THE SPACES BETWEEN THE FACTS

Sylvia Lawson


When T.S. Eliot wrote that “Human
kind/Cannot bear very much
reality,” he hadn’t seen the
thousands packing in to the Sydney
Film Festival’s huge and remarkable spread
of documentary. “Reality” – in the sense of
truth pursued on locations and in editing
suites, assemblages of fact linked and netted
by interpretation – seemed to be exactly what
they were after, no matter where. It has been
said that a film festival is a lot of virtual
travel; some of that travel takes in places
where, outside of a film festival, we’d never
really want to go.
After The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line,
no one concerned with twentieth-century
history would stay away from the next Errol
Morris essay. Faced with the operations of the
military-industrial complex, the splits in the
conscience of the powerful, the illogic of the
deeply self-deceived, Morris is the ultimate
cunning, soft-spoken strategist; he has
described himself as a director-detective,
rather than producer-director – once, between
films, he spent time as a private eye. The
Unknown Known , this year’s examination of
Donald Rumsfeld and his obsession with
memoranda, isn’t as deeply searching a film
as The Fog of War , but that has to do with the
level of interest one can feel in the particular
human subjects. Robert McNamara, with his
many chapters of involvement back to the
second world war, was worth more of our
time and Errol Morris’s subtle interview-
management than is Rumsfeld. That said, The
Unknown Known must still count as one of the
2014 Sydney Film Festival’s most telling
documentaries, exposing some of the internal
workings of US imperialism under the G.W.
Bush administration. Rumsfeld is on screen
for most of the time; in consequence one
emerges with a wry sense of grim knowledge
gained, at the cost of spending more than an
hour-and-a-half in the company of an
accomplished professional liar.
The late and great critic Roger Ebert (1942–
2013) praised Errol Morris for being “much
more interested in the spaces between the
facts than with the facts themselves” – that is,
interested in the speaking positions assumed
by those interviewed, in the ways in which
“facts” do or don’t become evidence. Ebert
himself never tired, not only of viewing films
and writing about them for the Chicago Sun-
Times , but also of ferreting around their pre-
histories, and the conditions of production
and reception. Another of the festival’s best
documentaries is about him; this is Life Itself ,
directed by Steve James from material shot in
the last five months of the critic’s life, with
old photographs, video footage of the late-life
wedding, and images from the TV program in
which Ebert argued about movies in dialogue
with his perennial rival, Gene Siskel of the
Chicago Tribune . The film gives us old and
new journalism, as Ebert dives into Facebook
and Twitter. En route, it’s full of the life of
the city and its newspapers; there are
moments which echo the early chapters in
Citizen Kane , and reminders of Page One ,
Andrew Rossi’s superb essay on the way the
New York Times and its personnel face the
digital age: is the Grey Lady on death row?
Roger Ebert is; with body, head and face
malformed by terminal cancer, he goes on
tapping on his laptop in hospital, and
continuing, miraculously, to get some fun out
of everything.
So many documentaries have to do with
survival. For Keep On Keepin’ On , two
Australian film makers, Alan Hicks and Adam
Hart, went to the United States to make their
vibrant essay on the life and work of the
trumpeter Clark Terry, who taught Miles
Davis and Quincy Jones among others, and
who, late in his life – and still blowing his
horn brilliantly – became a mentor for a
young blind pianist, Justin Kauflin. Terry,
Kauflin and Terry’s wife Gwen are their own
extraordinary stories, with Quincy Jones’s
masterly narration weaving through them,
and signalling outward; Jones’s own story is
something else again, connecting to those of
every other jazz master you’ve ever heard or
heard of. Terry’s music, which some called
“the happiest sound in jazz,” remains with us
in the film even after he, at past ninety and
ill, can’t help to produce it any longer;
Kauflin’s piano goes on.
It was accidental illumination that this film
was seen in short order after the curious,
perversely comic The Kidnapping of Michel
Houellebecq. This writer’s books, which I
haven’t read, are notorious for his special
forms of misanthropy and misogyny. Those
elements in his disposition are convincingly
enacted, by the man himself, in this demi-
fictional replay of the days when, on the point
of literary appearances, he disappeared from
public sight; with him, the supposed
kidnappers (played by Luc Schwarz, Mathieu
Nicourt and others) engage in meandering,
demi-philosophic dialogue while waiting for
ransom to be organised. There’s a sour kind
of comedy happening in the fogs of smoke
and drink; the jokes are all at the writer’s
expense, miserably self-absorbed as he is; he
defines and personifies a mentality. Moving
from this to Keep On Keepin’ On , you
understand all over again that jazz evolved
precisely to ride over and out from all that,
from its beginnings in an underdog culture
that refused exactly that mentality – grudging,
self-pitying, hopeless – and refused it
absolutely.
Some of the most popular documentaries are
likely to reach the cinema circuits; those
include Particle Fever , on the Large Hadron
Collider at CERN (European Centre for
Nuclear Research) on the Franco-Swiss
border. This huge and expensive installation
is there, in part, to work out what happened
at the beginning of the universe. Curiosity
drives crowds, even if your family doesn’t
include an aspiring nuclear physicist; both
screenings were packed out. Of this thrilling
tale, more to come. Its distributor, Madman
Entertainment, also has the wonderful
Sepideh: Reaching for the Stars , and this also is
one to wait for. The fourteen-year-old Sepideh
passionately wants to be an astronomer, and
if possible an astronaut as well; she is
philosophically akin to the Saudi-Arabian
Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda , first met at last
year’s festival and then at local cinemas. It
will be remembered that the intrepid Wadjda,
aged ten, wanted to acquire a bicycle and ride
it, against all the rules for girls; and also that
as a considerable strategist, she won the
money in a competition for recitation from
the Koran.
Wadjda was a fictional creation, the kind
where fiction is necessary precisely because
it’s all true. Sepideh , directed by Berit Madsen,
is documentary, and like many films from the
Middle East, it was enabled as a co-
production, with input from four European
sources as well as from Iran. We find the girl
toiling up a hillside at night, trailing her hijab
and carrying her portable telescope. The
uphill track is unforced symbolism; Sepideh’s
widowed mother is struggling, and can’t but
calculate that the best course is a well-
arranged marriage for the girl. In countries
where honour killings, forced marriages and
domestic imprisonment persist – and those
include Australia – the circulation of such
films must be taken beyond middle-class
urban audiences. Their excellence as cinema,
both drama and document, isn’t an end in
itself.
The major features on the program will
resurface, among them Richard Linklater’s
remarkable drama-documentary Boyhood , an
essay on normally dysfunctional family life
observed over twelve years in a sunny Texan
suburb, a benign, modern Sons and Lovers.
This was in the running for the Sydney Film
Prize; the one that got it, the Dardenne
brothers’ Two Days, One Night , will also
reappear. In the meantime, cinephiles aware
of Belgian cinema might profitably spend time
with Philip Mosley’s excellent new book on
Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne and their now-
considerable oeuvre, from the documentary
videos of the 1970s through the distinguished
fictions of the past twenty-five years: The
Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers: Responsible
Realism (Wallflower Press, the Director’s Cut
series, 2013). Their story should ring bells for
Australians; they took a clear decision, early
on, that they weren’t migrating to Paris, but
in the teeth of provincial struggle they were
going to make movies right there where they
were; not even Brussels or near it, but in the
province of Wallonia.
ith all the productive interaction
between festival and film trade,
there are still films which, without
the festival, would be very unlikely
to reach us. It’s because of the Sydney
festival’s current size and prosperity that, at
the last crowded minute, it could draw in
unprogrammed items hot from Cannes, those
including the winner of the Palme d’Or, Nuri
Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep .
I can report that this film held a large
audience mesmerised for all of its 196
minutes; and as with Ceylan’s Once Upon a
Time in Anatolia, the magnetism has only so
much to do with plot; these are tantalising
fragments of drama, appearing and
disappearing, trailing on into minds and
memories beyond the limits of the screen. In
this film the enchantment has to do with
landscape, the Anatolian steppes, snowbound
as we see them here, with the houses cut into
the rocks; with the presence of an angry child,
whose parents can’t afford the rent; and with
the work of a formidable actor, Haluk
Bilginer. His character, Aydin, is a former
actor and in the present of the film, both a
landlord and a columnist for a newspaper
called The Voice of the Steppe . Seeing the
alienation of Aydin’s beautiful younger wife,
we seem at first to be in a world like that of
Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (also seen in the
festival’s retrospective programs). But the
unhappiness of women – Nihal (Melisa Sözen),
and Aydin’s divorced sister Necla (Demet
Akbağ) – is an intractable, persistent element.
Nihal understands herself: she needs
meaningful work, as unequivocally as the wild
horse, brutally captured, needs its freedom.
This winter country isn’t so far from
Chekhov’s, and Istanbul, like Chekhov’s
Moscow, is always there, somewhere across an
uncrossable distance.
Sometimes there appears a small film which
strikes the viewer as being formally perfect.
That is the case with Ida, discussed here in the
last posting; it is the case with Abderrahmane
Sissako’s Timbuktu, which, like Winter Sleep,
came in late to the festival via Cannes.
Sissako, who is spoken of as present-day
Africa’s great director, takes up the jihadist
assault on northern Mali with drive and
clarity. A young deer is seen running over the
sandhills; a family is assembled peacefully in
their tent; a boy herds cattle in a river, and
angers a fisherman casting his nets. It will not
be possible for the end-credits to claim that
“no animal was harmed…”; the visible death
of a very important beast prefigures needless
human murder. The jihadist vigilantes want
women to be both hooded and gloved, even as
they’re cleaning fish in the market. At the
end, we understand more about the fleeing
animal.
I will give some further comment soon on this
super-abundant film festival. Its major
Australian offering, David Michôd’s The
Rover, is already on the circuits. •