Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) - There seems to have existed a visual convention extending all the way beyond Baywatch.

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme ten, part three - a cinéma vérité film!

(Chosen by John!)

Let's not make the whole, "Well this film isn't good, proper, Christian cinéma vérité in the true sense, but the list said it was and we stick to our picks," thing a little postscript at the end.  Let's address the matter right up front: director Werner Herzog is not one to embrace the theory of observational cinema.  When he's crafting fiction, he is determined to leave his thumbprint on the work prominently as possible with his often unsafe working practices and method of handling actors; when helming a documentary, his unique, strangely compelling voice is perpetually at the forefront, and we are given constant reminders of how there is a camera, and lights, and a crew, and the person of Werner Herzog involved in every stage of production.  He will not vanish into the background like a fly on a wall, and indeed noted his belief that a director should instead serve as a hornet constantly attacking their subject in an interview chronicled by the New York Times around Cave of Forgotten Dreams' American release.  We have, to all appearances, chosen a film whose contents scantly reflect the tradition of an invisible camera and subjects captured in perfectly natural surroundings.  As he notes, by virtue of the Chauvet cave paintings' depth within their cavernous home both upon initial creation and after a rockslide buried the initial entrance from view, one cannot appreciate them without artificial light, be it from a torch or stage light.  Herzog and his crew at first cannot stand in this space without accompaniment from researchers well-versed in the safety protocols and history behind the cave, and because they are along for the ride, we are going to hear more than plenty from them throughout the film, their words addressed directly to Herzog and the camera.  Peppered throughout we find many vignettes showing the work towards digitally mapping every inch of the cave, inspecting reproduced artifacts from nearby sites in a museum, talking of ancient hunting practices and music and sniffing for cave scents.  Cave of Forgotten Dreams is anything but cinéma vérité, moreso than High School owing to Wiseman's disdain for the term, or Man with a Movie Camera due to Vertov predating the very idea.

And yet, for all this, Herzog does employ techniques we might call purely observational.  At a few key points throughout and most prominently for the climax, he ceases his speech, banishes all persons from the frame, and chooses to only film the paintings in all their preserved beauty.  It is of course impossible to say there's NO intended influence from the director or crew in these passages - he places so much emphasis on the importance of light in making the animals on the walls dance and move in a proto-cinema earlier in the film, it's impossible to ignore how his own lights shift across the rockface - but by comparison there is no guiding hand musing about the nature of those who came here before, no expert detailing why certain images are so fascinating.  When we come down to the matter, it is simply us, the painted animals, and the temporal distance collapsed to zero.  One expects this in a documentary cave paintings, naturally.  If you're gonna take a camera into a fragile location sealed off to all save a handful of experts, you'll eventually stop talking and show what you've found to show.  Why make note of Herzog staying quite when anyone with even the tiniest awareness of how incredible it is to find a direct link to a moment and people 32,000 years past would keep their trap shut?

I do so because I think, despite Herzog's disdain for observational cinema and his tendency to make knowing Werner Herzog is behind all this a top priority, his limited use of observational techniques here is more effective for their sharing time with his usual methods than they would as a total work in themselves.  Pan the camera across the walls, let us appreciate the paleolithic artwork, and it is all awe-inspiring, yes, but the context is so much more.  The paintings become more incredible when someone who knows what's up explains how we can trace the journey of one particular painter through the tunnels thanks to his crooked little finger, when we are given cause to deliberately contemplate the fragility of the calcite structures, when someone explains the limitations that prevent us from getting a full look at an angularly protruding stalactite with a union of woman and bull painted round its circumference.  To follow the archaeologists and art historians and geologists and even the strange perfumer fellow who's determined to find new caves by identifying their musk and following his nose is to gain necessary knowledge, place a specific idea behind WHY we find these images of hunts and wilds long extinct so compelling.  Equipped with this understanding, when we are finally left alone like Herzog and his crew in the furthest confines of the cave, with only these ancient paintings before our eyes, we are able to draw on that which we now know, consider them more fully, and feel our unnamed hypnotic compulsion to look and drink and be one with our ancestors coalesce into an informed sense of commonality.  For my part, knowing more about how they took advantage of the texture and contours of the cave walls sharpened my appreciation for how their tableaux takes on the appearance of a plain observed from a high place, certain features tangibly in the distance, others obscured by foliage and rock formations and the like.  It became a true window into another time, thanks to my learning how and possibly why it was made this way.

 My regular readers will note I constantly harp about purity of form when it comes to movies, dolling out greater praise for works that achieve in one particular manner to a sharpened peak.  While my aesthetic preferences will typically swing this way, it's important to note the equal strength found in a marriage between disciplines.  The tradition behind cinéma vérité, when coupled with a more usual form of heavy-handed, carefully guided documentation, can reveal untold truths about the subject when we finally do back off and look with nothing more than mechanical eyes.  With regards to the Chauvet cave and the paintings within, I wonder whether a more adamantly observational director, interested only in filming the walls, could have captured the same sense of compressed time Herzog manages here?  Learning as we do before our time with light against ancient paint and older stone grants the paintings a stronger sense of humanity, some more visible image of an early homo sapien crouched before their work, bringing it to life before our eyes as we puzzle out their thought processes, their intents, their dreams.  Would the cave speak so legible a tongue if presented on its own, or do we truly need all Herzog includes as a Rosetta stone?  Furthermore, could this explain why Herzog chooses to focus on the albino crocodiles in a nuclear power plant-dependent jungle enclosure several miles away?  After all, the crocodillians will not have any guides or experts to inform them about what the paintings could mean or why their creators chose to draw them, anymore than the tourists in Lascaux would in the days those paintings were open to a mold-breeding public.  In an artistic, anthropomorthized sense, when they see what we see, free from intellectual guidance, will they too dream of the horse on the open plain?

Do Crocodiles Dream of Wild Horses is the name of my new album, look for it on store shelves.

Man with a Movie Camera (1929) - An experimentation in the cinematic communication of visual phenomena.

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme ten, part two - a cinéma vérité* film!

(Chosen by Jackie!)

Dziga Vertov so believed in cinema, he renamed himself for the camera's motion, from the Ukrainian for "spinning top."  His faith in the mechanical eye's ability to capture actualities as they happened, free from any need for characters or narrative, formed the basis for his goals in Man with a Movie Camera.  The three-year project was to serve as a revolutionary cry in support of cinema as the modern art of the people, an artform capable of capturing an entire city in motion without resorting to the techniques of theater or literature, or indeed any medium other than the purely cinematic.  Per the conventional wisdom, he succeeded in his aims while failing to reach the public, crafting an experimental piece of pure filmmaking the likes of which have rarely, if ever, been equaled, just unfortunately timed to release after Battleship Potemkin made a Soviet realist approach the popular mold at home and abroad.  He was, tradition holds, a man fighting the whole weight of narrative film with something completely detached from narrative.  To my eye, however, watching Man with a Movie Camera reveals Vertov failed in even this respect, for his film does adhere to a three-act structure, does communicate in the language of those who came before.  I do not count this failure as a failure he could have avoided, though, nor a failure that speaks to Man with a Movie Camera falling short of its primary goals - rather, I consider it a demonstration of how handily Vertov illustrated the possibility for a moving image to speak the human tongue, and ultimately be a human art.

Let me explain.

The film proper begins with a movie camera atop a movie camera, and the theater's patrons settling into their seats as a projectionist brings the house lights down and the projector to speed, but the first we see of our true subject denies motion entirely.  Our city in the morning is asleep, the rich and poor alike in repose in their quilted bed and bare park benches, the storefronts speak to no one, the great machines all still and quiet.  Trace of activity attract attention ever so slowly: the early risers walking the streets, the pigeons aflutter in the air, the man with the movie camera trotting the landscape and preparing his shots for the day.  With time, the residents rise and busy themselves with freshening and dressing for the day, some already tirelessly working as others blink sleep from their eyes and reluctantly go through the motions.  Even the camera must take time to adjust to the light and focus on the right details and keep its shutter open.  Soon, the traffic begins, workers appearing from nowhere to ready the planes and trains and automobiles, beginning the day's delicate balance of a thousand vehicles narrowly avoiding ten thousand pedestrians.  The pace of life is not entirely even, for the shopworkers have the luxury of sleeping longer than the street cleaners and and transit operators, yet they too must rise and prepare for the day as the machines that truly power the city are brought to life - these, it must be noted, show no hesitance, instantly springing to life and achieving full speed within seconds.  Inside twenty minutes, Vertov and cameraman brother Mikhail Kaufman have brought their subject to its full swing, the camera tracing Kaufman as he places himself in out of the way places to get the shot, slipping under barreling locomotives and perching atop moving cars and walking against the crowd and climbing to high perches to find just what he needs.  All is as it always is...

...and then we transition with a stop.  We move from establishment to exploration with a moment's consideration for the editor, Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova, as she holds the celuloid in its raw, unmoving state, and brings it to life with careful cuts.  Initially an invisible hand taken for granted, we will see her numerous times throughout the remainder of the film, keeping us firmly aware that someone must make these images dance as they do, in addition to our existing awareness towards their place in the movie theater and their selection by someone holding the camera.  The kino eye IS perfect in capturing exactly what it is set to capture, exactly as it is before its lens, but it is nothing without those who operate and discern.

Speaking of operation and discerning, we come to our second act, exploring the city's operations.  Vertov contrasts images more here than at any other point in the film, and it is interesting what he chooses to contrast in what order.  The usual choices are right up front, the camera swiveling atop a balcony to capture marriage and divorce at the same instant, a baby's birth and a man's funeral, the celebration of new beginnings and the mourning inherent to passing.  From this lofty comparison of ultimate extremes, he suddenly finds interest in that delicate balance again, positioning the camera between trams and atop trains and at intersections to capture how readily accidents COULD happen, and how narrowly it all speeds on, even tilting mirrored images towards one another to squash Kaufman between passing vehicles with barely an inch to spare - and then we take a minute or two to watch those who ARE unfortunate enough to take a hit, and the rescue and medical services which follow.  Necessity must compliment indulgence, so we next turn our attention to those who partake in leisure and service during working hours, and intercut them with those who package and craft and toil to keep the same functional.  Notably, halfway into this sequence Vertov starts prominently cutting Svilova's editing process in place of the other workers, arguing for the act of movie-making as laborious and necessary a task as wrapping products and tending weaves and minding traffic.  He does not, I think, places these images against one another to imply conflict, for the laborers are shown to enjoy their task just as much as the patrons do their constant repose, and he does them great kindness by then placing them in complimentary positions against the act's grand finale, the thunder of machines.  Mines, forges, power plants, enormous dams, the necessary lifeblood of the modern metropolis, all captured at the height of their operation, tunnels and pools and rushes of water so great they darken all but themselves... and still, the workers and the man with the movie camera are distinctly visible, their actions presented as essential to the continued movement of it all.

And so we stop again, if in a less jarring way than the sudden freeze frame of the first transition.  The factory workers power down their machines, the laborers put down their labor, and the whole city moves to a third act, one of leisure and play.  We engage ourselves at the beach, the track, the amusement park as the people magically fade into their places naturally as you please, and Vertov becomes endlessly fascinated with their activities.  On those who partake in sport, he makes time to freeze on their most dynamic action, capturing both the total motion and the instant of the human body in peak exertion.  The beachside visitors he photographs simply for their own sake as people.  We watch as many become purposefully dirty before washing off at the same instant, see the children enjoy a magic show as the dancers kick and the track stars hurdle and the carnival-goers shoot and the  motorists ride, the millions upon millions doing as they please with the hours they are given.  Through it all there is the man with the movie camera, Kaufman towering over the tallest buildings and rising from unlikely places to get his shot, the great mechanical eye capturing reverse games of chess and excess drinking at the bar from whatever angle is needed.  As the editing grows faster and the images of the day's activities begin to blur into one impression of pure movement, even the camera takes a break, gamboling an awkward dance atop its spindly legs free from the operator's influence.  At this point, we might expect the film to end with another stoppage, watching as weariness sets in and the city goes to sleep, resting for yet another day of weeks of months of years of this endless ballet we call life.

But Vertov does not stop.  The city does not come to rest.  Instead, it splinters, magnifies, kaleidoscopes into many.  Numerous complimentary views fill the screen all at once, reflections of the city as the every-city, the images we have seen before folding on themselves to become the all that is one.  Rather than halt, the city ascends, returning us to the movie theater to watch as it becomes the very nature of the film before Vertov's audience, before, as we might assume, every audience.  The city IS the art, and as we can see by way of Vertov positioning Kaufman as a giant filming his subjects on the screen one last time, so too are those who create such art.  While the kino eye is great, we have already established its limitations, and here we see this expressed in as literal manner as possible: Kaufman's filming as part of the film itself, and the final shuttering montage of Svilova cutting cut itself with the audience, the film, the cameraman, the camera, until we reach our last, enduring image of her eye within the camera's eye.  It must, Vertov argues, all be one.  The city, the people, the subject, the camera, the operator, the director, the very idea of cinema as the modern art - by their total nature as solid, true subjects before the camera's eye, the mechanical and human alike must BE cinema, nothing more, nothing less.

Vertov, I think, fails to make his point in as pure a manner as he hoped because to tell stories in the mode we are conditioned to understand stories is as much part of what he wanted to capture as the city free from story.  Stripped from all but the barest framing device, however, I also think he makes his point as beautifully as he could possibly have done.  Man with a Movie Camera both is and isn't film freed from all that came before; it answers to the master of segmented structure same as any other tale, while performing under this one remaining constraint as only a movie can, through the contrast of living images and nothing else.  Failure here becomes success, proving his point in a more roundabout manner than his own preferred firebrand manner, and in the process becoming a piece of motion picture-making appreciable to any eye.  He truly makes the photoreceptors of glass and viscera one and the same, the idea of a city and its people as they are the natural subjects for both to consider and subsume, and I would even go so far as to say he does so to such great effect as to make the eventual dominance of narrative cinema something in line with his views.  His techniques here became the basis for so much of the cinematic language as we now speak it, whether directly taken from his visual text or recreated by others further on down the line; regardless of the moving picture lacking so clean a cut as he fought towards, the form is distinctly its own entity according to the pattern he illustrated all the same.

(*Which, again, it's not really cinéma vérité, predating the concept as it does by a good 40 years or so, but we chose what we chose from our list, and some of Vertov's views on the camera as the perfect objective eye do fit with the "fly on the wall" idea behind the movement.)

High School (1968) - It's against my principles, you have to stand for something.

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme ten, part one - a cinéma vérité* film!

(Chosen by me!)

The uniting theme of discussions about Frederick Wiseman's 1968 documentary High School typically holds Wiseman shot and edited the faculty of Philadelphia's Northeast High School to argue they less teach their students the assigned curriculum and valuable skills for independent living, and more constantly drill and drone and degrade with the end goal of producing uniformly gray members of a conformist system.  Some arguments further advance this notion by noting how the film takes place against a backdrop of the counterculture revolution and growing dissatisfaction with the war in Vietnam, and construe intent to paint certain amongst the teachers and disciplinary staff as doubling down on their usual techniques in the vain hope of halting the crushing tide.  It is an understandable perspective to adopt, both in face of how Wiseman presents ample scenes of students trapped beneath apparent doubletalk and quickly escalating punishment and the endless bore of great poetry made bland by bad reading, and how the 1960s carry a commonly accepted Identity in the generally held western world and the United States in particular.  This was a time of Unrest, of Change, of the youth who'd seen a rise in visibility and souring of temperament over the preceding decades finally coalescing into a Movement - whether you're living through the moment as with audiences and critics of its day or watching from a distance as now, the image of a teacher reading private correspondence from a student convinced they'll die in Vietnam against that student's expressed wish for privacy within the letter, and then claiming their success as a grunt destined to die in some anonymous jungle is proof High School works conjures the image of a system that's either failing its intended goals, or meeting them perfectly.

I understand these perspectives, and I agree Wiseman's film is cut and presented to drive the idea firmly as he can manage.  His vignettes are carefully chosen and placed in relation to one another with visible intent of wearying on the strength of collective memories within similar halls and against similar authority figures.  High School is a film sympathetic to the teenager in all of us, the person trapped in a sterile, nonstimulative environment for hours of the most valuable years of our lives, wishing the prick at the front of the room would shut up and let us go five minutes early.  It understands your feeling the adults are dead set on grinding every last piece of you from your person with arbitrary rules and unfair detentions and lessons about what a REAL man does, what CONSEQUENCES there'll be in the REAL world if you don't toe the line, how the line and the toeing thereof is the be-all end-all from the moment you graduate to death's door.  I hold it is right for Wiseman and his work to adopt and argue this perspective, for the experience of being in school and blanching against authority is near-universal; even as someone who socialized better with their teachers than their peers and took to lessons so well I'd actively ask for extra work just to keep the mental stimulation going, I've been in the spot of thinking this is all designed to get rid of me and replace that with what THEY want.  You'll clash against authority and find you're not as equal as you'd like in your teenage years one way or another, model student or no.

I hold, however, that a screed against teachers as willing engines of conformity is not all High School contains for the discerning eye.  Indeed, I'm of a mind to argue the film's just as sympathetic towards the faculty and staff as it is the students who struggle beneath their byzantine rules.  Call it a lingering niggle of doubt born from liking my instructors better than the people who'd shun or belittle me, but I cannot believe the high school experience is truly MEANT for such grinding with individualism as the meat.

One has to understand, the film shows Northeast High School as an unpleasant environment for anyone within its confines.  The only people who show a spark of humor or vibrancy are those who don't have to call its blank white brickwork and uncovered fluorescent lights home forty weeks of the year, parents and guest speakers and the like.  The building itself is an unpleasant, confining structure, and the activities going on within are repetitive by nature, necessarily so if a student is to hypothetically retain any information.  Thing is, while we are only shown a lesson or so per classroom, a single meeting of a club, a few handful of shots in the gym, a limited glimpse into the most telling examples of teachers and administrators failing to reach their charges, you must know, from common experience, there is so much more we don't see.  Lesson plans repeated across days, the same faces week after week, the same lessons year after year.  Routine serves as a millstone for those who have to enforce it as well, because there are still people responsible for said enforcement, people who must balance the nightmarish task of imparting information in an interesting, retentive manner, and remaining distant enough from their pupils to act accordingly when a stronger hand is needed.  Both the English teacher reading "Casey at the Bat" in a monotone that robs the poem of all life, and the English teacher trying to make learning cool by teaching Simon and Garfunkel's "The Dangling Conversation" and failing to roue any interest fall prey to the same problem - this environment is not good for anybody.

How could it be?  The United States model of education asks the impossible of those who serve at its whim, to perform as robots while remaining available as a thinking emotional creature when needed, to educate a body of hundreds while thinking of each unit as a person worthy attention and nurturing, to do this until you can perform no more and yet never show signs of fatigue.  The teachers and faculty here can only look bad before Wiseman's camera, for the easiest, most natural response to such conditions is to do whatever you can to get through the goddamned day.  It'd make everything so much easier if nobody piped up or made trouble, if everyone just did as they're told and marched through freshman to senior years without requiring special attention, if those who DID require special attention were dealt with quickly and easily so you can get onto the dozens more who require the same today alone.  All this against a backdrop  of barren walls and glaring lights and prison-like air and the knowledge you'll have to keep coming in again and again and again, that if you leave to do anything else either someone will replace you and endure the same, or no one will and your colleagues will struggle to pick up the slack.  A drive for conformity, I think, arises not because anyone particularly wants to live in a world where marching in lockstep and speaking as expected when expected and thinking authority should not be questioned, but because we've all inherited into a situation so difficult and grinding and so very terribly samey that trying for control is perhaps the response requiring the least effort.

It sucks.  It does.  For everyone.  Understandable as the reaction is, the students are the ones who suffer because their instructors are pressured until they too ask the impossible from their charges, which is the real tragedy of the high school experience, which is why Wiseman's High School is the way it is.  To balance his film between the two perspectives would lose the raw expression of what it feels like to endure these conditions and lessen the youthful drive to push back and be new and different and stubborn on purpose, yet to leave the limitation of its present state with regards to how the situation comes about in the first place unacknowledged is wrong to my mind.  It'd be ever so nice if I could conclude here by saying the solution is and always will be greater mindfulness about what the easy road will do to those around and below you under strenuous circumstances, for those in charge of education to give it their all every single day to the last and fashion a better environment.  Aware as I am, though, of the ever-diminishing value of education by those in power above our instructors, of the constant underfunding across the country, of how even with maximum effort there ARE the bad actors who want to exercise power and genuinely do see the goal of education as the production of unthinking drones subservient to the whims of those who'd use them as gears in a revenue-generating machine or pawns in a holy war... I cannot make such a suggestion in good faith.  Best I can say is we should ditch those enclosed buildings and make the switch to open-air like the schools I came up in, because honestly, so much of the oppressive environment comes down to not getting any goddamned air or sun between classes, students and teachers alike.  Can't bear the thought of working there for decades on end.

(*I know Frederick Wiseman prefers the term "observational documentary" for his films, but the list we were linked to as example includes it as an option, so we're sticking to our guns here.)