are the disembodied voices of those who travel across it — immigrants, activists, border patrol agents — telling their stories to the listening desert. It is an essay in liminality, not just geographical, being set in the parched (but also somehow livid) terrain where one nation ends and another begins, but also in aesthetic approach, with almost frighteningly dense soundscapes engulfing images so abstract that they are at the very limit of decipherability, only to gradually resolve into something recognizable — a lava flow, a match flare, a discarded sandal camouflaged against the sandy earth. The wilfully enigmatic visual language becomes even more opaque in an epilogue that devolves and degrades into grainy black-and-white footage of an oncoming lightning storm, while a voice reads a poem on the soundtrack, but as oblique as it is, there is a compelling, non-human, or perhaps hyper-human soulfulness that infuses wonder into this sad, strange, unavoidably political excursion out to the edge of everything.
7. “Infinite Football” [Review]
The widely quoted aphorism “most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go their graves with the song still in them” is popular presumably because it contains a sad-eyed truth about fulfillment not found and potential untapped, phenomena to which Laurentiu Ginghină, the subject of Corneliu Porumboiu‘s droll, deceptive documentary, is no stranger. But the saying is also a con-job: a faux-poetic mash-up of Thoreau and a bit of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a mongrel heritage that somehow makes it more, not less applicable to Porumboiu’s irresistible, eccentric project. Colliding political allegory, football fandom, Romanian bureaucracy, superhero myths and hangdog biography, “Infinite Football” should be a hotchpotch but is instead a work of surprisingly honest and humorous lyricism, albeit painted in institutional grays, in which Ginghină’s increasingly convoluted plans for the total overhaul of the Beautiful Game come to symbolize all the beautifully impractical aspirations that can be harbored in the hearts of the otherwise disappointed. Static, wilfully ugly shots of dog-eared flipcharts and drab offices, contrast with the wild flights of fancy from the monologuing Ginghină, who is interrupted every now and then by a quizzical, skeptical but never condescending Porumboiu. Even before an epilogue that takes us into overtly poetic territory, and whether or not you care to read some manner of political parallel into his gradually revealed life story, Ginghină’s owlish sincerity sells us on the oddball nobility of this fabulously quixotic hobby of his. Funny, moving and as defiantly idiosyncratic as an octagonal football pitch, this is ultimately an admiring, if not a little heartbroken portrait of a downtrodden man determined, despite all that desperation, not to go to the grave with his loopy, ludicrous song unsung.
6. “Free Solo” [Review]
You’re not supposed to look down, but what if you climb so high you practically run out of up? Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi are no strangers to high places having previously directed the brilliant “Meru” (in which Chin was one of the climbers). But their record of their rope-free friend Alex Honnold‘s preparations to tackle his personal White Whale — the 3,000 foot, dauntingly smooth, sheer granite rock face known as El Capitan, deep in Yosemite National Park — is on a whole different level, even before a brilliantly constructed final act which records his dizzying ascent with a clarity and intricacy that is its own incredible feat of agility. Honnold is an engaging, if almost bizarrely calm presence on screen — something perhaps related to his low amygdala activity, which is noted at one point by a doctor and indicates an unusual lack of fear. But it’s hard to tell if his psychology, as well as his lean, wiry physicality, is the chicken or the egg: is he like this because he climbs or does he climb because he’s like this? With loved ones supporting him without necessarily understanding his drive, something Honnold himself seems to consider as natural as breathing, a lot of the drama of the film emanates not from the revered free-climber’s air of Zen-like detachment, but from family, girlfriend and the filmmakers themselves, who have to respond to Honnold’s practical concerns about camera placement and potential distraction while being personally daunted by the knowledge that at any moment the footage they’re shooting could take a turn for the snuff. You’ll already know if you’re watching “Free Solo” that that does not happen, but it won’t stop your heart from somersaulting into your throat via your semi-circular canal repeatedly for the last 20 minutes. Available for pre-order through iTunes and Amazon.
