Film Post: some documentaries

Nanook of the North

Robert Flaherty, US, 1922

If you look closely there’s lots of scattershot here.  What are these family relationships, exactly?  Cobbled together, shaggy-dog elements kind of come through the cracks.  It’s partly because documentary isn’t invented yet, but maybe it’s mostly that this is a barnstormer’s independent film production, and a crazy gamble of a production at that.  No wonder it’s sloppy!  Other than that, great things abound.  Yes, there’s always the igloo sequence.  But the arresting, amusing, faked seal tug of war  (there’s the deep space Bazin was remembering) made me forget the more matter-of-fact, much more important aftermath.  Look at the detail on the carve-up!  He’s an architect, and artist, a holy man, a warm-hearted vocational instructor and then a terrific butcher to boot.  

So.  "Nanook" is a great character, but there’s more than just him here.  With all its fibs and fudges, this film still reaches back across industrialization and conquest to primordial antiquity, and in a way that few films have managed.  (Dreyer’s “Joan,” City of Gold, Heartland, Master and Commander, anything by Paradjanov.)  Here’s creation’s dawn.  And maybe, when the systems and principalities topple, it won’t be Mad Max after all.  Humans in a space, and all that follows.

Final connection: Abraham Maslow (A Theory of Human Motivation [a hierarchy of human needs], 1943) jumps out during the film's concluding half hour.  There’s a powerful, looming fatality to this whole project, or rather to the whole tenuous existence that the project seeks to preserve and honour.  Look at that amazing late shot as these people walk out of focus, cross that blasted space, become mere silhouettes.  Talk about direness!  They struggle to cover their physiological and security needs.  Nanook dies within two years of the production of the film; they ultimately don’t struggle all that successfully.  But the grace with which they eke!  How did they leap from the basics right up to self-actualization?  This is a punishing elemental saga that doesn’t result in Jack London-like naturalism.  Yes they eat raw meat, but compare the unforced, thoroughly infused cheerfulness of these subjects with those snarling savage dogs.  Flaherty showed what he wanted to show, and he was right.  

The best copy, obviously, is available through the Criterion Collection.

The Battle of Russia

Produced by the US Office of War Information

Directed by Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, US, 1943

It’s kind of a false division, but what if you were to pit entertainment against education, and have this film represent the better part?  Based on doc student response, and their teacher’s too, there is overwhelmingly no contest.  This isn’t Hollywood rescuing and compromising dull information, it’s information rendered with the spirit it deserves, and producing the electricity native to it.  Blessings on the war department.  They’re motivating, and even propagandizing.  But this time they're doing so in the very best sense.  

Like those Stuart Legg/National Film Board films that precede and then accompany this series, emotion comes always and only after a proper and very detailed establishing of context.  Facts, two parts worth, selected and ordered and interpreted, are way more exciting than show biz can ever be.  First because they’re so much more important than frivolousness.  Second because they’re so much more interesting!  They even dispense with great men, in favour of acknowledging the Soviet collective.  They’d reap the whirlwind for that seeming miscalculation, but in fact they are right, anthropologically and morally.  The right thing to do is to tell their story, not your cultural or ideological take on their story.  And this is some story!  Watching this film is analogous to going through the Churchill Museum and the Cabinet War Rooms in London.  After the unspeakable hardship (not fully rendered, for modesty’s and decency’s sake) and incalculable loss of the Leningrad siege, and in the impossible stand at Stalingrad, this is that rare historical reduction, that rare historical simplicity.  This was the most important thing in the world, and this was the world’s salvation.  The result is so thrilling, and so moving.

Soviet victory banner raised over the Reichstag, Berlin, 1945

The Hutterites

Produced by Tom Daly and Roman Kroitor

Directed by Colin Low

Commentary by Stanley Jackson

Cinematography and editing by John Spotton

Canada, 1964

A perfect film.  Beyond the quiet virtuosity of every technical credit, it definitively embodies all of the institution’s--the National Film Board, that is--noble aims.  Revealing Canada to Canadians: affirming the necessity of the mosaic in the midst of the tempting oblivion of the melting pot; proving the primacy of the collective, which is both featured in the film and operational in its production; demonstrating that willing dutifulness, leavened by real interest—charitable cinema!—basically obliterates any commercial impulse.  If one more person says that communism (or public subsidy) is contrary to the gospel…

Available at http://www.nfb.ca/film/the_hutterites/.  Or, just go to http://www.nfb.ca/ for this, and hundreds of others of the world's best films.