fascinating viewing

One documentary I have been meaning to comment on for a while is Flight from Death - one of the most gripping cultural commentaries I have had the pleasure of viewing. The recipient of a modest 5 reputable awards, I am surprised this text has not been included in any of our lectures to date.

Based on a bestselling book by Ernest Becker, the purpose of this documentary is to examine the fear we have manifested within ourselves as a race of the very inevitable - death. Even though the film is of the ominisciently narrated variety (by Gabriel Byrne), I found the visual playbacks to be sufficiently enticing and did not feel that the content was subtracted from in any way by this. Both thoughtful and thought provoking, it really did a fine job of resonating with ontological reasoning we have been conditioned by since day 1... and what it also cleverly managed to do was turn that reasoning around into something more questioning of our everyday existence, highlighting just what lengths we have gone to in order to prevent the natural act of dying.

Without giving the game away too much, I will just say that everyone reading this blog needs to check out this film. From the beautiful prose and accompanying, moving nature photography to the insidious commercial profiteering (signposted by a wicked soundtrack), Flight from Death contains both rich, complex mind-material as well as a beautifully balanced audio-visual treat. Something to extract ideas from as well as broaden your understanding of the genre as a whole, and possibly come to grips with the way you see your own life (or death) headed in the years (or moments) to come.

you can lead a horse to water...

'Whatever else movies do, they invite viewers to think for themselves, without intermediary, narrator or correspondent.'
-Robert Drew



...Or do they? In a perfect world, documentaries are a perfect balance of revelation and judgement - that is, their point of view is so subtle and undemanding, audiences are inadvertently implicated within it. The article the above quote came from is part of this week's third reading - the first part, to be exact. Neither the boys (there is only 3 of us now, by the way, as Christine has gone to another group) nor I had even suggested using a narrator for this documentary, however we did stay back on Wednesday after class to watch Sadness - a doco directed by William Ayres, that centers around the life story of William Yang and how he grappled with his Asian identity and losing so many of his friends to the AIDS epidemic of the early 1990s. This film contained quite a bit of narration by Yang, something that both Deno and I thought detracted from the content because of its prevalence. The story would have been much more effective if it hadn't been so formulaic, and had strove to step outside the square much more than it did. Especially considering how powerful some of the content was, it could definitely have been executed in a more discrete manner - a more aesthetic one, at the very least. Something else for us to keep in mind with our own productions, that's for sure.

I want to catch another doco @ MIFF this weekend, seeing as it's about to wrap up, but I'll have to play it by ear and make sure I have enough cash and everything else. It'd be good to see though. I'm also considering hiring out 'Capturing the Freidmans' for a bit more inspo... everyone I'ce talked to about it said it was good, and David did mention that there were a few twists in it. And we like twisted, don't we? (Rhetorical question, I know)