To say there was something electric in the air this year as North America’s largest documentary film festival commenced eleven days ago would be more than a mere platitude. Springtime is typically fraught with electrical storms in Southern Ontario, but the charge felt during the first night of Hot Docs 2009 was generated most prominently by the new film from Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, whose Manufactured Landscapes made such a deep impression both at home and internationally after premiering at Toronto’s other major festival back in 2006.
Act of God uses stories of being struck by lightning as a foundation for meditations on our urge to invest meaning in the most seemingly random events. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to discover that the film feels a little random or rootless itself, but while frustrating desires for a more unified thesis and deliberately ignoring any exploration of the science, it delivers some enlightening profiles and, best of all, a duet of sorts between novelist Paul Auster, who eloquently recalls his experience of witnessing another child’s death by lightning during summer camp, and guitarist Fred Frith, who improvises a magnificent performance meant to invoke the primal drama of a tempest billowing over the landscape.
The equation of death and nature was also central to Swiss filmmaker Peter Liechti’s The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy, where heavily associational images accompany the story of a man who ventured into the wilderness to commit suicide by starvation. The voice-over reading of the man’s journal—the English version comes courtesy of Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler—alternately chronicles bodily collapse in increasingly disturbing detail, offers hints of the life he left behind, and muses on the bizarre choice of method, fasting in solitude ostensibly being the best way to witness the process of one’s own death. Based on a novel inspired by the real event, yet visually realized through a bank of images that feature no actors or recreations, The Sound of Insects playfully haunts the frontiers of documentary and fiction. It’s chilling, funny, hypnotic, and totally draining.
Private confessions are similarly the driving force behind Canadian filmmaker Alison Rose’s Love at the Twilight Motel, which features interviews with various clients of a pay-by-the-hour Miami love nest, many of whom are disarmingly lucid and affecting. The repellent yet admirably frank adulterer and closet junky who wants to protect his wife’s innocence; the Cuban massage therapist who feels it’s his duty to service sexually dissatisfied married women; the prostitute and exotic dancer desperate to reclaim custody of her children: each of Rose’s subjects is able to testify at length and with dignity intact in one of the Twilight’s anonymous rooms. Yet the film leaves you with questions regarding Rose’s intentions. What was she after? Who did she think she was going to fool by only showing portions of her subject’s faces as a method of disguise?
Love at the Twilight Motel is compelling, but a vaguely similar tack is used more rigorously and satisfyingly in Canadian filmmaker Alan Zweig’s A Hard Name, which features Zweig’s more transparently interactive interviews with several middle-aged ex-convicts, many of them with violent pasts. While talking to a former crackhead, a guy who grew up sleeping in abandoned buildings in Detroit, a guy who extended his prison sentence by 20 years just for the sake of stabbing Clifford Olsen 21 times with a pair of scissors, Zweig stays off-screen but remains very present, prompting the more tight-lipped, cracking jokes to ease tension, gathering advice on prison life, and gradually revealing that every last one of his subjects suffered sexual abuse as children. A guy named Art tells a particularly harrowing confession about feeling less capable of dealing with life outside than in. My heart went out to him. Before the screening I attended Zweig declared his hope that after this film his subjects would simply “be welcomed back into the family of man and just disappear into the crowd.” Of course, this didn’t keep Zweig from bringing a number of them up on stage afterwards. Sadly, Art was not among them.
The most sensational tale of going from brutal youth to violent adulthood and prison however would easily be that of Tyson, James Toback’s gripping profile of the eponymous former heavyweight champion. Even if you remember each of its key events (ear biting, et al.) as they unfolded, when you put it all together like this Mike Tyson’s biography is truly incredible, alternately inspiring and disgusting, a living essay on some deeply precarious notions of American race and sex. And Tyson ultimately emerges as a sort of poem about human contradictions, with constantly overlapping interviews in which Tyson gives glaringly incompatible testimonies on things like his rape conviction. Toback never interjects and seems totally uninterested in guiding us toward any conclusion. This movie is too ablaze with fascination for its subject and desire to provoke its audience to settle for anything as simple as closure.
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