From June 8-13 in New York, DocPoint, Finland’s only documentary film festival, and Northern Europe’s largest, will present a series of films produced in its native country in the ten years since it began. On the 12th, UnionDocs will run two programs of student shorts, but most of the action will occur at MoMA, Scandinavia House, and 92Y Tribeca — nearly 50 films, a sliver of which I have had an opportunity to preview.

Finland was among the first European countries to pick up the cinematograph, holding screenings as early as 1896, but few Finnish films made since have been distributed in the U.S.  Since the mid-80s, North American filmgoers’ understanding of Finnishness has been largely defined by Aki Kaurismaki, long the token ambassador of the Finnish cinema, whose work is marked by a grim, cockeyed humor, depressive fatalism, and flat pacing. The three DocPoint features I was able to see do little to change the sense of Finland his films impart. Closest to Kaurismaki is Jukka Kärkkäinen’s The Living Room of the Nation (2008), which begins with a shot of a schlubby, overweight twentysomething man lying face down in bed, who utters the first words of the film: “I wonder why life is so damn hard”.

Cutting between six fixed camera angles in as many living rooms across Finland, Kärkkäinen does not attempt to answer that question so much as vivify the experiences that provoke it. The film’s five other subjects, all single men or couples, are as glum and enervated as Tero, the young man from the opening sequence. What begins as informal ethnography becomes understated human drama as the particulars of contemporary Finnish life are bleached out by the universal facts of birth and death. Tero learns that his girlfriend is pregnant, and that she intends to keep the baby despite the disagreements and mutual indifference that plague their relationship. In Helsinki, a retired priest describes the baptisms that consumed much of his working life, while he himself slouches toward death, his physical capabilities diminishing before our eyes as the film progresses. A middle-aged couple fester in alcoholic co-dependency in the country’s center. A Lapland man reminisces about happier times away from Finland, and describes the humiliations his father suffered in a nursing home. A retired Southern couple sells their home, ready to begin their “senior lifestyle”. Finally, an elderly subway musician rehearses at home, giving one of his final performances at the film’s close, an end title announcing that he died shortly thereafter.

These stories develop slowly, and the film settles into inertia as life fulfills these peoples’ meager expectations. Though affecting, and intermittently funny, The Living Room of the Nation fails to transcend its gimmicky premise: it does not elucidate the harsh truths at its core, preferring instead to wallow in them. J-P Passi and Jani Kumpulainen’s cinematography does little to fill in the grid laid by the film’s formal schema. The upper third of the frame hangs barren above the action, and its colors are as dreary and lifeless as the worlds from which they are drawn. It is unclear to what extent Kärkkäinen has scripted the events of the film. It has been consistently presented as a documentary, but the stiff unreality of its social interactions, and the camera’s access to private calamity betray a (rather poor) staging. Whatever its truth value, the film observes the unpredictable rhythms and indeterminate occurrences of real life, and thus, like Ulrich Seidl’s even drearier doc-fiction amalgam Animal Love (1996), remains tentatively engaging even while submerging us in unrewarding darkness.

People in White (2011) shows us the opposite side of the same coin: documentary reality written in the grammar and syntax of fiction. Directed by Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, the husband-and-wife team behind The Complaints Choir (2009), the film explores doctor-patient relationships in the Netherlands’ mental health institutions. A group of Dutch, mostly middle-aged, sit in an airy, naturally lit meeting room of an abandoned asylum, sharing their experiences with therapists and psychiatric hospitals. Other members of the group, composed of both real patients and professional actors, reenact these stories, filmed largely within the same old hospital. Most of these figures play multiple roles, so that a man who appears as an abusive psychiatrist one moment plays a patient in a locked ward the next.

Though they slightly blur distinction between doctor and patient — a pro forma suggestion in any artistic treatment of psychiatry — the reenactments provide little in the way of commentary or feeling. Their ends are entirely aesthetic. As in Clio Barnard’s The Arbor (2010), and Gillian Wearing’s Self Made (2011), two other recent reenactment-heavy docs with art world pedigrees, these stagings allow the Kalleinens to treat reality to the mid-budget production values of an indie fiction feature. Every one of the film’s frames is washed in a soft, warm light, accentuated by the camera’s shallow focus, and the performances’ theatrical blocking, captured from the most telling angles. The result is easier on the eyes than the usual products of DV verité, but it could not be called beautiful. Premised on a generic idea of image quality, this style sucks the air from every space on screen and the vitality from every person who passes through them, producing the same timorous and somber emotional effect in every instance. The conflation of documentary and fiction in this kind of reenactment is neither timely nor radical, but simply a logical step in the continuing Errol Morrisification of documentary’s middle brow.

Less formally notable, but altogether more satisfying is the program’s centerpiece Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland (2010), which plays at MoMA once daily throughout DocPoint NYC. In 2003, Joonas Neuvonen began filming his drug buddies in Rovaniemi, the tiny capital city of Finnish Lapland. A user himself, Neuvonen started recording the people around him for vaguely articulated diaristic reasons, but he captured a transformative moment in Finnish drug culture, as methamphetamine was superseded as the country’s most widely-abused narcotic by Subutex, a popular brand of buprenorphine used for opiod replacement therapy that was flowing into the country from France, where it is issued to heroin addicts free-of-charge. Though the film begins as a depiction of this sub-rosa community in Rovaniemi — documenting junkies bumming around the city’s snow-packed streets and sparsely-furnished International Style apartment complexes, burglarizing cars and homes when necessary — a single addict and close friend of Neuvonen’s named Jani Rappana quickly emerges as its central subject.

Gaunt and agitated, clothed in the (apparently international) junkie uniform of a baggy hoodie and filthy jeans, Raappana appears as a familiar weak-willed, but well-intentioned anti-hero. His opiate dependency is all consuming, and he lacks the hardness or cunning to effectively feed it as a thief. We often see him trying to cadge a pill from friends, bargaining down to half a dose, promising he’ll pay them back this time. Midway through the film, a title informs us that dealers have sawed off two of his fingers in exchange for an unpaid debt. When he returns to the screen, he seems little changed by the horrors just nonchalantly described. More than anything, Raappana wants out of Rovaniemi. And incredibly, after serving a little jail time for a failed burglary, he pulls a robbery large enough to get him out. In the film’s third act, Neuvonen takes us on his breakneck run through Europe’s sunnier climes. This excursion brightens the image, but does little to remit the story’s consuming bleakness. Raappana’s elation — at having escaped his dingy, frozen little burg, and, increasingly, the ease and cheapness with which he can acquire Subutex — is freighted with the understanding that is a temporary escape from his troubles rather than any kind of long-term solution.

The trip is the film’s engine, transforming Reindeerspotting from anthropological curio into a full-fledged story, rounding out the structure and delivering a real narrative pleasure, but a naueous, voyueristic kind, poisoned by the knowledge that it is predicated on real life misery. It also looses the film from the geographic and cultural details that define its earlier sections, shaping Neuvonen’s footage into the kind of familiar tale of addiction and desperation suggested by the reference-dense title. Reindeerspotting is strongest as a portrait of Rovaniemi. Many European versions of the Santa Claus legend name Lapland as his home. Neuvonen acknowledges the myth with footage of a winter carnival complete with actual Reindeer races, but he is more concerned with the dismal social and economic prospects of its inhabitants. With opportunities limited to bureaucracy and tourism, and the landscape blanketed by darkness and snow, Rovaniemi is an ideal place to escape via drugs. Neuvonen’s footage brings this oppressive climate to life.

It is difficult to draw many conclusions about DocPoint NYC from this small fraction of its offerings. While I am ambivalent about all three of these films to one degree or another, it is apparent that Finland has developed a lively and sophisticated documentary culture. DocPoint NYC is a welcome, and overdue, opportunity to pick through its fruits.

Britton, South Dakota (2003) begins without titles. When the screen fills with even-toned black and white images of children posed on the main drag of some small American town, you must rely on contextual clues to situate this scene. The film’s texture, and the scratches and tears that sometimes obscure it connote the early-to-mid 20th century, and the kids’ formal dress bears this out. One child succeeds another, followed by pairs, all pictured on the same patch of sidewalk in front of a dark and heavy wooden door, any identifying markers of which lay beyond the cinematographer’s low-angle frame. The film chugs forward for nine minutes; little changes but the children themselves, and with them the frame’s composition. Some fidget or cry or ham it up like the kids you usually see on camera, but most of them aren’t so willing to play along. A few avert their eyes from the lens, not bashfully, but with a kind of dignified composure. Others meet our gaze head-on, brows furrowed in Cro Magnon intensity, hands on hips, totally unflappable. This is the most remarkably self-possessed group of children you have ever seen. It is not just the baleful drone of Johnne Eschleman’s organ score that makes them seem menacing: there is a hardness in their eyes that suggests real malice. They are like henchmen in a Western, warning you to keep far away from this place.

The credits confirm that this is indeed the West — the eponymous town in 1938, as pictured by Ivan Besse, a local movie theater owner. The woman who reshaped this footage is a Westerner herself: Vanessa Renwick, a filmmaker born in Chicago, but based in Portland, Oregon for nearly thirty years, and who depicts her adopted region with all the convert’s notorious zeal. Last weekend, Renwick paid a rare visit to New York for two shows: a mini-retrospective at UnionDocs, and a set of more recent work at Anthology Film Archives, both presented by the Flaherty NYC and curated by Penny Lane. The two programs surveyed a three-decade-long career so varied as to defy sensible categorization. Renwick’s work is often described as “punk”, which is true if one grants that word the metaphysical proportions it has taken on, but it does not usefully encapsulate her aesthetic; of the films which appeared last weekend, only Toxic Shock (1983), an angular, expressionist narrative fragment, bears resemblance to the formal traditions of punk filmmaking. Unconcerned with stylistic consistency, Renwick is a responsive and self-effacing portraitist of the American Northwest with the freedom to locate the form best suited to the subject at hand.

In Crowdog (1998), Renwick narrates one of her first westward journeys: a barefooted hitchhike from Chicago to South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Renwick recorded this reminiscence in the late 90s, but the Super-8 footage dates back to her 1984 trip. Dismissed from the reservation’s daily chores, Renwick and her German shephard wander a long yellow dirt road, searching for water in the wilting heat. The camera is pointed indifferently at the dusty ground, her bare feet and the dog’s slender torso gliding in and out of the ocher frame. Dirt clings to the lens, separating the image into two distinct planes. Renwick’s voice, surfing waves of tape hiss, sounds small and distant, but not weak: this is a story of willful autonomy that, like so many Westerns, finds an individual attempting to participate in a community without sacrificing hard-won personal freedom.The program’s other diaristic work, 9 Is A Secret (2002), recapitulates some of this dynamic, but in more formally sophisticated and psychologically complex terms. In a confessional whisper, Renwick describes assisting a friend’s suicide and riding out the emotional repercussions in the empty front room of a shared Portland house. Renwick is surrounded by people, but the action is all internal. She bears her sadness alone, finding solace in the divination games she plays, counting the crows and ravens that cross her path. The impressionistic montage conjures some of the spaces she describes, but focuses on the birds, framing them in silhouette against the dark night sky and then inverting the image, foreground and background changing hues with the movements of her heart.

In her character studies, Renwick gravitates toward people who share the isolation she expresses in the diary films. Richart (2001), made with Dawn Smallman, is a more-or-less straight documentary short about a once-institutionalized folk artist who has turned his Centralia, Washington yard into a dense jungle of wood, clay, and Styrofoam-based scrap sculpture. True to type, Richart is a cranky and stubborn autodidact. Renwick and Smallman milk his eccentricities for a few laughs, but they refuse to reduce him entirely to his prickly aloofness.  Their film revolves around a workshop he teaches for area kids — Renwick again finding satisfaction in the tentative embrace of community. Woodswoman (2010) is a structural work, its duration determined by the time it takes a book to turn to ash in a burning fireplace, but the titles that run throughout describe the life of another Renwickian type: Anne LaBastille, a pioneering ecologist and author of the titular Waldenesque memoir that smolders on screen.

Even more than the people, it is the landscape of the American Northwest that has captured Renwick’s imagination. In 2005, she began her first film series: a set of portraits of places throughout the Cascade Range, all of them so far concerning abandoned man-made constructions. Portrait #1: Cascadia Terminal (2005) is a lyrical tour through a grain terminal that was once Vancouver’s largest, shot on 16mm and hand-processed to look as neglected and fragile as the place itself. The second two, both shot on 35mm short ends by Hollywood DP Eric Edwards, treat the more recent past at a grander scale. Renwick and Edwards consider these sites from all angles, turning them over, poking at them to see what their surfaces reveal.  Portrait #2: Trojan (2006) examines the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in Rainier, Oregon, on the eve of the final stage of its demolition. Renwick had been an active participant in the protest movement that contributed to the plant’s decommissioning in 1993, but in the years since grew to love the site of the inactive cooling tower along I-5 between Portland Seattle. Edwards captures the tower, and the plant’s other standing facilities, on and across from the adjacent Columbia River at different times of day, in a variety of lights, in nearly-loving tribute to its grandeur. The camera pulls back across the river for a wide angle as the tower falters and collapses after a single explosion, the shot lingering on the smoke and debris that hover in its wake while Sam Coomes’ score decrescendos, simulating all of Renwick’s ambivalence about the source of this beauty.

This sense of ambivalence pervades Renwick’s filmography, particularly in the nature films. She marvels at the Northwest’s ecological magnificence, but does not feign understanding. In FULL ON LOG JAM (2010), her camera lolls among the charred tops of Cascadian Douglas-firs, burned in a recent fire, before cutting to a medium shot of a middle-aged Native American man laconically splitting wood in a gravel driveway. The camera holds on him for nearly five minutes, contemplating the odd mixture of lassitude and precision this man embodies in the stroke of his hand sledge. It is unclear how we are meant to respond this man, hard to tell what contrast, if any, is represented in this diptych on the death of trees.

Hope and Prey (2010) is a three-channel video drawn largely from footage shot by wildlife cinematographer Bob Landis. Ravens and eagles soar across an endless sky while wolves and coyotes prowl the snow-covered ground below, the three small boxes of image working in and out of sync, the boundaries between them dissolving and then reasserting themselves as some natural feature bisects the blank expanse of snow and sky. It isn’t long before an elk appears, spurring the ragged wolf pack to chase. For a few minutes, the suspense is overwhelming. The wolves nip at the elk’s heels as it weaves through the open plain, the shrill yowl of Daniel Menche’s score increasing in volume with every step. But each time it looks like he’s cornered, the elk somehow escapes, and the chase drags on for ten, fifteen, nearly twenty minutes. The initial thrill gives way to desperation, Menche’s score still keening, now signifying grinding necessity. Renwick does not allow us to experience the chase as an adrenaline-soaked departure from mundane life, but instead reveals it as that life’s very substance.

From the audience at Anthology, UD pal Chi-hui Yang suggested the films Renwick had shown there were all, in one way or another, action films. It is true the selection of work in that screening tended towards the depiction of physical feats and acts of nature, but Renwick’s attention favors the reverberations that follow rather than the events themselves. She is uninterested or incapable of telling a story — narrative is the one form she has abjured. She filters incident through subjectivity, fragmenting and distending it beyond recognizable structure. But, captivated by nature and culture alike, she does not reduce the outside world to our impressions of it. Perched between the interior and the exterior, Renwick shows us to how live quietly and attentively at a particular time in a particular place.

When Jim McBride made David Holzman’s Diary with L.M. Kit Carson in 1967, the personal documentary —  the very genre the movie appears to mercilessly satirize — barely existed. The film introduces itself as the creation of its eponymous protagonist, a man so deeply in thrall to claims of cinematic truth that he begins keeping a film diary in the belief that his footage will reveal to him, as if by magic, the source of his existential crisis. Though he learns nothing, he persists, alienating his few remaining friends, until his equipment is stolen and he is forced to stop. The diary film that Holzman purports to be was not created to stand as the latest iteration of a flourishing trend, but as the reductio ad absurdum of Cinema vérité rhetoric. Rather than dampening the excitement around vérité filmmaking, which was never really the point anyway, David Holzman’s Diary instead announced the birth of a whole new documentary subgenre. Since Holzman, first-person non-fiction filmmaking, under the various guises of “personal documentary”, “diary film” or “autobiographical documentary”, has become one of the most popular forms of American independent cinema .

McBride himself was among the first to respond to his film’s implicit challenge, following it with two autobiographical mid-lengthers, My Girlfriend’s Wedding (1969), and Pictures from Life’s Other Side (1971), both of which screened at UnionDocs in January.  The irony of McBride’s apparent reversal (the first of many in a career defined by counterintuitive decisions) is delicious enough to tempt reductionist interpretations of both Holzman and its successors, but the whole story is a little more complicated. Like all good satire, David Holzman’s Diary convincingly simulates many of the virtues of its target. It has remained relevant because of the possibilities its making suggests rather than the ones its mordant critique forecloses. And though it is appropriate to call My Girlfriend’s Wedding and Pictures From Life’s Other Side personal documentaries, the films do not much resemble the obsessive, solipsistic Holzman. Early in My Girlfriend’s Wedding, McBride appears on camera and re-introduces the Éclair 16mm camera that co-starred with Carson in Holzman, but he is reflected in a mirror held by the film’s true subject: Clarissa Ainley, his then-girlfriend. The bulk of the movie’s 60-minute run time comprises a nearly unedited conversation with Ainley on the eve of her green card marriage. Narrating the events in her life that brought her from England to North America, it seems it is she rather than McBride who is desperate to find insight at 24 frames a second.

In rural England, Ainley’s life was constrained by the child she had as a teenager and by her conservative parents, whose sense of responsibility and propriety still governed her life. Finding herself pregnant again, she fled to Canada for an abortion before making her way to New York. The sexual revolution, and its promise of “dissociation from everything that has conditioned you” is what brought her here. About the other part of the revolution –the toppling of the political system responsible for much of that conditioning — she hasn’t much to say. Marriage is of course antithetical to her restless impatience with the old social arrangements, but it is the only path to U.S. citenzenship for her and her son. So rather than contaminate her feelings for McBride with the reactionary values of the old world, she has arranged a sham engagement with another man, the owner of a leftist publishing house.

The progress of Holzman turns on the growing discomfort of fictional filmmaker’s girlfriend with his  invasive, compulsive documentation, but Ainley welcomes the camera’s attention. In her interactions with McBride and assistant cameraman Michael Wadley (who went on to direct Woodstock and, years later, Wolfen, a neglected classic of 80s expressionist horror), she has an easy performative manner. When she describes her life, she never seems disingenuous. Answering questions unrehearsed, she is alternately sharp and dippy, self-reflective and self-justifying, deep and shallow, evincing all the contradictions of a complex human being. In their conversation, Ainley and McBride betray few reservations about the marriage, but during the wedding itself, and its desultory little after-party, the mood becomes a little grim.

Any lingering sense of dissatisfaction is dispelled in the film’s coda, an explosive pixilated montage of images from McBride and Ainley’s mock honeymoon in California. Apart from the time covered in this punctuation mark, My Girlfriend’s Wedding is limited to the day of the ceremony, and the two days that bookend it, its spaces confined to a few interiors. When McBride received a commission from the AFI after My Girlfriend’s Wedding had been completed, he took the opportunity to document his life with Clarissa at a more expansive, leisurely pace. Pictures from Life’s Other Side finds the couple still together two years later, Ainley now pregnant with McBride’s child, and the couple joined by her older son Joe. The AFI money — which was not renewed for post-production costs after a change in the institution’s leadership left the filmmaker without support there — gave McBride an excuse to record the family’s move from New York to Northern California, merging the distinctly American personal documentary with another particularly American genre: the road movie.

Ainley is closer to co-director than star here, narrating the primitively animated passages that advance the story as they link up the vérite scenes taken by McBride in motels, roadside attractions, and from the window of his moving car. McBride himself becomes a more consistent onscreen presence, but it is Ainley’s son Joe who provides the film’s most memorable scenes, which find him trying to work out his place within his mother’s unconventional arrangement. He is sometimes affectionate towards McBride, but as the film progresses he is more frequently venomous, and it is never clear how much of his anger is fueled by unexceptional Oedipal longings, and how much by the particular alienation of his experimental rearing. Whatever sympathies you may hold for McBride and Ainley’s liberated domesticity, it is difficult not to feel sorry for the 8-year old dropped into the middle of it from another country, and harder still to avoid drawing a connection between his guardians’ open intimacy — which entails exposing Joe not only to casual nudity, but at least on one occasion, their foreplay — and the sexually graphic threats that constitute a part of Joe’s hostile campaign against McBride. Despite this, the tone of the film is altogether lighter and more whimsical than that of My Girlfriend’s Wedding, which is suffused with a free floating air of disappointment. The warmth of McBride’s home movie technique jostles against the disturbing nature of some the material, generating a friction electric with mixed emotions.

Next to the freewheeling, manic energy of David Holzman’s Diary, however, both of them look drab and inert. But Holzman is too articulate to be believed. The film traces its protagonist’s dissolution in frenzied strokes that align perfectly with his psychological trajectory. It suggests the possibility of an aesthetic mimesis that belies its skepticism about documentary, and marks it as an obvious forgery. Trained on one’s own life, the camera is a crude instrument. McBride captures swathes of his experience as one might try to catch fish with a burlap sack. A filmmaker depicting events in which he does not directly participate should be expected to refine the material to its essence, but McBride shares David Holzman’s desire to run his life through the analytic film projector (he is just less naive about the quality of the light it throws), and the relative formlessness of these films is inherent to their exploratory impetus. McBride’s chunky, undifferentiated construction respects the minute-to-minute banality of workaday life, and allows meaning to gather in the interstices between expression and action. There is no decisive moment, but an accumulation of indecisive ones. My Girlfriend’s Wedding and Pictures From Life’s Other Side are, of course, no more able than David Holzman’s Diary to provide an objective vantage on life as it is lived. But the unwieldy, digressive units from which McBride assembles these movies allow for more of its rhythms and textures than most, “vérite” or otherwise.

This indeterminate form perfectly molds the slack, hangdog face of early 1970s America. McBride’s films make good on autobiography’s implicit promise to reveal the general through the particular. When we join McBride and Ainley in My Girlfriend’s Wedding, they are both already wearied by the New Left’s failure to produce a second American revolution. Alone with Ainley on the evening of her wedding, McBride tells her: “It was a very upsetting experience and I’m not quite sure why. ” Some clues are available in the previous scene, which shows the wedding party dominated by Ainley’s new husband, a boorish Yippie clown whose politics seem to consist entirely of half-digested catch phrases and a macho militancy that only happens to have attached itself to the Left. By the time captured in Pictures from Life’s Other Side, they, like so many other young radicals, had transferred their utopian aspirations from the public to the private sphere. McBride finished editing the film in the same year that est began offering courses at San Francisco’s Jack Tar Hotel. The forlorn ambivalence that emanates from both films, and the self-questioning that must have prompted their making, echoes the wider cultural misgivings that met these developments.

As the program’s curator Jed Rapfogel put it during the post-screening discussion, these two films are made by someone who has thrown his life into the sexual revolution but left one foot out the door. For McBride, they are autopsies — he tips his hand with the title of the second film (the more upbeat one!), borrowed from a folk ballad that limns the inextricable association of image-making with death. But the films do more than rehearse the familiar story of 70s malaise. In McBride and, particularly in Ainley, we can locate the earnest craving for a freer, more equitable world that lay behind many of the 70s social experiments since discarded as the decadent and faddish excrement of 60s idealism. The world Ainley describes escaping in My Girlfriend’s Wedding refused to acknowledge the validity of her desires. In Pictures From Life’s Other Side, Ainley seems at peace with herself, having cast away the gnawing doubt she betrays in the prior film. And though the family’s dynamic is decidedly pre-feminist, in McBride she has found a partner as anxious as she to make a life that does not sacrifice autonomy for stability. Her efforts are not designed solely for personal fulfillment, but also to provide her son a more humane environment in which to develop. While Joe’s sullen outbursts make it obvious that his upbringing hasn’t been flawless, in most of the film he is livelier, happier, and more curious than he likely would have been had Ainley settled for a provincial English life with the clod who knocked her up.

Rich with surface detail, alive to broad cultural currents, and sensitive to human motivations noble and base, McBride’s mostly-forgotten personal films give concrete form to an era Baby Boomers are now more likely to recount as their own mythic Fall. It is a shame that they have never garnered the same attention as the more cynical Holzman, because while My Girlfriend’s Wedding and Pictures From Life’s Other Side are equally instructive about documentary’s limitations, they supplement that knowledge with all the unruly real life existence that a roll of 16mm film can bear, reminding us that great art is rarely produced by those who quietly accept that certain things are not possible.

In December, UnionDocs hosted Peter Hutton, one of the avant-garde’s most accomplished filmmakers, for an evening of four films: three old pieces, and footage from a work-in-progress. Since the late 1970s with the first New York Portrait (1978-79), most of Hutton’s films have been short place portraits, structured unsystematically, and typically rather short. He has focused his efforts on documenting cities (the New York Portraits, Budapest Portrait (1984-86), Lodz Symphony (1991-93), and the current work-in-progress about Detroit), and rural landscapes — often, befitting a former merchant seaman, bodies of water (Landscape (For Manon) (1986-87), In Titan’s Goblet (1991), Study of a River (1993-94), Time And Tide (1998-2000), Looking at the Sea (2000-01), and Skagafjördur (2002-04)). In these works, location serves as the sole organizing principle. Hutton shoots scenes as they come to him, arranging them in poetic or lightly rhythmic sequences, often as discrete units separated by black leader. The films are completely silent. People are rarely present. Hutton’s camera trains directly on the scenery.

During the Q&A after the screening, Hutton told film scholar Scott MacDonald that his art making is driven by a desire to “respect the process of looking”. A masterful cinematographer with an acute sense of timing, Hutton is a perfect guide through the places he gives us to behold, always finding the most suggestive angles from which to depict them, and the best natural light to illuminate their drama. He holds the shots long enough to allow an eye to move through the image, but never so long as to become an exercise in stamina. Without story or assertion guiding our viewing experience, there is nothing to do but look.

In 2007, he completed his most ambitious film, At Sea, which has since become his most celebrated. It traces three stages in the life of a container ship, wrapping Hutton’s landscape imagery in a much tighter narrative casing. Though At Sea is a very good film, the relative familiarity of its design made clear how special Hutton’s more modest films really are. At Sea’s structure suggests something like conventional documentary. Here, Hutton provides a record of how something happens — a container ship is built, used, and destroyed for scrap. In comparison, the oddness and inutility of the earlier works is striking.

The style of the older films is not totally unprecedented. They fit comfortably into the the avant-garde subgenre that Michael Sicinski, citing Bruce Bailee and Chick Stand, has glancingly identified as the “imagistic, non-argumentative cinema of fact.” And less obscurely, these mute, partial documentary records of space recall the actualités of the Lumière brothers and other early pioneers of cinema, as well as proto-cinematic devices like the camera obscura and the magic lantern that dazzled audiences simply by transforming the hard realities of space into a projection of light. Hutton exemplifies of a common irony: often the films that are called “avant-garde” are those most informed by the medium’s history — an irony noted by many film scholars, perhaps mostly frequently by MacDonald himself.

Despite the obvious influence, Hutton’s films cannot be called actualités. While he borrows something of their affect, his films do not depict events of interest beyond their presentation. Nor does his camera inhabit the objective viewpoint implied by those early non-fictions. Hutton shoots his vistas from a discernible first-person perspective. I have not seen any of Hutton’s earliest work (July ’71 in San Francisco, Living at Beach Street, Working at Canyon Cinema, Swimming in the Valley of the Moo (1971), New York, Near Sleep (For Saskia) (1972), and Images of Asian Music (1973), but my understanding is that they are diary films à la Jonas Mekas. While he never explicitly invokes the diary in the later films, the division of the shots, and the catch-as-catch-can nature of their recording suggest something like diary entries. It seems that even more than tributes to a general process of looking, Hutton’s films serve as accounts of what one man has looked at, the fades in-and-out that bookend the shots in many of Hutton’s films acting like eyes opening and closing. MacDonald has elsewhere compared the grainy quality of Hutton’s images to the Impressionist techniques of Seurat, Monet, and others.

Phenomenological subjectivity, however, does not explain the non-documentary effect of Hutton’s work. The drowsy eye movement suggested by the fades also evokes dreaming, and in this reading, the parade of landscapes takes on the dry-mouthed discombobulation of fitful consciousness. Dreaming has, of course, long been associated with the cinema, but not the rather prosaic works of its inventors. While Hutton’s direct, unadorned non-fiction makes him an obvious heir to the Lumières, his films also conjure all the strange, tenebrous magic associated with George Méliès and his acolytes. The most persistent myth of film history holds that early in its development, the form split into distinct poles represented by its earliest innovators — the realism of the Lumières and the illusionism of George Méliès. As stated by Sigfried Kracauer: “Lumiere appealed to the sense of observation, the curiosity about “nature caught in the act”; Melies ignored ignored the workings of nature out of the artist’s delight in sheer fantasy.”

Hutton’s best work emanates from the cross-roads of these supposedly distinct traditions. For him, catching nature in the act requires locating the sheer fantasy that already exists within its workings. In New York Portrait 1, the city is frequently shown in silhouette, rendering the concrete presences of the city’s skyscrapers as a distant play of shadows. In Study of a River, he transforms the pale blue water and the green banks of the Hudson into a stark, silky black and white whose shimmering tones have few real life analogues. A travelling shot captured from the bow of the ship makes it seem as though the camera is skating on black ice. Hutton’s resistance to structural logic also allows him to disrupt our serene appreciation of landscape with the most casual of gestures; the upside-down shot inserted towards the beginning of Study of A River, the abrupt change in scale that marks the interior shots that appear in the final third of New York Portrait 1, the washed-out, low-angle view of a chimney sweep that opens Lodz Symphony.

Moments such as these undermine any feeling that Hutton’s films exist to simply transmit the beauty of the physical world. The mysticism that informs these works is not the spiritual reverie provoked by long contemplation of the landscape, but instead reality sublimed by disjunction and legerdemain. Hutton downplays the importance of editing to his films. He doesn’t even work on a flatbed, but instead strings his shots together piece by piece with rewinds and a viewer. But though his aesthetic was most certainly developed as a cinematographer, it is Hutton’s minimal editorial interventions that give his films their gnawing, otherworldly stamp (blurring the boundaries between another entrenched opposition of film history: mise-en-scene vs. montage). This was clear from the recent footage of Detroit that Hutton showed at UnionDocs. While the images are no less sumptuous than usual, the haphazard arrangement of the work-in-progress lacked the beguiling power of the completed films, in which Hutton places the camera’s unvarnished, indexical record of real space on the same plane as what he calls the “subtle manipulations” of the apparatus. Their equal co-existence, and the hazy, intoxicating disorientation that results could be called “the Hutton touch”.

The past decade witnessed an explosion of documentary film production, but this growth has not been met by a reciprocal increase in documentary criticism.  Richard Brody (New Yorker), Ed Halter (Light Industry), Thom Powers (Toronto International Film Festival, DOC NYC, Stranger than Fiction), Lisa Rosman (New Deal Sally), Aaron Hillis (GreenCine Daily, Benten Films), and Karin Chien (dGenerate Films) discussed the challenges of getting documentaries critically reviewed and brainstormed solutions during this lively panel.

Karin Chien:
I think I was invited to the panel today not because I’m an expert in documentary criticism but because it’s played a huge role in the growth of our company. The perspective I can bring is mainly from a bigger picture market perspective. As a producer and a distributor, I can say that criticism really factored into our business plan. I’m working with films that have never been shown in the US. Some of them have gone—films like Petition which had gone to Cannes but don’t premiere anywhere in the states. There’s a lack of communication between the US and China in terms of the industries. There’s nobody in the US looking at films in China, so there’s no information or knowledge about how to get the films over here. A lot of these films are really fantastic. It’s the only free media coming out of China today. The only uncensored content is these independent documentaries.

When we started building our company, we thought: How do we get these films out there? It’s our job not only to sell these films but create a market for them. The main way we decided to do this was through criticism. So how do we get these films in front of the critics? Because some of them are too old to play at festivals– They’re not going to get a theatrical release. They’re Frederick Wiseman-esque documentaries in a foreign language. They’re not going to come out in theatres. What we did is we started to build our own base of critics who we would contact to write pieces about these films. And right now we have a website, we have daily updates and entries and it’s kind of become the go-to site for Chinese cinema. And it’s because we’re employing writers and bloggers and critics and also sourcing other material and putting it on our site really just as a service, really just as an information service for our readers, for our audience.

In that way the criticism has played a key role in getting the films out there. We don’t do any other advertising. We have very little money to do any marketing, so it’s really all criticism. Later I can talk about a case study. There was a film that we distributed called Ghost Town, by Zhao Dayong. It premiered at the New York Film Festival last fall. That film, we have pictures of when it played at MOMA last month, lines going up the elevator and to the mezzanine, and it’s all due one hundred percent to the criticism that came out.

Thom Powers:
I wrote this essay in 2008, called “Wanted: Documentary Critics”, which you can find on the Stranger Than Fiction website. The basis of that was that I felt that the output of documentary film, which has grown so rapidly in the past ten years, had far outpaced the critical attention being paid to it — to the extent where I feel like there’s an opening now for people to specialize in documentary criticism. This opens up a conversation amongst critics whether specialization is good or bad. I don’t really have a stake in that, I think that it’s valuable to read people who don’t specialize. But I think it would be valuable to have—because we barely have it right now—would be valuable to have people who are staking out this terrain for expertise.

I know because it’s my job as a festival programmer to watch several hundred documentaries each year. I’ve seen a lot more work than is represented in what I read about. There are some other trends that we can talk about later, but one trend, though, just to throw out there, is that I think a lot of the people who are writing about documentaries today are doing it in a very sympathetic way. They recognize documentaries are—it’s a hard slog, there’s not a great market. So when they step up to write about a piece, it’s usually a rah-rah piece. Which, god knows, filmmakers appreciate. But we also need real criticism. We need writers who are able to put films in context of the larger body of work that’s out there, and also write critically about them, not just favorably.

It was interesting when I wrote this piece and I heard from filmmakers like Alex Gibney or Michael Tucker. They both, for example, talked about how much they appreciated reading criticism of their work even when it was critical. They may not appreciate it in the moment, on Friday when their film is opening, but with a little bit of distance they appreciated what it had to say. I think that all filmmakers crave not only the ability to make a living off their work—none of us who are getting into this are doing it because we thought we were gonna make a great living. We got into it because we had something else to say. We wanted to have some engagement with the world. And I think criticism is part of that engagement. I think filmmakers as much as they’re starved for money in this profession are also being starved of good feedback. So, I’ll let they others continue and we can come back to some of these ideas later.

Aaron Hillis:
I have a lot of opinions about documentary. To elaborate on what Thom was saying, I absolutely think criticism is important when it comes to documentaries. I’ll back up. I see a lot of documentaries throughout the year. I have to admit I have a lot of frustrations with a lot of them that I see. I feel that the subject matter is compelling. There are a lot of fascinating, great stories that need to be told out there, but then the medium itself is not respected. It’s not cinema. It’s about conveying information but it isn’t told in a filmic way. I think a lot of times when people do write about documentaries, they tend to focus on the content but not on the film part of it, which I think is really important and needs to happen a lot more.

I also think that context is so incredibly important, especially for—you know, there have been such a slew of social activist docs talking about issues that, you know, they get you excited in the moment. Yeah, yeah, I don’t want to see those dolphins get slaughtered! But then you come out of the movie and you can have conversations about it and then you go back to watching your American Idol and having dinner. It doesn’t really transcend the filmic medium. I feel like there’s a lot of impotence in those kinds of docs even when they are heartfelt issues. I absolutely think that critics need to be addressing all of these things and more.

Documentary is more than just a genre. It’s more than just a sci-fi film. There’s a real life connection that I don’t think is addressed enough in film writing. I end up writing about a lot of documentaries each week for some of my freelance outlets. These are concerns I have and I can’t always get to them in a capsule length, if I can’t go further. I mean I really think the last decade has been one of the most interesting times for documentaries for a lot of reasons. This has been a time when the medium has really been stretched and interested things have happened. You have hybrid docs, things that you can’t really categorize easily. It’s exciting. Someone needs to be addressing these. It’s important for the filmmakers and important for the community and the medium itself. Ramble done.

Richard Brody:
Hi, I’m Richard Brody. I edit the movie listings at the New Yorker where I write capsule film reviews, a DVD column, and the blog The Front Row. I’ve written the book Everything is Cinema, which is a critical biography of Jean-Luc Godard. Nobody who is in any way Godardian lacks interest in documentary. Godard is only one of the French new wave filmmakers who started his career with documentary, and who continued to work in one way or another in some documentary-related format.

And yet, I think there’s something a little peculiar about even our presence here besides its intrinsic social value. Steve invited me to join the panel, and anything Steve suggests is good with me. And then, a couple of weeks later, he sent me the list of everyone who was gonna be here. I saw Thom was gonna be here, and I said, Oh shit! I’m just gonna be yelled at by Thom for not writing about enough documentaries. [laughter]

I actually do like documentaries. But I don’t—exactly as Aaron said, I don’t think of documentary as a genre. I very much enjoyed Colin’s introductory remarks in which he used the word ‘non-fiction.’ I think non-fiction is a valid way to describe a work of art, whether in writing or in film. But it’s not only not a genre, it’s hard to distinguish it from fiction except in certain very general and practical ways. I think there’s, exactly as Tom said, an incredible flood—he didn’t quite use the word flood, but, there’s an incredible amount of documentary films being made and shown. Of course critics can’t keep up with them, because there are too many documentaries being made and being shown. This is in part the fault of the digital camera. I think there should be a law that if you’re over twenty-five, and have an income over some fairly small level, you should have to shoot in 35mm. [laughter] Because that would help filmmakers actually think about what they’re shooting when they shoot.

There’s simply an absence of thought prior to pressing the button in many, many, many documentaries that I see. That said, the idea of specializing as a critic in documentary seems extremely peculiar to me. I can’t imagine a book critic specializing in non-fiction or fiction. I can imagine having a strong interest in one rather than the other. But I don’t think a book critic would have a career specializing, and I don’t think a film critic should have a career [specializing], except perhaps as a kind of encyclopedia writer. If you want to know about all the documentaries that have been released in the past decade, maybe there would be one go-to nudnik who would have actually seen everything. [laughter]

In March, UnionDocs presented a rare screening of Thys Ockersen’s Don Siegel: Last of the Independents (1980) as part of our ongoing Docs on Auteurs series. Prior to the show, co-programmer Cullen Gallagher prepared an interview with Ockersen.

For more information on Thys Ockersen or to order his movies, please visit his website

Cullen Gallagher: How did you get your start as a filmmaker?

Thys Ockersen: I entered the Dutch Film School in 1965 after graduating from high school in Heemstede (near my hometown of Zandvoort). The problem with the Dutch Film School was that not many teachers were qualified because we didn’t have a proper film industry. However, many young directors from that school started a Dutch nouvelle vague, very much influenced by the French New Wave and young Italian filmmakers. I had already done a lot of 8mm fiction films with my classmates who were in acting classes with me in high school. At the Dutch Film School I made my first two 16mm short fiction films. One of them, Key, was shown for about 13 weeks in an art cinema in Amsterdam. My graduate film, Surprise Surprise, was shown on Dutch TV and it also received a student award at the Chicago Film Festival in 1969.

CG: How did you first come to see Don Siegel’s films? What is his reputation like in The Netherlands?

TO: Like in other countries, Don was already a cult director because of his early work. I hadn’t seen those films, but in 1968 I saw Madigan and thought it was great. Then his films with Clint Eastwood followed and they were great, too. In 1973, I was a film critic for an important Amsterdam newspaper, Het Parool, and I also wrote for a film magazine called Skoop. Every time I went on vacation to London I did some interviews with stars and directors and also visited movie sets. When I heard that Don Siegel was directing The Black Windmill (1974) in London, I went to see him. It was a rather quiet day. Unfortunately, Michael Caine was not on call, but Clive Revill and Denis Quilley were, and they played police officers bugging the telephones in Caine`s house. Don had all the time in the world to talk to me and I think he recognized a fan who loved his work. The first thing he said was, “Sit down and watch how I direct a movie,” and he showed me the beautiful directors chair, a gift from Clint Eastwood. That day was not very exciting as far what was shot, but at least we got acquainted and that probably gave me the idea to tell the people at Universal (whom I knew rather well) to invite him to Amsterdam because of the release of Charley Varrick (1973). So, he came over with his wife, Doe Avedon. We had dinner and the group split up. Some critics took Doe out, while others (like me) spent the rest of the evening with Don in a pub listening to his stories.

CG: How did you come to make Don Siegel: Last of the Independents (1980)?

TO: Over the years, I met him a few times in Hollywood. After I made Sam Fuller and the Big Red One (1979), people asked me if I wanted to do another documentary and I proposed one about Don Siegel. You must understand that Fuller was totally unknown in Holland and with Dutch filmmakers. So, I never asked the Dutch film fund for money. With Siegel it was easier to get money from Dutch TV, plus a little bit from Belgian and German TV. Both docs I made for $30,000. We contacted Don and luckily for us he was supposed to come to Holland for Rough Cut (1980) and he said it was okay to shoot the doc. The title was more or less his idea. He thought he was one of the last persons left, like Charley Varrick, who had an independent mind of his own. For me, like with the Fuller doc, this was an independent movie because I kept the copyright on it.

CG: How long were you on the set with Don Siegel? Did he give you total access during the shooting?

TO: Don was very cooperative, but the picture he was working on was a mess. Before he came to Holland, he was fired by producer David Merrick. I had met Merrick on the set of The Great Gatsby (1974) and he told me than that he didn’t trust film people. Great, that’s a good start for producing pictures. Don had a reputation of fighting with producers, and he fought with Merrick. In London, over the telephone, Don told me that he was fired. Of course, I thought that my documentary was falling apart, too. Later, I heard from a friend that Peter Hunt (director of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service [1969]) was already scouting locations in Amsterdam to take over. How things turned around, I don’t know. I think that Burt Reynolds—who had waited a long time to work with Eastwood’s favorite director—didn’t agree with Merrick’s decision. Moreover, Don told me that he had a share in the film.

When I got to the set in Muiden (outside Amsterdam), they were shooting a scene with Burt Reynolds and Lesley-Anne Down in a garage and outside of it. The weather was very bad. Burt was in a rather bad mood because he didn’t like the Dutch weather and Lesley was apparently on drugs and out of control. There were only a few days to go and I heard stories that Don had collapsed and Burt had taken over. The public relations department told me that Don had refused to make any publicity for Escape from Alcatraz (1979), which had recently premiered. I shot my scenes for

the documentary and went to the Dutch Cinetone Studios (outside Amsterdam) where they had built a street from the red light district with an apartment of a prostitute. Don was shooting a little scene of a visitor negotiating with two prostitutes (one of them played by his new wife, Carol Rydall). For me it was essential to get an interview with Burt Reynolds and I succeeded because Don asked him to. Don also asked me to invite the Dutch critics to the studio because he wanted to talk to them about Escape from Alcatraz. You can understand how surprised the Public Relations lady was. Since I had just left my job as a critic, I still knew all the other critics and they showed up. The publicity was great and everybody loved Escape from Alcatraz. Later, I heard that many people had directed on Rough Cut: Siegel, Peter Hunt, Burt Reynolds, Hal Needham (second unit), and when the ending of the picture had to be re-shot, it was done by Robert Ellis Miller. It was the beginning of Don’s downfall with bad health. Later that year, I shot my interview in his house in Sherman Oaks.

CG: What was the biggest challenge in making your documentary?

TO: Clint Eastwood. Don told me in Amsterdam that he would tell Burt that Clint would be in my documentary. So, we contacted Clint officially in his office in Burbank and his producer Robert Daley promised my producer that I could come over and things would be arranged. But when I got to Hollywood, Daley wasn’t there and we had to start all over again. The secretary had no clue who we were and she asked for my contracts. When she got them they couldn’t read them because they were in Dutch and German, of course, so I had to translate them. The first week passed and my cameraman and I could only stay for 3 weeks. I got nervous and the second week passed. We had done the interviews with Don and Sheree North, and Don asked me how things were progressing. No progress, I told him. He then told me that he had just done a favor for Clint, so Clint should do a favor for him and give me an interview. Now I could tell the secretary that Clint was okay. She was quite surprised. On Tuesday she said to me, “When do you want to meet him?” “Thursday,” I said, and everything was okay. We went to Burbank and he welcomed us. I gave him Dutch cheese (which is always a good gift) and he told me that he was of Dutch origin. That makes his name “Oosterhout” for Eastwood. I had to sign a contract that I could only use 5 minutes of the interview in non-English speaking territories. I still have the original contract. I was very pleased that he was in my documentary, but it limited sales, of course. In fact, we never sold the film because of copyright problems with the clips.

CG: Where has your documentary screened? It was made for Dutch television, right?

TO: It was hardly screened in the USA. I showed it at NYU and Siegel’s first wife, Viveca Lindfors, and their son, Kristoffer Tabori, were there. Viveca got angry over what Don said in the movie and I still don’t know why. A shorter version of the doc (only one hour long) was shown on Dutch, German, and Belgian television. Recently, a digital Dutch channel showed it again. I am very proud of this documentary and I understand that it’s the only one about Siegel. Last year, his daughter Anne Whamsat-Siegel contacted me about getting a DVD, but after that she never told me whether she liked it or not, it was very strange.

CG: Did you stay in touch with Don Siegel after your documentary was over?

TO: I did stay in touch with Don. One time on the phone in Hollywood, he told me he was ready to begin Jinxed (1982) and already he didn’t like Bette Midler. It was another failure that cost him his health. Then he invited me to his home in Sherman Oaks and we had lunch. He was very nice and he told me that he really was interested filming a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the guys who wrote the novel Vertigo (1958) was based on. Don asked if I could help him set it up. I was very proud that he asked me and I managed to get the book from the French editor. I read it, and it was a modern Frankenstein story about a criminal who is executed and his limbs are used for other people. Then, the rest of the dead body starts collecting the limbs and kills for it. I didn’t really think it was good material for Siegel, but when I called to talk to him from Holland his wife told me that he was really too sick to do anything. Some time later a Dutch producer called him and asked if he could be interviewed for a documentary about Casablanca (he had done some montages for it), but he didn’t want to do that. He was too weak but he talked to her about some projects that were offered to him. Of course, the movies never happened.

CG: What are the qualities that you admire in Don Siegel’s work?

TO: He did a lot with impossible budgets and all his pictures are both interesting and entertaining. I like watching them all over again. He had a great sense of humor. If you want to know how he talks and you haven’t see my doc, you just have to look at Walter Matthau in Charley Varrick, he plays Don Siegel.

CG: Do you have any particular favorite films of Siegel’s?

TO: I think Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is one of the best Science Fiction films ever made. It’s like an episode of Peyton Place where everything goes wrong—it’s magnificent. I think Clint has never been better than in the Siegel films, and Siegel’s influence on his directing is obvious. The Beguiled (1971) is a gem because it diverts from the other films made with Clint. It’s a very dark film.

CG: On your website, it says that you run a film society in Zandvoort and host a radio show. Can you say something about these projects?

TO: The film society is in the local cinema. We have about a 100 members and most of the time about 50% shows up on Wednesday nights when we show an interesting film and I do the introduction. Recently I have shown Up in the Air (2009), Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs (2009), Millenium 2 (also known as The Girl Who Played With Fire) (2009), so it is not only art-films but also good entertainment films that have little chance in the regular programs in Zandvoort. I have been doing this for over 15 years. I stopped the radio show because there was not a large audience.

CG: What films are you working on at the moment?

TO: I am trying to get money for a doc about a seaside resort near Rotterdam called Hook of Holland. This doc would be a little bit like my Zandsvoort doc. I am also in negotiations with a producer to do a little feature film based on a book. A documentary on Westerns never materialized because I need a Dutch TV station to co-produce it and they are not interested in Westerns anymore. I also interviewed Roger Corman when he was in Amsterdam three years ago and I spent some time with him.

Alban Muja is an artist from Kosovo who is currently doing a residency at UnionDocs through C.E.C. ArtsLink. On November 7th, he screened a short program of videos and films about the nature of names and the uses to which they are put. Spanning the past six years, from Muja’s college graduation to his emergence in the international art world, the four works here trace the early development of an exciting new voice.

While Muja’s background is in painting and drawing, he has garnered the most attention for his videos. His first, Free Your Mind (2004), opened the UnionDocs program. It consists of one static frame, shot from a low-angle with a consumer DV camera, in which Muja (then a recent art school graduate) attempts to purge himself of influence by reciting the names of artists, locally or internationally famous, as they come to him. Later efforts Palestina (2005) and Tibet (2009) are both short interviews with Kosovar Albanians named for countries also engaged in struggles for sovereignty.

Muja produced the first two videos while Kosovo was still under UN administration, and the third in the year following its declaration of independence. Underlying all three is an investigation of Kosovo’s recent history, and an attempt to discover the character of the newly independent nation. But Muja abjures big statements. These three works are modest and narrowly defined vignettes. Their concern with Kosovo at-large is never explicit, but it is not exactly oblique. All three of them map the flow of international news into Kosovo. The country’s plight is evident in the very nature of Palestina and Tibet, and Muja is happy to leave it at that, steering both interviewees toward the particulars of their christening. In Free Your Mind, Muja mingles canonical figures with Southeastern European favorites and Kosovar contemporaries. And Muja’s cultural position is evident from his performance, as unfamiliar names roll gracefully off his tongue while he discovers novel pronunciations for those he knows only from text. In each, there is a kind of two-way refraction that illuminates something of contemporary Kosovo through the questions of nomenclature, and vice-versa.

But the three videos are just sketches–statements of purpose that resist the slightest formal or structural organization. Their implications are enticing, but the videos, though neither unpleasant or boring, fail to deliver on the promise of the ideas. They share the unfinished, partial quality that mars so many videos produced for the gallery setting, but Blue Wall Red Door (2009), the 33-minute film that closed the program, suggests that Muja has his sights set higher. Co-Directed with Yll Çitaku, the documentary directly addresses Kosovo of today. Or yesterday, really, since one of the film’s lessons is that Kosovo is changing too rapidly for a report like this to stay relevant for very long.

When Muja and Çitaku say their film examines how residents of Pristina orient themselves in the city, they are not venturing idly into urbanist theory, but referring to an urgent practical problem. In Kosovo, national leadership has changed hands so many times in the past few decades that street names have been altered or re-named at a pace that renders them functionally useless. In Pristina, the capital, a major artery is called Lenin Street one day and Bill Clinton Boulevard the next. In lieu of a standardized system of roadway nomenclature or addressing, Prishtinalis rely on a loosely agreed-upon set of landmarks to direct one another: large or unusual buildings, natural features like rivers or hills, and other places seemingly chosen at random, like the red door of the film’s title (which, of course, is no longer even red).

That’s not such a problem if you’re just directing a friend to your house, but for public servants, cab drivers, and visitors, it is nightmarish. Alternating between point-of-view shots and sequences in which Muja plays a gregarious man-on-the-street interviewer, the co-directors lead us through the problem at each municipal level, bringing us on cab rides, tagging along with mail carriers and fire fighters, and stopping passersby to ask for directions. Their methodical approach to the street name problem gives us a panorama of life in Kosovo, introducing us to citizens across a range of classes and lifestyles.The evolving street names are symbols of Kosovo’s recent history, and the spaces they are supposed to denote provide a physical record of it.

Blue Wall Red Door‘s tone is surprisingly lighthearted and fun, but this is not tragedy played as farce, or a jeering condemnation of developing world bureaucracy. Almost everyone who appears on camera is good humored and eager to participate. They explain their problems getting around the city with a sense of irony untainted by bitterness. The film instead looks to Kosovo’s future with an almost giddy hope that does not obscure the real difficulties that face the nation.

Here, Muja not only ventures deeper into Kosovo, but into issues of nomenclature as well. Unless you live in a city like Pristina, it is easy to take basic administrative functions like street-naming for granted. By documenting Pristina’s navigational difficulties, Muja and Çitaku make evident the political nature of nomenclature. They also illustrate the most the most basic purposes served by naming, and show us what happens in its absence. But this is no  meditation; everything happens very quickly. Blue Wall Red Door is one of those delightful narratives, like a Donald Barthleme story, that manages to propel you forward without ever letting you fully grasp your bearings. It keeps your brain one step behind the action, but no further, interpretation nipping at the heels of comprehension. This is precisely the sort of dynamic Muja’s videos fail to produce. The three of them clearly announce their themes at the outset, but bring us no closer to them as they unfold. Blue Wall Red Door launches in medias res and never stops barrelling forward, accumulating new meanings, and altering our sense of what we are watching at every turn. It is a thrilling and intellectually rewarding experience. If this is the progress Muja has made as a filmmaker in the past five years, I cannot wait to see what’s next.

Last week brought the sad news that amateur filmmaker Robbins Barstow had died at home in Hartford. He was 91. Since the mid-1930s, Barstow had produced more than a hundred films and videos, most of them documents of quotidian family life, all marked by a peculiar narrative sensibility. In the past decade, sites like YouTube and archive.org brought large audiences to his work, and he became an avatar of the home movie preservation movement. In 2008, The Library of Congress added Disneyland Dream, his most successful work, to the National Film Registry.

Last January, UnionDocs presented four of Barstow’s films, in conjunction with the Orphan Film Symposium, long-time champions of his work: Tarzan and the Rocky Gorge (1936), Youth and the Future (1943-44), Disneyland Dream (1956), and The Making of Disneyland Dream (2009).   In preparation for the screening, critic Cullen Gallagher, who co-programmed the show with Jennifer Blaylock, conducted an interview with Barstow. As a tribute to Barstow, it is reproduced below.

Many of Barstow’s films are available on archive.org.

Cullen Gallagher: How did you come to start making your own home movies?

Robbins Barstow: I have always loved movies. Growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, in the 1920′s, I went to see as many theater movies as my parents would let me. Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. was my childhood hero, for films like The Three Musketeers (1921) and The Black Pirate (1926). I also remember being irresistibly terrified by the dinosaurs in The Lost World (1925). When our family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1930, I got a hand-cranked Kodak 16mm movie projector, and purchased 25 foot reels of short films of cartoons, comedies, and animals, which I would I charge neighborhood kids five or ten cents to watch being projected onto a sheet hung in our basement. After our next-door neighbor took 100 feet of 16mm home movies of my two younger brothers and me playing and doing stunts with our Dad in the backyard, I just knew I had to have a movie camera. The earliest films I remember making were some scenes of various family activities, beginning in 1932, when I was 12. I used a hand-held, hand-cranked Eastman Kodak 16mm camera. I became a youthful member of the Amateur Cinema League, and read a lot about making home movies, including trick shots like reverse motion and stop motion. I had a small Kodak editing and titling machine, so I could edit and title my films for home viewing.

CG: There is a wonderful whimsicality to Tarzan and the Rocky Gorge (1936), and it captures the magic of childhood imagination more than many movies I’ve seen. What was the production like, in terms of preparation and development?

RB: By the time I was sixteen, I was ready to turn my random, family filmmaking hobby into the creation of an epic teenage adventure film. In the early 1930′s, Tarzan of the Apes had become my new film hero, as embodied by the Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller. When visiting a friend of my father in the hillside woods of Granby, Connecticut, we discovered a tall, rocky gorge with a small stream and waterfall at its base, and immediately realized that this would be a perfect setting for a Tarzan movie. So I got my two, younger brothers, and three neighborhood girls, to embark on a film-making safari to the site of the gorge. We had figured out that we needed two main characters besides Tarzan to tell a rudimentary story — a hero and a villain, to whom we gave the outrageous names of Paulus Rufus Barstinio, the eminent African explorer (brother Paul), and Mahahatmi Slinkaround (brother John). Barstinio would lead a three-girl safari seeking to find Tarzan, and Slinkaround would try to stop them, to protect Tarzan from intruders. There was no script. We just made things up as we went along, utilizing the varied natural settings. We filmed the entire production, just by ourselves, in a single day on location. I directed and did most of the camera work myself, but got one of the other crew members to film the scenes that I (as Tarzan) appeared in. Everyone cooperated very well, and we all had lots of fun playing this out. We used up three or four 100-foot reels of 16mm film, but had relatively little wasted footage. After we got home, I did all the editing myself, and developed a standard narration which I would give live whenever we showed the film to family, friends, and other groups. It became increasingly popular over the years, and in 1993, nearly 60 years after its origin, I had it transferred to videotape and recorded the narration. Most of this original 1936 fanfilm was developed through on the spot instinct and inspiration.

CG: Youth and the Future (1943-44) was made with Eries Boys’ Club at the Hudson Guild Neighborhood House. What was that organization and how did you come to be involved with them?

RB: I graduated from Dartmouth College in 1941, and applied for alternative service as a conscientious objector in the military draft. I was classified, however, as 4F due to an inherited blood condition which had required the removal of my spleen in December 1936. In September 1942, I married Margaret Vanderbeek (Mount Holyoke, 42), at which time she had secured a position as girls’ group worker at the Hudson Guild Neighborhood House, in Chelsea, on New York’s West Side. Since I was exempt from the draft, the Guild also hired me to serve as boys’ group worker, and we lived in a second-floor apartment on West 28th Street. I organized the Eries Boys’ Club at the Settlement House, a group of a dozen teen-age neighborhood boys, and was responsible for supervising their after-school activities. I was also politically active, and after President Roosevelt enunciated “The Four Freedoms” as goals for the war, we discussed their meaning at a few club meetings.  Since I had a home movie camera, we thought it would be a neat group project to figure out how to dramatize “Freedom from Want” on the home front. I think it helped all of us crystalize interest and concern over how to move from the Past to the Future in this area.

CG: Disneyland Dream was added to the National Film Registry in 2008, a very high honor. What sort of life did the film have leading up to that moment?

RB: I first showed the home-edited version of Disneyland Dream to a gathering of neighborhood families and friends, projected on a sheet attached to the side of our house in Wethersfield, with my 16mm movie projector set up in our back yard, on Labor Day weekend, 1956, with me providing on-the-spot narration as the film went along. It proved to be an immediate favorite and became very popular. Over the years, I received dozens of requests to show it to community groups, PTA’s, schools, church and other social groups, extending throughout the state, as well as to relatives and at family gatherings.

Finally, in 1995, after nearly 40 years, I had the film transferred to VHS Video, for wider distribution, and I recorded the narration on tape. I was then able to have it broadcast over our local Wethersfield Public Access Community Television Channel. When I heard in the mid 2000′s, that the Library of Congress was interested in adding home movies to their collections, I sent Dr. James H. Billington, the distinguished Librarian of Congress, a copy of Disneyland Dream, along with a dozen other home movies which I had produced with our family over a period of some 70 years. In 2007, I signed an agreement donating these amateur films to the Library as “The Robbins Barstow 20th Century Family Home Movie Collection.”

I knew that in 2008 Disneyland Dream had been nominated by a friend of mine, Beth Gilligan, to be named to the National Film Registry. But the thrill of its announcement in December 2008 has been unmatched. It has been publicly shown at Home Movie Day in New Haven, at Northeast Historic Film Symposium in Bucksport, Maine, at Hartford International Film Festival, and on November 2, 2009, at Museum of Modern Art International Festival of Film Preservation.

CG: In Making “Disneyland Dream” (2009) we see some footage and photographs that weren’t included in the original film. What was the process of selection like going through your archives and backlog of material?

RB: As a life-long film hobbyist, I have a pretty good idea of what materials I have saved and stored somewhere over the years, and I actually enjoy observing my film-creating process. I’ll start out with a particular project in mind, and then as I work on it, new ideas come along, it changes, and other elements come into the picture. Sometimes new ideas come to me in the middle of the night, or when I am taking a walk. Then I search and find, and often come up with, a new angle. Putting it all together in an interesting framework is the fun of it.
CG: How do you decide on what events in your life and community to film?

RB: Impulse, instinct, availability, time, energy, request. I have a strong sense of wanting some special events to be preserved for future recollection. I want to give certain presentations an afterlife, not just have them blossom once and be gone forever.

CG: Do you finalize all the projects with editing and narration, or only select ones?

RB: I still have a couple of dozen film projects on my shelves waiting to assume priority status, with editing and narration. I’m looking ahead now to trying to switch over to digital, computer editing in future days, as long as I am able.

CG: What places have you been able to share your films over the years?

RB: My biggest reward has come just in the last couple of years, through being able to share 16 of my amateur home movie productions with anyone on the entire planet who has access to the Internet! This was absolutely inconceivable when I first started making films. All anyone has to do now is go to the archive.org web site and search for “Barstow Travel Adventure.” I’ve gotten scores of letters from total strangers around the world thanking me for sharing these. For me this is truly a “reward greater than gold.”  (As of January 20, 2010, Disneyland Dream is reported to have been downloaded 61,612 times, and Tarzan and the Rocky Gorge 147,564 times.)

CG: What changes have you seen in the home movie/amateur filmmaking community?

RB: The biggest change has been in increased awareness through the promotion of the annual Home Movie Day (www.homemovieday.com) by the Center for Home Movies (www.centerforhomemovies.org).

CG: What do you see as the cultural value of sharing home movies?

RB: Home movies provide insights into other people’s lives. Moving images go beyond still photographs. They provide active “slices of life,” which bring back recollections for elders and revelations for youngsters. They also provide an incomparable legacy. The author of Zenzele — A Letter for My Daughter (1996), J. Nozipo Maraire, has said: “Each of our lives is a story. What we leave behind, in words and pictures, is our telling of that story. These images are the very manifestations of our immortality.”

Simone Bennett’s The Truth Machine (2007) begins with an epigram:

“Truth is a mirror which fell to earth in a million pieces, and each human being picked up a piece, looked at it and saw themselves reflected. And each decided they saw the truth…but not realizing that truth is splintered among all people.”

Bennett’s video appeared at UnionDocs as part of “you may find yourself: Short Films Exploring The Urban Landscape”, a program composed of 7 works to which this fable of the multiplicitous and polysemous nature of truth could have applied equally. Curated by Dutch filmmaker Tim Leyendekker, the evening was devoted to documentaries or quasi-documentaries that share an ambivalence about the authority of the camera and the certainties of narrative. But even more telling than the fable’s content was the banality of its presentation. I can imagine liking many of these films in a different context, but what struck me here was their basic refusal to confront the problems they highlight. Together, these works appeared timid, fussy, and inert.

In The Truth Machine, the narration gives way to a harsh buzzing sound as the camera swoops upward from dark grass and begins traversing a tableau vivant. Actors hold positions from a moment following a sedan-on-RV car crash. Moving past them across the road, the camera reaches a woman who holds up a glistening shard of mirror glass. Bennett plays with the effects of motion and time, but as a long gaze at a split second scene, The Truth Machine cannot but suggest the conditions of photography. Its light and setting recall Joel Sternfeld’s uncanny landscape scenes from the 1970s, but the execution — the elaborate, plodding crane shot, the human bodies in pregnant poses, and the deliberate artifice — is closer to Gregory Crewdson’s smug big-budget stagings. The whole thing unfurls with little surprise. Its designs are clear early on, and the camera merely completes its inexorable course to a conclusion that does not much enlarge or illuminate the introductory parable.

Volko Kamensky’s Oral History (2009) likewise uses artifice to complicate the reality of the film image. A camera mechanically pans back and forth across what appears to be a quaint German town as voices on the soundtrack relay various events from its history. But this is fiction presented as fact. Neither the town nor the stories are real. Kamensky is shrewder than Bennett, but he too sacrifices experiential depth for conceptual clarity. The pseudo-historical text is itself so rarefied that the post-facto reveal just shuffles the rug rather than pulling it out from under you.

The films on the bill that directly explore actuality play out in the shadows of these two theoretical baubles. Leyendekker included two of his own works in the program, which he put together, he said, partly to contextualize himself. This grounding indeed helps elucidate his rather hermetic films. In still (1989), he shows us two autumn scenes: an empty bench sitting outside a building of vague institutional quality, and a small square of forest floor striated by sunlight, both of them shot pixilated over the course of a few hours to convey the passage of time. The screen goes black after the second shot, and we hear an awkward, even desultory, exchange between two young men making a date over a chat line. This is an early effort, and while Leyendekker’s sensitive cinematography captures a certain seasonal wistfulness, the whole thing is so slight and unspectacular that its riddle does not beckon. The Healers (2010), his latest film, is a clearer articulation of the same ambitions. Another triptych, the film’s first section is montage of strobe lights and abstract motion set to assaultive Euro techno beats. Leyendekker tightens the reins in the second part, the film’s longest, giving us a series of quiet, beautifully composed static images of an empty nightclub in the light of day. In frames either packed with alluring detail or pared down to minimalist design, Leyendekker takes us through the club’s dance floor and bar to the backroom bathrooms, and sex stalls — there’s even a modest little dungeon, complete with a harness. In the final segment, the camera sweeps 360 degrees around a group of men in a recording studio, reading from a script that describes a strange, volatile encounter between two men who met at the club we have just seen. Both films revel in a kind of fragmentary personal obscurantism. Leyendekker decouples his experience into individual strands and assembles them in parallel so that they refract, but do not explain one another.

Leyendekker turns inward, but the other films on the program venture into the wider social world. Subject matter aside, Jørgen Leth’s 66 Scenes From America (1982) is something of an outlier. One of two films on the bill made prior to the new millennium, 66 Scenes is distinctly of its era. A travelogue broken into postcard-like vignettes from an era rich with half-ironic, half-longing (and typically European) odes to the big, weird American landscape, it immediately recalls a number of filial relations: Robert Frank’s The Americans, Baudrillard’s America, many books by Peter Handke, and, most notably, the early films of Wim Wenders, whose Alice in the Cities sports a roadtripping, Polaroid-mad protagonist who could have directed 66 Scenes. Leth, like the other European art tourists, has a wry appreciation for American sincerity and capitalist excess — its most famous scene is a long static take of Andy Warhol, dry and detached as ever, working his way through a Whopper — but he does not peddle an overarching thesis about the country. Like Leyendekker, he emphasizes the part above the whole. While the film’s first half is electric with possibility, by the end, Leth’s refusal to synthesize his findings seems less like resistance to the constraints of documentary than a lack of anything to say. The film’s vintage is its primary interest — Leth captures the striking regional variety of the old United States, just before much of it was rendered a Möbius strip of chain restaurants and prefabricated design.

Like 66 Scenes, Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky’s God Provides is a letter to home sent by uncomprehending tourists.Two among countless filmmakers who have traveled to post-Katrina New Orleans, Cassidy and Shatzky distinguish themselves through disorientation. Apart from the now familiar devastation, nothing in the film directly indicates that it was made in New Orleans. The filmmakers lead us through a series of disconnected scenes of the clean-up effort, most of them sad and absurd, by crosscutting with a throughline that propels the film forward: the camera tracks alongside a woman with an unspecified disability as she travels on the shoulder of the road in a motorized wheelchair, as a voice on the soundtrack describes the woody area she often visits to collect her thoughts. During the Q&A, Cassidy and Shatzky said that while most documentary filmmakers seek to enlighten, they wanted to mystify their subject. But rather than present the awesome enigma of everyday life following a disaster on the scale of Katrina, they pour on their mystifications after the fact, laying on a viscous goop of discombobulating styles. The film’s halfhearted Southern Gothic and disability exotica would likely be offensive if there were any conviction to the film.

In A Necessary Music (2008), Beatrice Gibson and Alex Waterman also seek refuge in the uncertain. Their video portrays life on Roosevelt Island, the odd little strip on the East River between Manhattan and Queens that has hosted a penitentiary, an insane asylum, and a smallpox hospital, and which is now home to more than 10,000 people who live packed into Modernist housing blocks. An ethnography of sorts, the film faces the notorious perils of documentary authority more directly than anything else in Leyendekker’s program. To meet this task, Gibson and Waterman throw everything at the wall, employing most of the tactics seen in the other films, and add others for good measure, transforming the ethnographic portrait into what they call a science fiction film. The film’s narration, read by the great composer Robert Ashley, is mostly borrowed from Bioy-Casares’ The Invention of Morel. Gibson and Waterman conducted interviews with residents, but they scramble the image and sound, matching one subject’s words with the face of another, thwarting any attempt at direct interpretation. These tortured obfuscations bring us no closer to the residents of Roosevelt Island or the mechanisms of documentary.

The concerns about film’s claim to truth that are at the heart of these works have animated nearly every serious non-fiction film produced in the last 30-odd years. Leyendekker’s program reveals — inadvertently, one must assume — the old tactics of experimental documentary sedimented into pastiche. The Healers, the best film of the evening, manages to represent some of the allusive interstices of experience, but most of these films not only fail to tell us something about the world, they are incapable of even describing it.