Watch and Learn: Documentaries

Stepping on the heels of yesterday’s post, I decided to write about my favourite documentaries about making movies. Not the “making of” adverts that make it onto DVD’s of all types (who wants to know about making an Adam Sandler movie (other than Punch Drunk Love)? What, does it have more secret cameos of Rob Schneider in a burkha, farting and giggling like the annoying kid from camp when you were ten?), but honest-to-goodness movies about the joy and frustrations–mainly the frustrations—of plunging into celluloid.

Burden of Dreams
Les Blank’s amazing documentary about Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo demonstrates the mania of the man. I think Herzog has, in the past decade, become even more important and vital as an artist. His irascible, humanist misanthropy and acid humour drive his documentaries, and his voice that glints and winks a boon companion for the days when you loathe humanity—watching a dubbed Herzog documentary is torture and frustration. Watching this great film about the making of a great movie of a ridiculous event shows just how ridiculous the movie is.
Myths and legends about Herzog films abound: Ian Curtis killed himself because of Stroszek (well, it’s in Control, Corbjin’s beautiful bio-pic (god, I love the shot of the power wires and the sad concrete)); people died making Fitrzcarraldo; Herzog threatened Klaus Kinski (the madman) with a gun (I read Kinski’s book, Kinski Uncut, and it is an hilarious glimpse into a monomaniacal ego with a twisting sex scene on every other page)). This movie pretty much dispels those, but rewards you with visions of two driven men driving each other to greatness, and a third, Blank.

I am my Films
Another movie about Herzog, and one I just saw recently. It’s on the six (6!) DVD set of Herzog shorts and documentaries, and a film I had no knowledge of. It’s a small German production, made during the shooting of the suicide inducing Stroszek, so we get lots of shots of Bruno S. There is a scene where Herzog is shooting Bruno crossing the street and the documentary shows us Herzog and his crew—of five or six! God, how sweet. The bloat of modern cinema and its rigmarole, and here are a few people making one of the saddest, bitterest films you could hope to see (or withstand seeing). And to fuel the Herzog mythos, there’s a scene where Herzog and one of his actors are betting each other about who can beat up who, and planning a boxing match for later. Hard to say if it’s real or not, but I would bet on Herzog: crazy men will always win because they won’t stop.

If I could, I would add Herzog’s My Best Fiend, and Les Blank’s Werner Eats his Shoe.

Hearts of Darkness
Imagine Werner with an immense budget, less humour, and the air force of a dictator and you get Francis Ford Coppola making Apocalypse Now. Coppola deals with heart attacks, changing stars, typhoons, and Marcos. He doesn’t have to deal with Kinski, though, who could probably eat Marcos in a pique, so he got off easy. It’s another great film about a great film, and seeing how this huge mess becomes the great huge mess that is Apocalypse Now (I always thought a comma would be nice) is again, inspiring.

Lost in La Mancha
Here’s the other side of the coin: the sadness and disappointment of not making movies—or starting to then stopping. Like Coppola and Herzog, Gilliam is a man with a distinctive vision (well, Coppola had one at one time) and a mission, only it is really a mission impossible. Of course, you couldn’t ask for a better subtext than the trials to make a movie out of Don Quixote, but the quest isn’t thrust up your nostrils at least.. Like all the two, Gilliam is battered by the two unstoppable forces of filmmaking: weather and money. And a dying actor. A heartbreaking film to watch: not because of the film not being made, but because of watching a man with a nagging dream begin to realize the dream then have it die, and probably for good. Draining but oddly inspiring.

Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
Okay, quibble away. It’s more a biopic than a movie about making a movie, but it covers Kubrick’s career and has lots of great little bits along the way, including shots of him directing and manning the camera. The little stories are wonderful, particularly the one about how he got his hands on some beautiful Mitchell (?) 35mm cameras which he fitted with the fastest lenses made (by NASA for space, which has a wonderful poetry to it) to shoot Barry Lyndon by actual candlelight (god, the depth of field must be the depth of a pore). Like all three other directors, Kubrick had a reputation as an iconoclast who became an icon—how does that work?—and this film goes some ways to dispel the myths of the hermit who locked himself away from a humanity he hated. I agree with many of the ideas that Herzog and Kubrick put across, though I prefer Herzog’s sarcasm over Kubrick’s coolness—perhaps it’s a Germanic trait, for I get much of the same feeling from Sebald’s writing.