My local arthouse has recently gone very doc-heavy (among other things they're doing a four-part, four-year retrospective of Frederick Wiseman's complete filmography). They also had a fantastic mini-festival of avant-garde docs. A few choice selections:
The Killing of America: A bleak, terrifying, essential piece of American filmmaking. After Taxi Driver indirectly caused Reagan's near-assassination, Paul Schrader's brother Leon became obsessed with how and why violence was so prevalent in America. Leon happened to be fluent in Japanese and ran into manga artist turned producer Mataichiro Yamamoto, who was looking to capitalize on the success of Faces of Death in the Japanese video market. Sheldon Renan was hired to direct, and added cherry-picked future Oscar winners from UCLA's filmmaking program to his production team (who made the American dubs of Shogun Assassin and later, Akira). The final result is more of a stark Werner Herzog type meditation on the increase of violent crime in America instead of straight-up mondo schocksploitation, which its producers were not happy about. But it's accompanied with the most tragic and horrific film of the 20th Century, including the murder of JFK, live footage of the Nguyen Van Lem execution, and late 70s' LAPD gunfights that the doc's production team filmed themselves. It goes from the most high-profile assassinations of the 60s' into the political violence at home and abroad through the late 60's and 70's before hitting the serial killer boom of the 80's (including a horrific interview with an obscure serial killer). It's such a bracing slap of reality that it was never distributed in the US,not even on home video. But in Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia it was a box office hit (it was the #7 highest grossing movie at the Japanese box office in 1982). It's currently being restored for a Blu-Ray release.
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Dead Slow Ahead: Mauro Herce's first feature, a horror movie about late capitalism, a version of Alien where the massive clanking emptiness of the spaceship is the monster. Filmed with almost no dialogue from the POV of a commercial freighter as it makes its way from one dystopian seaport to another, barely connected to land by a faulty satellite phone line. Sometimes the crew is shot in close profiles as they maintain the ship or relax in an impromptu karaoke room, but most of the time they are tiny figures outlined against a bleak and inhuman space. I saw it on a Sunday afternoon and that pretty much the perfect time for it, as it works best when the viewer relaxes and lets the endless roar of the sea and industrial freight roll over them completely.
Cameraperson: Kirsten Johnson has worked as a cinematographer on documentaries for most of her life (including Fahrenheit 9/11 and Citizenfour) but in the middle of making her first feature, one of the main characters of the documentary asked to be removed for reasons of personal safety. Forced to reconfigure her footage, Johnson accidentally hit upon how much of herself she had documented on camera. That sent her on an archival search through raw footage from over 120 projects she'd worked on to create a nonchronological memoir of a live lived in dozens of countries; including postwar Sarajevo, full War on Terror era Afghanistan, and a resource-strained maternity clinic in Nigeria, as well as autobiographical snippets from her own life (including her mother's sad descent into Alzheimer's).
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Helmut Berger, Actor: This is less a documentary than a Mexican standoff with a resentful German manbaby that descends into a real-life Lars Von Trier or Gaspar Noe movie. Helmut Berger was the one-time lover and muse of Austrian director Tony Visconti. When Visconti died in 1976, Berger tried committing suicide, fearing he'd never work as an actor again. Afterwards Berger became a recluse, famously swearing off interviews about his work with Visconti or his attempted suicide. Though he'd agreed to do a documentary, he still wouldn't talk about any of these subjects to director Andreas Horvath. The only person willing to talk about Berger's past is his maid, who's dutifully maintained Berger's run-down two-room apartment for decades. Horvath won't stop asking and Berger starts having full blown freakouts at him both in his decaying apartment and over voicemail. And then things get even weirder.