Four documentaries at the 75th Berlinale

The documentaries spanning all sections of the Berlinale have always been interesting and wide ranging.  One gets a sense of how the “creative treatment of actuality”, in John Grierson’s always handy description, has fared from one year to another.  The flexibility of the genre is palpable in the four documentaries I saw these past days: The first-person historical compilation All I Had Was Nothingness; two observational documentaries about war-torn Ukraine, Timestampand Time to the Target; and an American essay film, Evidence.
 

In 1985 I had the opportunity to view the complete Shoah – the nine-and-a-half-hour oral history of the Holocaust made over 12 years by Claude Lanzmann. It was an experience I never forgot, not the least because the screening over several days took place in the very city where the logistics of the hecatomb were planned and implemented. Also striking was that Shoah did not show any historical footage, à la Night and Fog (1956); it only featured interviews with survivors and perpetrators, and B-roll, some of which was obtained with hidden cameras. Or, using deception, as Lanzmann wryly described in a Berlinale appearance in the 2010s, for the screening of The Last of the Unjust.

For Shoah’s 40the anniversary, the festival premiered in Berlinale Special Je n’avais que le néant: Shoah par Lanzmann / All I Had Was Nothingness. Guillaume Ribaud, a French photographer whose interest in history led to writing books on dark chapters of the 20^th century, was given access to Lanzmann’s archive by his widow Dominique, who is also one of the two producers. Ribot reviewed over 220 hours of outtakes and materials not used in Shoah and his last Holocaust project The Four Sisters (2018). The editing is organized around Lanzmann’s 2009 memoir Le lièvre de Patagonie (The Patagonian Hare, trans. 2012), which Ribot reads as a first-person voiceover.  The narration cleverly works at two levels: it is a referential text about the complicated research over a decade to find the interviewees; but it also comments about the challenges of a project whose point of departure was the “All I had was nothingness” of the title, coming straight from Lanzmann.  The interplay between the expository mode and the self-referential approach to its conditions of production and ethical dilemmas makes All I Had Was Nothingness a superb coda to Shoah.  The documentary also unfolds as road movie of sorts, since much of the material selected is of Lanzmann driving to interview his subjects, talking to the camera about the peculiar nature of this work, the presentation of “the horror, the horror”.   

Screened in the Forum Time to the Target and Timestamp, written and directed by Vitaly Mansky and Kateryna Gornostai are complementary takes on the impact of the 3-year war Ukraine is fighting against Russia. In both films the approach is cinéma verité, never easy to implement, requiring time, timing, patience and more than a modicum of luck. Mansky crafts a 3-hour love letter to Lviv, his hometown, relatively far from the battlefront. With a very small team and a camera both inquisitive and respectful, with an eye for details, 

Time to the Target is a mosaic of people, old and young, military and civilians, maimed soldiers and priests, in a wide range of situations captured over a year. Death, destructions and funerals are regularly brought from the background to provide narrative continuity and a visual and sound frame. Interviews are few and far between, well selected and edited to seize the fundamentals of a permanent state of war and its impact on ordinary people.  A profound sense of beauty - physical and spiritual - permeates the film, creating an immersive experience for the non-Ukrainian audience, that generates empathy.  In this sense, Time to the Target functions as a strategy of truth, showing the world the resilience and determination of a beleaguered city, a synecdoche for the whole country. 
 

Timestamp has a similar impetus, but its focus is one year in the life of several schools far and close to the battlefront. The vérité approach serves it well, and it shares with Time to the Target a similar sensibility to beauty in its physical and spiritual dimensions.  Here, the teachers as beacons of strength and normality ground the story, fulfilling a patriotic mission, the preservation of the nation’s history and culture. 
 
Viewing these two films, I was reminded of another Ukrainian documentary, the semi-experimental Rule of Two Walls(2024), directed by the Ukrainian-American David Gutnik. It captures the experience of war as lived and thought through by several artists precisely in Lviv and Kviv.  One recognizes, a patriotic sensibility looking to consolidate a national identity threatened by an imperial invader.
 

Finally, my two cents about Evidence, a well-crafted example of the essay film, written and directed by Lee Anne Schmitt, a filmmaker based in Altadena, and probably affected by the devastating Easton fire of a month ago.    
 
The essay film has gained wide recognition as a specific, if eminently plastic, mode of film practice. It is a hybrid that is neither “purely fiction, nor documentary, nor art film, but incorporates aspects of all these modes”, as noted by Nora Alter in The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction (2018, p.4). From a purely film history angle, Evidence is designed as a piece of agit-prop, in the mold of the Soviet Russian filmmakers of the 1920s.
 

Schmitt’s subject is the role played by the John M. Olin Foundation, set up by the chemical company Olin Corporation, in the financing of conservative institutions and programs in the U.S.  The director builds the air-tight narrative characteristic of the agit-prop, by laying a first-person narrator over images purposefully unrelated to the topic. This editing strategy is visually arresting, in the style of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, but the downside is that it preaches to the choir.  If the counterpoint to Evidence had been a documentary about the Ford or the Soros foundations, leaders in funding progressive causes, the effect would have been the same: another choir, similar impact. Lee Anne Schmitt’s documentary is exhibit one that ideologically-driven projects – whatever its politics – face limitations.