Back from two years of pandemic disruption, the 73rd Berlinale – from February 16 to 26, 2023 – offered cinephiles an awesome experience of recent films from all over the planet. My teaching career spanning two decades in the U.S. has been shaped by the annual trip to this great city thanks the bounty I collect to share with the students, since my first visit in 1985. Through the lens of the Berlinale I have seen contemporary history and politics unfold in its mess and complexity, from the allegorical works of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, to Latin American quirky auteurs to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The documentaries I saw, including the beautiful Sur l’Adamant, winner of the Golden Bear, would make an excellent CSUN Cinematheque series to complement the education of our emerging filmmakers in the newly launched documentary option in our undergraduate program.
Simplifying matters, as all teachers are bound to do after time spent in the teaching trenches, I live and die by John Grierson’s motto that documentary is the “creative treatment of actuality”. The films below show how ample and elastic the genre of non-fiction is, and how much the students can learn about the nuts-and-bolts of making one, through examining the five I was privileged to see in the various sections of the Berlinale. The range was wide: from small scale verité films – Sur l’Adamant, In Ukraine – to a slickly narrativized crowd-pleaser like Alex Gibney’s Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker; to political documentaries based on unseen television footage, like the Argentine El Juicio, and the well-meaning Superpower, directed by Sean Penn, about Volodymyr Zelensky.
Presented with this range, the students can experience, for example, how a well-crafted observational documentary makes it easier to absorb an immersive experience of a topic on the screen, in a strong contrast to the shock-and-awe of documentaries favored by Netflix and other streamers to please wider audiences.
El Juicio [The Trial] is entirely constructed from over 500 hours of television footage, made by Argentine public television ATC as a record of the trial in 1985 of the nine members of the military juntas, in power in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Only snippets of that footage were shown in news programs during the duration of the public trial, whose legal, political and ideological ramifications commingled then and today. An experienced filmmaker working on ethnographic and environmental issues, writer / director Ulises de la Orden jumps into a large-scale political documentary, funded, besides Argentine public and private sources, by the Ford Foundation, with support from the Sundance Institute, among other international contributors.
Political documentaries are tricky since they have to deal with truth, point of view and objectivity. In El Juicio the decision was made to tell the story not chronologically and contextualized, but thematically. There are 18 blocks, most of them based on the gripping testimony of witnesses attesting to the workings of clandestine detention centers. Their titles come from the testimonies themselves. These statements to the judges provide the tone and content of the film, emotional in nature, designed to elicit a passionate response from the audience, through an editing process that distills the original 500 hours to almost 180 minutes. The historical information is taken for granted – those who remember the trial and lived through those years like me – and in the case of the younger Argentine audience, its absence becomes an invitation to explore the subject outside of the film. In that sense, El Juicio is a gateway for the newer generations to investigate the 1970s – a civil war – and its aftermath – the military defeat in the Malvinas / Falkland War against Great Britain in 1982, triggered a return to the constitutional order.
The film is a welcome invitation, that deserves to be done right. In this sense, El Juicio is not a partisan film made more than four decades after the bloodbath of the 1970s, agitating for a leftist interpretation of Argentine history. Its scope is more modest, and, paradoxically, more important: to rescue an audiovisual historical record from a television archive. It can be compared to the Israeli documentary The Specialist. Portrait of a Modern Criminal (1999, dir. Eyal Sivan), about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, using the CBS footage of the proceedings. At the center of this documentary is, precisely, a villain – emblematic of the “banality of evil”, in the words of Hannah Arendt, who wrote about the trial for the New Yorker. In El Juicio, the villains are edited in such a manner that they are either pompous clowns or simply elided from the story. There is a dramatic imbalance in the plot, by making the villains absent, ciphers without context.
The Argentine docudrama / political crime film Argentina, 1985, based on the same historical event, but circumscribed to the perspective of the prosecution, falls into the same trap: the handling of the villains. The film is neither a full melodrama – accentuating the bad stuff of the characters – nor a powerful drama – in which the bad guys are either sort of nice people, like the Hitchcock villains, or complicated sinister figures. In both Argentine works, the military and their enablers are caricatures, ultimately weakening the impact of the story.For young filmmakers working on controversial historical matters, this is one of the lessons learned from El Juicio; eliminate or soft-pedal the villains at your peril. Reducing their significance is detrimental to the plot. The most important lesson, however, has to do with research, as discussed by Ulises de la Orden in much detail after the screening of the film: immerse yourself in the material, diligently, with discipline, and begin to carve out the story.
In Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker, Alex Gibney, who wrote and directed this two-part documentary for Apple TV + (only the first one was shown in Berlin), constructs a Janus-figure, both a hero and a villain combined in an almost Citizen Kane – kind of way. It is about the rise and fall of the German tennis player Boris Becker, a wunderkind who in 1985 at age 17 won the Wimbledon, the prelude to a remarkable tennis career in the 1980s and 90s, that came crushing down (sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, so to speak) and ended in jail for tax fraud. For Part 1, Gibney secured two key interviews with Becker, one in 2019 and another in 2022, before his conviction by a British Court. Excellent case studies on how to conduct an interview with a subject both charming and cagey, they frame the documentary’s extensive and entertaining use of archival materials and talking heads: fast paced rhythm; a great score and cool sound effects, including nods to the spaghetti western when tennis matches are shown; and knockout interviewees, like John McEnroe and Björn Borg, providing not only color commentary, but comic and dramatic insights into sports stardom.
As has been noted, Alex Gibney has a knack for capturing larger-than-life figures in fields fraught with corruption, risk and failure: Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room (2005); Zero Days (2016) and The Inventor, Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019). Boris Becker is in the same league. And like the equally excellent Unitas (2000), directed by Steve Seidman, the opening film in my documentary class, Gibney’s portrait of an athlete show us how extensive research, a knack for capturing the arc of a life in a compelling narrative, and a clever use of cinema’s techniques can make a film esthetically seductive. I didn’t know who Becker was, and now I can’t wait for part 2, to figure out the rise and fall of a modern athlete, a rascal of sorts sympathetically portrayed.
What a student of non-fiction cinema can observe in Gibney’s smart and engaging documentary is that which film does best, to engage the audience emotionally, in a style – boom! boom! boom! sound and visuals – that fits the theme to a tee. 
The situation in Ukraine is the subject of two very different documentaries, one observational, the other first person: In Ukraine, by the Polish directors Piotr Pawlus and Thomasz Wolski, and Superpower, directed by Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman.Strictly verité, In Ukraine is concerned with showing us what life is like in a war-torn country. It is interested in capturing the experience of the everyday since the Russian invasion a year ago – the lines for food, the shelters, the villages, the roads, the destroyed tanks (and people taking selfies with them). The Polish filmmakers set out to photograph “the horror, the horror”, with the “dull” parts left in, so to speak, or that state in between calm, anxiety, with the fear that intermittently grips those staying amidst the devastation. The war front itself is not the focus; it is the people and how they spend their days, all done through a static camera and takes long enough to let the viewer “sip” the moment.
Like good observational documentaries recording an event through time, we are pushed, vicariously, into the experience of disjointed lives. No interviews, or voiceover explanations, or maps, only the “here and now”. The focus is the Ukrainians and the carpetbombing that destroys their homes, land and subsistence. The virtues of a well-executed cinema vérité documentary are in plain sight. In Ukraine shows an emerging filmmakers, in 83 minutes, the payoff of recording and editing a collective story, without losing sight of what makes us human (yes, pettiness in a food line qualifies).
The challenges of documenting an event so well covered by daily news on television and cable, blogs and podcasts and print media are in plain sight also in Superpower, co-directed by Sean Penn. Its most curious feature is the mutation of documentary mode: it was originally an expository project featuring Ukraine’s president, an intriguing political figure to a Hollywood fellow actor. While in Kyiv waiting for an interview with Zelensky, Penn and his team were caught by the Russian invasion in February 2022. The documentary changed gears and became a first-person record (almost a home movie) about the team escaping to Poland in a van.
Sean Penn recounted the circumstances when he presented the film in the Berlinale. His celebrity wattage married political urgency and made him the interlocutor of President Zelensky in the opening ceremony of the festival, where the president delivered a salutation (with film references) via satellite from Kyiv. This onstage interjection of a Hollywood star in a world-affairs arena encapsulates Superpower: a documentary about a Hollywood activist making a documentary about Time’s Man of the Year. Like Icarus (2017), another instance of genre mutation, and a more skilled handling of its political subject – Sean Penn makes himself the story, at the expense of the relevant interviewees - government officials, politicians, reporters, activists – he has access to. What we see is a well-intentioned Hollywood actor playing the role of war reporter, Hemingway style, offering platitudes as political commentary. A saving grace, though, is the wealth of archival materials mixed to the escape footage, beginning with the Maidan Uprising of 2013 - so well covered in the vérité Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom (2015) - and providing a solid profile of Zelensky, the comedian and satirist become politician.
Finally, the jewel of the crown: Nicolas Philibert’s Sur l’Adamant, winner of the Golden Bear, a spectacular low-key self-effacing instance of cinema vérité that clings to the soul.The documentaries of Philibert attest to these observations: Le Pays des sourds (1992), Every Little Thing (1997), Être et avoir (2002, which I often use in class), Nénette (2009), and La Maison de la radio (2013), among the ones that have circulated internationally. Even the whimsical Nénette, where Philibert observes the daily routine of a 40-year-old orangutan against a soundtrack with comments and conversations of visitors refracted in the glass, his documentaries reflect an interest in the ordinary world, in the functioning of communities – a rural school, deaf children, a mental hospital, a radio station – from an observational vantage point.
One can compare Philibert with Frederick Wiseman, the king of the rigorous observational documentary in the English-speaking world, and yet, both filmmakers could not be more different in tone and sensibility. Wiseman is attuned to the workings of institutions, slowly but sharply revealed. He is interested, as Manohla Dargis has noted, in “how these institutions reflect the larger society and what they reveal about human behavior, toggling between the general and the specific”. Philibert’s approach seems less controlled, open to the mystery and serendipity of the everyday in communities, gracefully going where his subjects take the film. The loving gaze of the camera dwells on the uniqueness of these groups, and no larger issues are probed. The program notes of the Philibert retrospectives at MoMA, the Pacific Film Archive and the Harvard Film Archive, between 2003 and 2005, after the international success of Être et avoir, perfectly explain Sur l'Adamant, two decades later. The documentary reflects the director’s view of life from a humanistic lens, and his film strategy – patient observation, sensitivity, humor and great respect – as key to apprehend the human experience in its variety.
L’Adamant is a daycare center for outpatients in treatment by mental health facilities in the Paris region. It is located on a welcoming wide boat tied to a pier on the Seine river, in the center of the city. The place, the patients and psychiatric personnel come into focus very slowly and movingly. The portraits of those seeking care, through artistic activities (drawing, painting, singing, a film club) are finely etched by a camera that is both friendly and probing. It is a testament to Philibert’s skills that this low-key, non-invasive approach yields great insights into the peculiar workings of minds of people marching to the tune of their own drum. Never made explicit, this approach is, one feels, grounded in the Gospel.
Sur l’Adamant should sail into American shores, pushed by the winds of the Berlinale award. Another great vérité winner did a few years ago, Fuocoammare / Fire at Sea (2016), directed by Gianfranco Rosi. If any of the five documentaries presented here could make it to the classroom, this is a key one to show how documentary interviews and a camera that manages to stay “invisible” can reveal the human in any person.
Notes
https://harvardfilmarchive.org/programs/nicolas-philibert-five-films, accessed March 11, 2023.
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