Documentary gems: The 2023 World Poll of "Senses of Cinema".

In the issue 108, January 2024, of the Australian online magazine "Senses of Cinema", I published al list of documentaries I viewed in 2023. 

I have been reviewing documentary submissions for the Social Impact Media Awards for a few years. It is an annual competition run by the non-profit organization SIMA Studios, that also curates and distributes documentaries and media projects.
 
Here are 6 above par documentaries, richly deserving promotion and a worldwide audience.  
 

Al Djanat / Le paradis original  

Dir. Chloé Aïcha Boro, France, 2023

 

In this first-person documentary, Burkina Faso director Chloé Aïcha Boro, based in France, takes up the exploration of the self, as a woman split between cultures, religions and worldviews. She is also a synecdoche because her family in Dédoughou, Burkina Faso, represents a large swath of francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam coexists with animism, and is engaged in a complicated relationship with the West and modernity – a world richly explored by Ousmane Sembène and Abderrahmane Sissako. Shot over five years, it follows the daily lives of her extended family, recording conversations where polygamy and the role of women in an Islamic society are recurrent.  The director intervenes as a voiceover, commenting on a culture she knows from the inside – her original paradise - and yet appraising it from a distance.  It is a conflict she cannot resolve, well captured in the umbilical cord ceremony and the function of the “griottes”, the women who keep an oral singing record of family and culture.  
    Shown at Fespaco (Burkina Faso) and Visions du Réel (Switzerland) in 2023.
  

  Battleground: The Fight for the Future of  Abortion in America 

  Dir. Cynthia Lowen, U.S., 2023

 

Battleground is a piece of long form journalism designed to describe how political and religious pro-life groups worked for decades to revert Roe v. Wade, the 1972 Supreme Court ruling that adumbrated a right to abortion considered implicit in the U.S. Constitution.  Embedded in the organizations Students for Life, the Susan B. Anthony List and San Francisco Pro-Life, Lowen follows three charismatic female leaders. Their grassroots work is framed by a recording of evangelical leaders pledging support to Donald Trump. The conservative Christian vote was key to his win in the 2016 election. Eschewing a narrator, the contours of the battleground are clearly delineated: two diametrically opposed views about abortion, the human rights issue of our times. But unexpectedly, the pro-abortion arguments espoused by the documentary come up short, intellectually and morally, when engaging with pro-life ideas. In a surprising volte face, Battlegroundultimately becomes a persuasive explanation of why life inside the womb is human and matters. 
    Shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2022.

              Eat Bitter 

             Dir. Pacale Appora- Gnekindy, Ningyi Sun, 

              Central African Republic / US / Canada                   /Netherland / Kenya, 2023

 

Eat Bitter unfolds over several months in Bangui, the capital of the landlocked Central African Republic, where a Chinese contractor is building a bank with local workers. Briskly shot and edited with a killer score by Cal Freundlich, the film observes the contractor interacting in a foreign culture and the young African workers he employs, who dream of a better life.  The story is built with the tools of fiction cinema – à la Nanook of the North – including a skillful use of dramatizations. (I hesitate to use “reenactments” because it would give the idea that spontaneity is absent. Quite the opposite).  The camera is the real asset here, always in a good spot to catch character revelation and conflict.  Fresh, engaging and movingly insightful, the last two scenes push the documentary into a philosophical dimension: what is a life well lived.
 
                Landshaft 

                Dir. Daniel Kötter, Germany/Armenia, 2023
 

Essayistic and intimate, without a first-person narrator, nor drama on screen or a thesis to develop, and no characters to follow, Landshaft, or “landscape”, is a startling documentary about the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. “What is not filmed and is not seen” is its subject, noted the director. The conversations are divorced from the images, and they only match when the viewer slowly puts them together. People are shown from far away or framed without their faces. Stunning cinematography, hypnotic long takes, recurrent motifs dotting the landscape (a beaten-up Lada car, long freight trains) and free flowing comments and memories about war by ordinary people function like pieces of a puzzle.  In the ten-minute final sequence– the director shot at eye level an unruly flock of sheep descending on a village– the meaning of the film is encapsulated in an oblique yet tangible manner.
    Shown at Visions du Réel (Switzerland) in 2023.
 
              La memoria infinita / The Eternal Memory 

              Dir. Maite Alberdi, Chile, 2023
 

At first sight, this observational film, shot from 2018 to 2022, about a married couple dealing with the husband’s Alzheimer’s, looks like a medical project. Confined to the couple’s home, the wife took over the camera in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The protagonists are well-known, intelligent and camera-savvy figures in Chile’s cultural and political landscape. Layered over this diary-style record of a person’s failing memory, is a meditation on aging, and the preservation of historical memory: Augusto Góngora is a journalist and TV critic whose professional goal has been to remember traumatic historical events during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The loving care of his wife Paulina Urrutia makes the tenderness of the relationship glow throughout the film. The couple’s personal and professional lives are shown through home movies, clips from the news, television shows and films. Wisely, The Eternal Memory avoids a chronological record of the illness’ progress, and organizes it around specific memories, building blocks that erase time and display the healing power of remembering.  Maite Alberdi’s work is characterized by patiently observing small worlds for a period of time – Tea Time (2014), Grown-Ups (2016) and The Mole (2020).  The “formula” is brilliantly, humanely at work here too.

   Shown at the Sundance Film Festival last January, 

   it won the World Cinema Documentary award. 

   A box-office hit in Chile, it had a limited theatrical    release in the U.S. in 2023.

             Mermaids of Africa

             Dir. William Collinson, South Africa, 2023

 

From its title, Mermaids of Africa is prima facie an ethnographic documentary about the beliefs of hunter-gatherers in a semi-desert territory (present-day South Africa), where the elements of nature, like water, are seen as deities. It is built, however, as a mutually exclusive counterpoint between the scientific view of two very articulate anthropologists who have studied the phenomenon of mermaids and water snakes as manifestations of ancient mythical beliefs connected to a dry area, in a culture untouched by Western rational thinking. On the other side are the native subjects who persuasively describe encountering mermaids and water snakes. The anthropologists conclude that scientific and mythical thinking are different orders of reality. From their Western perspective, they cannot pierce the phenomenon. The mythical is staged for the camera with realistic dramatizations of mermaids and snakes wrapped in an uncanny score.  One way into the mystery, the documentary suggests, is to understand that like Koyaanisqatsi poetically proposed in 1982, the world is out of joint. 

Source: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/world-poll/world-poll-2023-part-2/

 

 
 

 

El San Diego Comic Con 2024: una forma de carnaval

Del miércoles 25 de julio al domingo 29, Comic Con, la convención por excelencia de cultura popular en sentido amplio, se desarrolló en esta ciudad del sur de California, llegando a su nivel pre-pandemia de 135 mil visitantes.  Es un carnaval que bien ilustra la imagen de un torbellino que succiona cuanto se cruza por su camino, transformando objetos y personas en cosas disparatadas que luego escupe sin ton ni son: el auto retro de los Fantastic Four atravesando el escenario de Hall H, en el Centro de Convenciones; los edificios contiguos del Gaslamp District  literalmente “envueltos” de planta baja a terraza en lienzos publicitarios de películas y series, como Spongebob; disfraces imaginativos, muchos indescrifrables; “homeless” durmiendo en carpas precarias; juguetes de peluche tamaño baño; despliegue policial y de voluntarios para organizar el incesante hormiguero humano; cacofonía de sonidos; colas de cuadras; y un caos generalizado de olores y colores.
 

Harrison Ford gives the Red Hulk roar in Hall H

El clímax de Comic Con fue la presentación de Marvel, un show de una hora a todo trapo, mezcla de concierto de rock y circo, en el cual Kevin Feige, presidente de Marvel Studios anunció las cinco superproducciones para 2025 y 2026: Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts * (con un asterisco sin explicación por ahora), Fantastic Four: First Steps y los próximos dos Avengers - Doomsday y Secret Wars.  Luces psicodélicas, música estridente, 6, 500 fans enardecidos, la presencia insospechada de Harrison Ford y Robert Downey Jr, anunciados en papeles protagónicos. Un espectáculo bien coreografiado, combinando clips y breves conversaciones con los actores, parados en el escenario, sin el formato panel.
 

No hubo presentación de DC, el brazo de Warner Bros que alberga el universo de Batman,Superman y Wonder Woman, en Hall H. En reorganización económica desde que Warner devino Warner Discovery en 2022, el conglomerado no parece haber alcanzado todavía velocidad de crucero. Tampoco de Paramount, que debe haber gastado una fortuna publicitaria empapelando edificios con los programas de su plataforma; la empresa es objeto de una compraventa complicada desde hace varios meses. 
 
La relación entre Comic Con y Hollywood tiene un componente geográfico – Los Angeles, donde se cocina el bacalao desde los comienzos de la industria, queda a sólo 200 kilómetros - y otro de relaciones públicas y marketing.  Desde el desarrollo de las redes sociales a mediados de los 2000, quedó visto que la maquinaria publicitaria podía utilizar este evento para difundir masiva y globalmente sus productos.  Hubo ajustes en la última década para contrarrestar publicidad negativa de fans enojados y virales. Pero es el desnorte producido por la pandemia entre el 2020 y 2022, y el tumulto generalizado en Hollywood por los cambios de producción, distribución y exhibición, además de la aparición de un adversario accidental como la inteligencia generativa, quien ha replanteado la relación.  El éxito de Comic Con - más allá de la compra y venta de cómics, novelas gráficas, presencia de autores y exhibidores en el cavernoso Exhibition Hall – está predicado sobre la experiencia colectiva de ir al cine, en vez del consumo individual en espacio privado. De allí que como instrumento de marketing y publicidad Comic Con tiene que adaptarse a la realidad cambiante e inestable de Hollywood en la era digital. 

Fede Álvarez - Comic Con photo

Lo que no ha cambiado es la constancia eficiente con que Hollywood absorbe capital humano – gente creativa o de pericia tecnológica que viene de afuera, con un portafolio en sintonía con las necesidades globales de la industria.  Por eso fue interesante observar cómo Fede Álvarez, un uruguayo nacido en 1978, está en el pico de su carrera, completamente integrado al sistema, hablando sin acento, con gestos, modismos y vestimenta asociados a los directores “cool” de Hollywood. Personaje canchero, de pelo largo algo canoso, con vago aire de profesor, Fede Álvarez hizo el cortometraje Ataque de pánico. Marcianos en Montevideo en una Mac en 2009, que inmediatamente atrajo la atención de ejecutivos en Los Angeles cuando lo subió a YouTube.  Siendo su especialidad el cine de género – suspenso y horror, una constante de la industria  – Álvarez vino a San Diego para presentar Alien: Romulus, el último título de la “franchise” Alien, iniciada en 1979 por Ridley Scott. El panel que presidió fue vibrante, entretenido, incluyendo toques de terror – como la “invasión” de criaturas malintencionadas, manejadas por control remoto, y el reparto de esos esqueletos, de plásticos, con dedos alargados e instintos asesinos, al público de Hall H. (Detrás mío, un chiquito lanzó un aullido de terror).  Ridley Scott, productor del film, estuvo presente, haciendo preguntas en un video grabado para la ocasión. Brillante maniobra publicitaria dos semanas antes del estreno de la película.
 

La oferta en Comic Con es variada para quien no quiere o puede hacer colas nocturnas para entrar en Hall H al día siguiente. El “cosplay” une a grandes y chicos, y algunas de las fotos adjuntadas al artículo, muestran la variedad y creatividad de la oferta. Hay familias enteras con unidad temática, y no faltan bebitos recién nacidos en disfraz de Spider Man, Bumble Bee o mini-guerreros de las galaxias; aparecen también perros disfrazados. Atmósfera de carnaval y buena onda, a pesar del rebrote de Covid y el calor de verano.

Mash-up: Jedi Barbie

El pulso de la cultura popular también se puede tomar participando en los paneles que se ofrecen cada hora entre las 10 de la mañana y las 7 de la tarde, durante los cinco días de la convención.  De lo más interesante resulta siempre la Conferencia sobre el Arte de los Cómics, con profesores y expertos en todo tipo de temas, entre ellos manga, animé, artistas internacionales, géneros, estilos y el estado de la industria editorial.  
 
Con el prestigioso premio Inkpot – alusión al tintero de los dibujantes – se premió al animador y artista de cómics y novelas gráficas Juanjo Guarnido, un español nacido en 1967 y afincado en Paris, dos de cuyas publicaciones - la serie sobre el detective felino Blacksad y la ilustración secuencial de la segunda parte que inventa para la novela El Buscón de Quevedo - merecerían circular ampliamente por la Argentina, si es que ya no lo hacen. Viendo los dibujos de El Buscón en las Indias – versión original francesa publicada en 2019, traducida por Guarnido al castellano, “muy cuidadosamente”, según me dijo - se perciben la influencia y homenaje a Diego de Velázquez. 
 

Un grupo importante de paneles se dedica a recopilar diversos aspectos de la historia de los cómics en Estados Unidos, con figuras destacadas del arte y la industria, que dejan testimonio en mini-historias orales de este fenómeno cultural norteamericano y global. Hubo homenajes esta vez a Batman, en sus 85 años; a la serie SpongeBob Square Pants; homenajes a Stan Lee, organizador de universo Marvel, que hubiera cumplido cien años; al artista underground Harvey Pekar; al japonés Osamu Tezuka, influido por la obra de Disney en los años cuarenta y cincuenta; y al escritor Isaac Asimov. 
 
El fervor electoral norteamericano se coló en muchos paneles, con marcado tono anti-Trump. En el que festejaba la serie de Fox Los Simpson, su creador Matt Groening presentó un clip de Kamala Harris, ungida reciente del Partido Demócrata, de hace unos años, donde se la ve citando una frase de la serie. Recibió una ovación estentórea. 
 
Comic Con ofrece a sus miles de participantes, curiosos y entusiastas de la cultura popular – esa que criticaba la escuela de Frankfurt - una suerte de enciclopedia anárquica, cuya estructura desordenada, conexiones fortuitas y perplejos corredors hubiera quizás encantado a Borges.

Fotos de Jonathan Kuntz
 
Este artículo fue publicado por Ámbito, el diario argentino por quien me acredita como periodista el San Diego Comic Con, el 29 de julio de 2024. https://www.ambito.com/espectaculos/san-diego-celebro-esplendor-la-nueva-edicion-comic-con-n6040671

Alberto Isaac's "En este pueblo no hay ladrones (1965): Announcing the New Mexican cinema". Program notes for the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles screening, July 13, 2024

 

In 1964, a newspaper cartoonist who had been a swimmer in the 1948 and 1952 Mexican Olympic teams, entered his debut film in the First Contest of Experimental Cinema, sponsored by the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica, STPC, the union of the hierarchical film industry seeking to attract new talent to a fossilized field.  Winner of the second prize, En este pueblo no hay ladrones, which premiered in Mexico City in September 1965, would be the first of the 13 features Alberto Isaac, el “Güero” as he was affectionally called, directed until his death in the late 1990s (1).

Alberto Isaac

Two recent books published in Mexico celebrate the life and work of Alberto Isaac (1923-1998), firmly perceived to be a reference of Mexican culture in the 20^th century (2). A versatile artist, whose work includes cartoons, paintings and ceramics, Isaac took the pulse of Mexican popular culture, viewed from his native state of Colima and Mexico City, as his professional life developed in the 1960s around a group of intellectuals and artists proposing a renovation of Mexican cinema. Besides Isaac, names like Carlos Monsiváis, José de la Colina, Rafael Corkidis, Salvador Elizondo, Paul Leduc and Emilio García Riera would become the Mexican intelligentsia in cultural matters, and specifically film, for the next two decades. They proposed a new approach to Mexican film, one that favored realism and a space for political and social critique. They were influenced by European cinema – Italian neorealism and the French New Wave – as well as the vigorous anti-Hollywood examples of the New Latin American cinema of Brazil and Cuba. They formed the group Nuevo Cine, issued a manifesto and founded a journal (3). Their fervor and advocacy led to the creation of film preservation – the Cineteca Nacional - and cinema programs at the university level, like the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Autónoma, UNAM, with a Filmoteca attached, and the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (4).

 

It is not by chance, then, that Isaac’s En este pueblo no hay ladrones is emblematic of the call for renewal gripping Mexican cinema in the 1960s and the ensuing changes that unfolded when a new generation of filmmakers entered the scene in the following years: Arturo Ripstein, Paul Leduc, Felipe Cazals, Jaime Hermosillo and Jorge Fons (5). 
 

En este pueblo no hay ladrones was shot in 35 mm, in less than a month in Mexico City and the town of Cuautla in the state of Morelos. Critic and future film historian Emilio García Riera adapted with Isaac the short story by Guillermo García Márquez, included in the compilation Los funerales de Mamá Grande, published in 1962.  The jump to international literary fame of the Colombian 1982 Nobel prize winner would come three years later, in 1967, with the publication of Cien años de soledad. 

Gabriel García Márquez, left

The names of other collaborators in the project, playing cameos, makes for a fun film reference, since it is a collection of the names that would shape the Mexican cultural establishment of the next two decades: none other than Luis Buñuel, as a hell-fire-and-brimstone priest; the writer Juan Rulfo, the other key name of the Latin America literary boom, two of whose stories Isaac would adapt in his 1972 film El rincón de las vírgenes), filmmaker Artur Ripstein; painter Leonora Carrington; artist Luis Cuevas; critic Carlos Monsiváis and García Márquez himself, as the ticket taker in the town cinema. 
 
For those familiar with the narrative, genres and stars of Mexican cinema of the Golden Age – beautifully celebrated this month by the Academy Museum series “Damas de la pantalla: The Women of Mexico’s Época de Oro” – the contrast between these classics of the 1940s and 50s, spectacularly rendered in a Hollywood style, and En este pueblo no hay ladrones, with its realistic simplicity, could not be more glaring.  The aspirations of Nuevo Cine are captured in such a way that Isaac’s film has reached the status of a classic. And for students of cinema, a tangible example of how the golden age was giving way to a new artistic sensibility in the 1960s. is in front on their eyes.
 

Julio Pastor and Rocío Sagaón

The tropical setting of García Márquez’ Colombia is now Mexico, but the contours of the story, its characters and the idiosyncrasies of an isolated town are faithfully rendered in this journey from the word to the screen.  Dámaso, played by Julio Pastor (with a wink to the dapper bon vivant persona of Pedro Infante), has no job and relies on the work of his pregnant wife Ana (Rocío Sagaón), who washes and irons to subsist. He spends his days at the local pool parlor and bar, the only entertainment in town, until one day, at night, he steals the billiard balls, mostly out of boredom and thoughtlessness. An escalation of gossip, violence and xenophobia quickly leads to the apprehension of a passing stranger. Damaso’s involvement with a local prostitute, and a failed attempt to return the balls lead to a tragic fate.  

 

The film proceeds leisurely, more concentrated in the minute depiction of the characters thancreating drama and suspense. What is foregrounded, notes Carl J. Mora, is “the social examination of a small, poverty-stricken town where nothing ever happens.  Dámaso is seemingly the only resident who dreams of better things but is finally overcome by the stultifying inactivity of the town” (6).

 

Luis Buñuel as the town priest

What is interesting to note of how Isaac – with cinematographers J. Carlos Carbajal and Rafael Corkidi (uncredited), editor Carlos Savage and production designer José G. Jara - captures on location the provincial world that García Márquez was already building in his pre-One Hundred Years of Solitude. This unnamed town functions like Macondo, both a real and a mythical place.  The realistic setting of the film version is used as a jumping point to lay a second layer of meaning, as the town becomes emblematic of a place that is inescapable and circular, and where dreams are squashed.  In this space, between the real and the symbolic, En este pueblo no hay ladrones lays out its compassionate critique.  Even the blunt homily of Buñuel from the pulpit -which in his own films would be a merciless anti-clerical speech – is deflated by the stoic demeanor of the parishioners attending mass.
 

The Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles has programmed this beautiful digital restoration of a pivotal film in the history of Mexican cinema (7). If one makes a list of all the titles shown by the Cinemateca over the years – and certainly since 2004 when I started writing the program notes - one realizes how this institution, essential to preserve the film memory of Los Angeles, has passionately celebrated the history of Hispanic cinema in the Americas. 
 

Notes

(1)  David de Wilt. Profile of Alberto Isaac. https://www.grace.umd.edu/~dwilt/isaac.htm, accessed July 4, 2024.
 
(2)  Alberto Argüello Grunstein, “Alberto Isaac. El fluir d ela imagen en la práctica artística transmedial”. Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura / Centro Nacional de Investigación. Documentación e Información de Artes Plásticas, 2023. Online:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MWDwmo34KOjjr-YidgKq3-Ud4MvZ2-6W/view
Fernández Reyes, Amaury, comp. Alberto Isaac. A 100 años de su nacimiento (2024).
 
(3)  Carl. J. Mora, “Motion Pictures: 1960-1996”, in Michael Werner, Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico, Taylor & Francis Group, 2001, pp.509-512.
 
(4)  John King, Magical Reels. A History of Cinema in Latin America (1990), pp.132-133.
 
(5)  Isaac was the first director of the Instituto Mexicano de Cine, IMCINE, founded in 1983. For an assessment of the era, see Charles Ramírez Berg, Cinema of Solitude. A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967-1983 (1992), pp.46-47.
 
(6)  Carl J. Mora, Mexican Cinema. Reflections of a Society, 1896-1988. Revised edition, 1989, p.109.
 
(7)  This copy of En este pueblo no hay ladrones was made by the Digital Restoration Lab of the Cineteca Nacional, from a 35 mm acetate negative.  The film belongs to the collection of the Fundación Televisa.  The restoration is part of the preservation program of Mexican cinema, a joint effort of the Cineteca Nacional, the Filmoteca UNAM and the Fundación Televisa.
 

Additional sources

 
Joanne Hershfield, David Maciel, ed., Mexico’s Cinema. A Century of Film and Filmmakers (1999).
 
“Manifesto of the New Cinema Group (1961)”, and “Manifesto of the National Front of Cinematographers (1975)”, in Scott MacKenzie, Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology (2014).

Beatriz Reyes Nevares, The Mexican Cinema. Interviews with Thirteen Directors (1976).
 
Ronald Schwartz, Latin American Films, 1932-1994: A Critical Filmography (2005).

Alberto Isaac – Filmography as a director

  

1964    En este pueblo no hay ladrones 

1967    Las visitaciones del diablo

1968    Olimpiada en México, documentary  

1970    Fútbol México 70, semi-documentary

1971    Los días del amor

1972    El rincón de las vírgenes

1974    Tivoli

1976    Cuartelazo 

1977    Las noches de Paloma                       

1981    Tiempo de lobos 

1986    Mariana, Mariana

1988    Maten a Chinto! 

1994    Mujeres insumisas