Last week Hot Docs announced a project that will be launching in a modest way at our 2010 Festival. We’re calling it Ripping Reality, and the intent is to generate a kind of cooperative, traveling symposium, from which we hope to stimulate discussions around the notion of a documentary new wave.
While excited by the prospect of creating spaces (at festivals, online, in publications) to discuss and reflect upon the unprecedented surge in the quantity and quality of creative documentary filmmaking over the past decade or so, I did have some doubts once we actually committed to doing it. Was this a lame idea? Yet, the consistent excellence of the docs at Sundance TwentyTen (and we’re only halfway into it) reassure me that its a worthy endeavour, and perhaps overdue.
Its one of those Park City cliches that the doc selections are much better bets then the dramatic features….at least creatively, and often in terms of pure entertainment (their market potential/interest is an entirely different matter). Like many festival cliches it holds true this year. WAITING FOR SUPERMAN is one of the most effective advocacy documentaries I’ve ever seen, and it also just happens to be an inventive and very moving storytelling experience. THE OATH, SECRETS OF THE TRIBE, THE TILLMAN STORY, GASLAND, RESTREPO, CASINO JACK AND THE UNITED STATES OF MONEY, TEENAGE PAPARAZZO…all so highly accomplished on their own terms that, when consumed in such concentration, one begins to take their achievements for granted (not to mention a few of the other powerhouses presented here, which I’ve seen over the past months: THE RED CHAPEL, LAST TRAIN HOME, ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE, HIS AND HERS, SPACE TOURISTS….).
And this is not necessarily, overall, an exceptional year….or, exceptional years for documentary have become the norm.
So, can we call what we’ve seen develop over the past decade a documentary new wave? What are its key attributes aesthetically, politically, socially, industrially? What are the key films, filmmakers? What are the conditions, enablers, and factors behind the explosive growth of documentary filmmaking, festivals, audiences? These are a few of the questions behind Ripping Reality.
Participant Media hosted a drinks/discussion thing here last night, featuring the filmmakers of the impressive four Participant productions being presented at Sundance: CASINO JACK (Alex Gibney); WAITING FOR SUPERMAN (Davis Guggenheim); COUNTDOWN TO ZERO (Lucy Walker) and the 3-D extravaganza, CANE TOADS: THE CONQUEST (Mark Lewis). Following some general discussion of their current films, each filmmaker remarked on the richness of contemporary documentary as an expressive medium, noting their attraction to the fluidity and expansiveness of the form.
As a programmer (and cinephile), this is what motivated me to focus my attention on documentary ten years ago. I fancied myself a formalist, and docs seemed like the most open, poetic cinematic form. That they also fed the political animal and info junkie in me was a bonus (not to underplay the significance of activism and social justice in driving the new documentary…..it remains at the core of documentary practice and relevance).
Compared to a sense that fiction filmmaking has been relatively stagnant, creatively, in recent years, its easy to see why so much new talent has been drawn into the doc fold (even as many of the new generation of filmmakers move between drama and docs much more effortlessly, and often, then their predecessors). Of course, parallel to the creative possibilities inherent in documentary are many other factors behind its growth, the least of not has been the democratization of filmmaking in general.
AMERICAN MOVIE was out the first year I became a doc programmer at TIFF, and was a film that simply had a different energy around it then most of the other nonfiction films we were presenting at the Festival that year. It, AMERICAN MOVIE, was also hugely popular, selling out and generating long rush lines at each screening.
As a rookie programmer, and doc enthusiast, I was disappointed that generally the docs didn’t seem to draw as well as the fiction films at TIFF (of course, there were always exceptions). The media generally weren’t covering them, and the distributors couldn’t be bothered. Over the next five years that would all change dramatically, both at TIFF and elsewhere, fueled by a wave of astonishing, galvanizing work, much of it debuts: PRIPYAT, FAMILY, THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE, BENJAMIN SMOKE, SPELLBOUND, STARTUP.COM, CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, THE CORPORATION, TARNATION, THE YES MEN, CZECH DREAM, SUPERSIZE ME, DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE, GUNNER PALACE….a very quick, top of head list (and omitting some of the obvious, and being U.S. centric)
While this has been an international phenomenon, the contemporary American documentary movement has been a singular force in reimagining and reinvigorating the form, even if some of these developments are beginning to harden into conventions of their own. The Sundance Film Festival has been and remains the single most vital platform for launching U.S. documentaries, the hub of this movement. The good news is that Sundance TwentyTen will add several new works to the contemporary canon of great documentaries…..and I haven’t even seen all of them yet!