Meira Blaustein is the director of the Woodstock Film Festival, but this year she's also a contributing filmmaker. She's screening her heartrending documentary about her disabled son, For the Love of Julian, and it begins my day of documentary viewing. "I made the film out of necessity," Blaustein told me when I bumped into her at the opening night party. She's nervous about bringing such a personal piece of work to the festival, she says, but feels it's time since Julian passed away last year.
In her film, Blaustein delves deeply into the experience of having a profoundly disabled child. Her son was born with extensive brain damage and never gained the ability to walk or talk. Instead of hewing to the party line that "special children are given to special parents," Blaustein explores her feelings of frustration and impotence, and brings up some difficult questions about whether technology should be used to save such children at birth. This is courageous, and it also makes me feel double impressed about what Blaustein does with this festival. She's been everywhere these past few days: introducing movies and panels, coordinating events, posing for photographs with celebrities. Her husband Laurent Rejto, the fest's co-founder and now head of the Hudson Valley Film Commission, has been around too – but Blaustein is indefatigable. When I met with her last year, she was gushing with enthusiasm about getting a sound stage and production facility built at a former IBM site in Kingston, 10 miles from Woodstock.
Leaving Blaustein's film, I head over to a panel called "Where Journalism Ends and Filmmaking Begins," about the similarities and differences between traditional journalism and documentary filmmaking. On the panel are four doc-makers: Robert Stone (Oswald's Ghost), Michele Ohayon (Steal a Pencil for Me), Godfrey Cheshire (Moving Midway) and Bill Siegel (The Road to 9/11). In addition, we have Molly Thompson of A&E Indie Films (which produced, among others, Jesus Camp and Murderball), and moderator David D'Arcy.
Here are some highlights from the discussion:
• Robert Stone says that he has a basic, two-part moral code as a documentarian: (1) He never makes financial deals or promises flattery in return for access, and (2) He never presents archival footage as anything other than it purports to be. Bill Siegel wonders if he broke Stone's second rule in The Weather Underground when he used general archival footage of a hippie love-in to represent his subjects' orgies. Stone says he doesn't think so.
• Michele Ohayon thinks that the difference between journalism and documentary filmmaking is in the point of view. "Our job as documentarians is to show our point of view, not hide it," she says. Molly Thompson says that A&E Indie Films is not looking for "films that convey balance." What she's looking for, she says, is a great story with a 3-act narrative. "We do impose that requirement on filmmakers because, let's face it, we want people to see the movie."
• There's a lot of discussion about Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That (produced by A&E Indie Films), which divides the panel because the film doesn't draw hard conclusions about whether its subject, four year-old Marla Olmstead, really painted her "masterpieces." Godfrey Cheshire says that "fashionable ambiguity" is sometimes not good enough. Thompson defends Bar-Lev, saying that mysteries are usually the best stories. Robert Stone remarks that not everyone likes the fact he drew a conclusion about Lee Harvey Oswald at the end of Oswald's Ghost.
• David D'Arcy brings up the question of topicality in documentary filmmaking. "These days, it seems there are two documentaries on everything, and everyone's trying to scoop everyone else," he says. He suggests that the current trend to make ultra-topical documentaries can be dangerous if the film is outstripped by events, as it was in the case of Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight. Thompson says that A&E Indie Films looks for subject matter that's unique rather than topical.
In the light of this discussion, it's interesting to see two films that, in very different ways, push the envelope of documentary filmmaking: Brett Morgen's Chicago 10 and Nina Davenport's Operation Filmmaker.
Chicago 10 tells the story of the 1969 trial in which activists Abbie Hoffmann, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale, among others, were accused of conspiracy to commit violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. "I think the world needs a little Abbie Hoffman now," Morgen says when he appears, to resounding applause, after the screening. What's new here is that, in an attempt to draw in young viewers, Morgen decided to use colorful rotoscope animation to recreate the trial. He was inspired, he says, by Jerry Rubin's comment that the trial was "a cartoon show." The animation takes up over a third of the film; the rest is archival footage from the 1968 protests.
It's what Morgen refers to as "experiential cinema," and probably, it's going to to ruffle some feathers in the Old Guard documentary community. I'm reminded of Tom Twyker's 1998 film Run Lola Run, another fast-paced mixture of live action and animation calculated to appeal to a youthful audience. Personally, I like the way he's pushing the envelope, though I have to admit that I've never been a huge fan of the Ken Burns school of meticulous and exhaustive documentary filmmaking.
Nina Davenport's Operation Filmmaker pushes the envelope in completely different way. The film recounts how Davenport got much, much more than she signed up for during a shoot in the Czech Republic. She was hired by actor Liev Schreiber, who was directing his first movie, Everything is Illuminated. Schreiber had decided to bring a young Iraqi film student to work as an intern on the film, and Davenport thought she'd be making a bland piece that she jokingly referred to afterward as The Kindness of Liev Schreiber.
Things quickly went awry, though when Mohmed turned out to be as feckless as he was charming. He screwed up every chance he was given and hit up various crew members for money, and "I felt as though I was documenting a train wreck," Davenport said. As things went from bad to worse, the people who'd brought Mohmed from Iraq began to wonder if their plan wasn't just a little bit too hasty and unplanned.
The film is remarkable for several reasons. First, it has obvious parallels to the larger screw-up of the Iraq War itself, and brings up some hard questions relating to that mess. Second, Davenport puts herself in the movie with a degree of vulnerability that I've never seen before on the part of a documentary filmmaker. Continuing her relationship with Mohmed long after the Schreiber crew has left Prague, she follows his progress at the same time as asking herself tough questions. Is her presence helping or hurting Mohmed? Why is she so invested in his success, and should she keep on giving him handouts?
"I had a huge amount of anxiety, because I was making a film about an Iraqi who wasn't likable," Davenport says in the Q&A after the screening. Asked why she and other members of the crew broke several rules of documentary filmmaking (principally Robert Stone's Moral Code Rule (1): Never make deals in return for access), she sighs heavily and runs a hand through her hair. "What I think it comes down to is the power of guilt. You know, here was the one Iraqi we could actually help."
Stone, who attended the screening, didn't seem bothered that this movie made mincemeat of his golden rule. He told Davenport that her movie "might just be the most honest and informative film about the Iraq War yet." Asked to report on Mohmed's current situation, Davenport said he is living in London, having persuaded a movie star to give him money to attend film school. Clearly his story isn't over yet.
