Hiding all over the world: Hot Docs 2011

The 2011 edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival draws to a close today in Toronto, where the belated arrival of spring has failed to lure filmgoers away from lining up and huddling into theatres throughout the city. I’m at least sitting near a sun-warmed window as I write this, my report on some of the festival’s highlights, in a quiet converted coach house deep in Parkdale, hidden off Sorauren Avenue, where it’s slightly easier to reenter my unlikely to ever be realized fantasy of hiding from the world altogether.

The hermits, monks, freaks, fascists, dropouts, druggies and survivalists of French filmmakers Laure Flammarion and Arnaud Uyttenhove’s Somewhere to Disappear, all of them male, all of them American, all of them unmistakably incurable misfits of one kind or another, have gone to greater lengths to hide from the world than most of us could ever fathom. Flammarion and Uyttenhove’s film is the product of a protracted road trip with US photographer Alec Soth, who has forged an ongoing project out of making portraits of those who have attempted to fall off the grid, nearly all of whom, ironically, are more than happy to be photographed and to talk about their lives once tracked down in their hovels, shacks, caves and campsites. Soth spends part of Somewhere to Disappear shopping around for a remote piece of land of his own, yet he confesses that what appeals to him is not genuine escape from civilization but “the idea of escape.” He’s an artist, not a recluse. He wants to get a lost a little, “to be carried along,” yet he keeps a GPS on the dashboard of his minivan. He’s our surrogate, cruising the outer margins to convey the eerie allure and obvious hazards of life lived in rejection of all we take for granted. The filmmaking in Somewhere to Disappear is (perhaps inevitably) grubby, lacking the distinct highly personal perspective, craft and precision of Soth’s work, but it ultimately serves its theme very well, evoking a sense of rough roads rarely taken, rabbit holes in a world hard at work to keep its every corner tracked and measured, hovering in cyberspace.

Bobby Fischer tried to hide from the world, but it’s not so easy to pull off when you’re the greatest chess player in history, an ideological pawn in Cold War one-upmanship, and quite probably, and flamboyantly, mentally ill. Liz Garbus’ Bobby Fischer Against the World attempts to map out Fischer’s story, his peculiar and precarious sort of single-minded genius, his uneasy relationship with fame and urge toward isolation, his erratic behaviour and the grotesque politics he adopted late in life. She doesn’t entirely succeed, utilizing a treasure trove of archival images and footage and drawing upon a number of fascinating interviews with Fischer’s colleagues, but arranging these pieces into a somewhat muddy narrative arc that more than once abandons the path it seems briefly invested in. If you don’t know chess deeply, the film doesn’t help you much, and once it does begin to offer some insights, it does so only after working through the period in Fischer’s life when understanding chess is most useful. The general style of this HBO production is perfectly conventional, though, given the amount of biographical information and cultural context it wants to convey, its structure finally feels not quite conventional enough. Still, Fischer’s a fascinating figure who couldn’t resist the opportunity to expose some parts of his troubled psyche to the public, so the film, flawed or not, is very much worth watching.

The Forgotten Space (pictured both above and in the lead-off image), easily the finest work I caught at Hot Docs this year, is a collaboration between photographer Allan Sekula and theorist Noël Burch, a sort of follow-up to Sekula’s 1995 book Fish Story. This “film essay,” shot on both Super 16mm and digital video, traverses the world to investigate the global transportation industry, so much of which remains hidden or invisible to consumers, exploits labour, and undercuts the economies of developing countries. Sekula and Burch are especially interested in sea transport, in the “floating warehouses” that, for example, carry cod from the North Atlantic to China for cheap filleting and then sends it back again, or moves American wastepaper to recycling factories in the developing world. 90% of the world’s commerce travels by sea, packed into shipping crates than renders the cargo anonymous, unloaded in yards where its shuffled around by robots and rarely inspected, even in the post-9/11 US. As an elegantly structured critique of late capitalism whose visual refrain is an image of ships sailing onward, it’s tempting to think of The Forgotten Space as the coherent version of Godard’s Film Socialisme, but this is finally a very distinct, arguably singular kind of film, its discourse so thoroughly grounded in interviews (with laborers, with historians, with the homeless) that you occasionally forget how exactingly conceived it all is.

Art in America: Terry Zwigoff's portraits of infamous or insufficiently famous men, their problematic legacies and vanishing worlds, return on DVD

Terry Zwigoff had played in a band and been close friends with legendary American cartoonist Robert Crumb for over two decades before finishing Crumb (1995), and it makes you wonder if more documentary filmmakers shouldn’t be turning their cameras on their most intimate acquaintances—providing their intimacy doesn’t blind them to these acquaintances’ more difficult tendencies. Crumb benefits enormously from Zwigoff’s relationship to his subject, yet familiarity in no way inhabits discovery or critique.

Crumb draws a portrait of the artist in middle-age, on the verge of leaving his San Francisco home forever to re-settle in France with his wife. It describes a deeply eccentric nerd and preternatural curmudgeon who learned to make a life for himself by submitting to a relentless compulsion to interpret the world around him, the result being sometimes satire, sometimes fantasy of the most brazen, grotesque, perverse incarnations, and often both—I wonder if this mixture hasn’t endowed Crumb with a legacy not altogether different from that of Naked Lunch author William Burroughs. Those who have seen Zwigoff’s Ghost World (01) yet are unfamiliar with Crumb will likely see him as the real-life version of the later movie’s hapless Seymour, but with talent and purpose.

Zwigoff’s clearly enamored if not obsessed with Crumb’s work and sensibility—Zwigoff conveys real love for everyone in Crumb’s family, who, it rapidly becomes evident, are as much this movie’s subject as Crumb himself. Yet Zwigoff’s interest isn’t reflexively defensive. What’s morally or politically troubling about Crumb’s monstrous, big-assed, powerful-legged—and, in at least one case, decapitated—women or his nostalgia for bygone eras awash in racist imagery is all on the table, and Zwigoff invites several articulate commentators to examine it, some of whom regard Crumb as a contemporary Brueghel or defender of full-figured female beauty, others a narcissistic pornographer of the most dangerous kind. I don’t think this is Zwigoff’s attempt at objectivity. I think he’s just trying to get things right, to look at Crumb’s work from as broad a perspective as possible.

You might argue that Crumb’s work is of secondary importance to the story of the Crumb brothers. Zwigoff and his crew accompany Robert on visits to his housebound, pharmaceutically dependent brother Charles, who still lives with mother in a house frozen in time, passing his days re-reading the Victorian novels he adored as a boy, and to his ascetic brother Maxon, who lives alone in a San Fran fleabag apartment, alludes to a history of sexual assaults, and meditates on a bed of nails. There’s something deeply unsettling about how closely Charles and Max resemble less fortunate variations on Robert, who seems to care for and even admire his brothers, yet is so overcome with despair over their lifestyles and psychological frailty that all he can usually do in response to their stories is emit more of his trademark dry chuckles. Truth is you’ll probably laugh too while watching Crumb, which never succumbs to pity or sentimentality and often celebrates that one essential element that might just keep the Crumb brothers—and some of the rest of us—alive for as long as we can bear it: a healthy sense of humour. Long before he made fiction movies, Zwigoff proved himself a masterful storyteller, and I don’t think he could honestly tell any story without recognizing it’s inherent laughter.

Criterion’s beautifully transferred and packaged release of Crumb this week coincides with their release of Zwigoff’s less known yet just as wonderful documentary Louie Bluie (85), a portrait of obscure country-blues musician and visual artist Howard Armstrong, whose recordings Zwigoff had cherished and emulated for decades before discovering that Armstrong alive and well and living in Detroit. As with Crumb, Louie Bluie takes a no-brainer approach to telling its subject’s story, with scenes of Armstrong doing his thing—ie: playing fiddle and mandolin or displaying his fecund, scatological and not un-Crumb-like art—and a journey back home, in this case rural Tennessee, where Armstrong learned to play whatever instrument he could find or invent, as well as several languages so he could play songs for diverse ethnic audiences. What’s magical about Louie Bluie arises not from its rudimentary structure but from Armstrong’s immense charisma and the movie’s slyly selected details.

We see Armstrong and his old partner Ted Bogan playing up a storm in the kitchen of “Yank” Rachell, another old collaborator. Armstrong solos with the mandolin behind his head while Rachell nonchalantly peruses the latest issue of Income Opportunities. We see Bogan boiling water in a frying pan to make a cup of Hill Brothers instant. We see Armstrong convince Bogan to give him one of his least-ugly shirts. We see Rachell sucking every last bit of anything we might call flesh from a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken while Armstrong mercilessly and affectionately makes fun of him. None of these guys made much money from their musical talents, but Zwigoff makes it abundantly clear that what they did earn was several lifelong friendships. And as with Crumb, Zwigoff doesn’t shy away from the potentially offensive aspects of his subject’s outsized persona, allowing Armstrong to display his beloved erotic-historical Whorehouse Bible, and to hold forth on his ways with women and his inability to understand the appeal of Jesus: “Who the fuck cares about somebody nodding his damned head when some guy’s getting ready to kick his ass?”

Lovers of our less-recognized musical traditions owe a debt to Zwigoff for preserving this record of Armstrong, who died in 2003 at the age of 94, which also preserves many anecdotes and images of largely unheralded or even anonymous black musicians who developed what we call jazz, country and blues in the early 20th century. Lovers of our great if less-championed movies owe an equal debt to Criterion for rescuing Louie Bluie from oblivion.

Get Low: Putting the fun back into funerals

Felix Bush (Robert Duvall) is resident the boogeyman in the woods, taciturn, bearded and ornery, living alone outside some wintry Midwestern town in the cabin he built 40 years ago, shotgun at the ready should any varmints need a fright. We’re between world wars here, not that the affairs of the world cause many ripples in Bush’s hermetic existence. Bush hires former Chicago car salesman-turned-funeral home director Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) to arrange his own funeral-party, a stab at realizing the universal fantasy of hearing what the bastard-hypocrites say about him when he’s gone without having to actually depart. Everyone is invited.

The cast is pretty great across the board. As Quinn’s protégé, Lucas Black is charged with the task of playing straight man to Murray, not necessarily an enviable position when you consider that Murray’s approach to comedy is unfailingly deadpan—he’s already his own straight man—and though sometimes at odds with the uneven tone of Get Low as a whole, Murray’s performance, watchful, allusive, and bristly as his John Waters moustache, is about the closest to understanding the real strengths of the material. Fortunately Black holds his own just fine. He plays the action, letting the comic moments simply breathe, grounding himself in his character’s moral fortitude and genuine ambition to do right by Bush.

Duvall cultivates Bush’s enigma scene by scene. He’s very comfortable here and in fact very good, unconcerned with what the others are up to since Bush is holding all the cards in every scene—in keeping with the trickstery nature of his preemptive death rites, he’s always one step ahead of everybody else. Even when Get Low ushers him onto the climactic podium to spill his guts, Duvall understands that his vulnerability is to displayed but in no way is it to be challenged, the whole death trip steering us not toward an open forum but a one-on-one between Bush and his maker—and, okay, the wonderful Sissy Spacek with her glowing eyes—that the public is merely allowed to be present for.

Herein lies the problem with Get Low. Based on a true story that grew into something of a folk tale, molded into a screen story by Chris Provenzano and Scott Seeke, scripted by Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell, and realized by Aaron Schneider, the film ultimately betrays what was fun about its premise. The first act is filled with the promise that everyone has a story to tell about Felix Bush, yet when the funeral party finally happens and the whole town turns out not a single speaker shares the mic with Bush and Quinn. They just huddle some distance from the outdoor stage and rhubarb discreetly. The open stage turns into a one-man show, banking everything on the big reveal that by this point has pretty much already been revealed in piecemeal though a number of twists as predictable and ornamental as the story’s basic premise is intriguing. The sense of Get Low’s straying from its own path is further solidified by Schneider’s overly solemn and ominous direction, which, from the fiery opening flashback onward, too often anticipates what’s to come, and by Jan Kaczmarek’s over-used score.

There are nonetheless pleasures to be had in Get Low, which seems at heart to want to be a humanist comedy. The slight modulations in Duvall’s expressions alone are worth the effort, and his one extended sequence with Spacek has a rhythm and a certain grace to it that would be difficult to locate in a film that would not allow for such unhurried gentleness between veteran actors. In this respect Schneider should be applauded. Duvall, now 79, seems like one of these actors who could just keep going forever. It’s been over a dozen years since he made The Apostle, a major career highlight, and I wish he would direct again. In the meantime, I’m happy to see him find young directors who know how to stand back and let him do his thing. And I’m happy to see a director smart enough to let Spacek do just about anything.