An interesting documentary at this year’s Encounters festival raises issues at the core of documentary filmmaking. Called Grey Gardens, it is an obscure work by a legendary American duo, the Maysles brothers. The two came to prominence in 1970 when a murder they filmed inspired a landmark discussion about the responsibility of the filmmaker in conflict situations. In that year the brothers made Gimme Shelter, a record of a Rolling Stones concert in Altamont near San Francisco attended by 300 000 hysterical fans. During the event the Maysles kept their cameras rolling while the Hell’s Angels, hired as security staff, assaulted audience members, killing one. In the New Yorker magazine the United States’s foremost film critic, Pauline Kael, accused the two of colluding in the disorganisation of the concert. She claimed the whole debacle was ”staged and lighted to be photographed”. The audience she called, ”an unpaid cast of thousands”.Kael argued: ”It’s impossible to draw a clear line between catching actual events and arranging events to be caught. Would those events have taken place without those crews?”Next week’s festival gives South Africans a chance to interrogate this issue afresh. Not that our society hasn’t considered it before. For who can forget the security police using the same logic to ban crews from filming township violence in the 1980s?The re-released work by the Maysles was made in 1976. It is not a film about crowd hysteria, but it is about hysteria nevertheless. On the surface Grey Gardens is about two aging aristocrats, a mother and daughter, caught in a solitary life of emotional codependence. Edith Bouvier-Beale and her daughter Edie (close relatives of Jacqueline Onassis) lived in filth and squalor in a rambling, dilapidated mansion in a wealthy enclave on the US coast. They were the end of a line of class-conscious socialites. Grey Gardens is an examination of family madness and one gets the feeling, throughout its tense 94-minutes, that these eccentrics are indeed playing it up for the lens. At times they go so mad that there is palpable danger in the air. It is this sense of immediacy, shaky hand-held camera work and odd angles that characterises the movement known as cinema-vérité. As Kael wrote in her scathing attack, the aim is to catch subjects in their natural habitat. Yet, she pointed out, it is not impossible to set up a ”genuine” look at everyday life.Audiences are naturally bloodthirsty, and so documentary filmmakers tend to run cameras until a drama comes about. Somehow human nature never fails to deliver. Victor Kossakovsky’s 1992 exploration of a Russian peasant family is, in many ways, a partner to Grey Gardens. Belovy is about two aging siblings who live in poverty on the steppes. Their drudgery involves milking cows and tending a vegetable patch. Then, after work, they consume ample amounts of vodka while they bellow at full-throttle about the miseries of life.Ultimately, or so it seems, poverty stricken Anna and Vasily Belov of Russia share much in common with the aristocratic Bouvier-Beales. Or perhaps it is that documentary filmmaking has homed in on universal concerns. Without wanting to sound moralistic, it would appear that comfortable, middle-class audiences are hungry to understand behaviour beyond the pale of their imaginations. From the outset, it must be stressed that this year’s Encounters has moments of filmic brilliance beyond expectation. But be prepared for challenges. There is Nima Sarvestani’s wholly unstructured 2002 look at Iranian heroin addicts living in a cemetery in Tehran. By the time they’ve resolved to sell their kidneys and been rejected by a doctor, it feels like the end of the world.Then there’s My One Legged Dream Lover made by Australia’s Penny Fowler-Smith and Christine Olsen. This work features the disabled Kath Duncan who travels to the US to attend an amputee’s convention. At the convention she runs into a bunch called devotees — blokes exclusively attracted to women with missing limbs. Devotees have their own web sites and hound the high flying community of amputees in what could best be described as an offbeat act of sex tourism.While My One Legged Dream Lover sounds extreme, its quaint form serves to soften its shock-value.
Likewise, the current trend of rediscovering seminal works of porn has dredged up some fabulous love-fests from the Sixties and Seventies. Thorsten Schutte’s biography of Lasse Braun, I Was the King of Porn, has Europe’s former leading porn director saying some weird things. After claiming that women’s nerve endings are less sensitive than men’s Braun gets down to whipping a rather traumatised-looking girl tied to a pole.The festival features two premieres of local works. The first is Mandilakhe Mjekula and Jahmil Qubeka’s look at traditional circumcision in Qula Kwedini — A Rite of Passage, the other is Catherine Muller’s look at township rent boys in Looking for Love. Muller’s camerawork makes even the most dilapidated areas of Johannesburg sparkle and shine. Yet her subjects are sometimes off the wall. There are straight gangsters who believe that sleeping with men brings luck in crime. And there is a tragic episode in which a cross-dressing sangoma relates how he was raped as a child and how, when he reported this to his elders, they saw the fact as a sign from the ancestors that he would sleep with men for the rest of his life.It is the miniscule aspects of experience that bolster the documentary form. And as filmmakers dig deep, the illogical truths they uncover are often difficult to comprehend. In this way Encounters is not merely a festival — it is an education.
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