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Have You Seen… Five Documentaries to Seek Out (Part Three)

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Charles Rivington asks the immortal question: Do all dogs go to heaven?

 

I stated way back in part one that I was going to present this list in no particular order. Having said that I have saved my favourite feature length documentary by my favourite documentarian for last and written so much about it that I’ve had to give it an article in its own right. Oh well…

 

Gates of Heaven (1978)

 

Throughout the first two parts of this three-part article and through these four brilliant films, I have touched on some very challenging issues: war, mental illness and suicide, child molestation and the disintegration of a family, the birth of the movies. It therefore might seem somewhat anti-climatic, perhaps even rather disrespectful to have as my final entry a film about pet cemeteries. Surely a documentary about people batty enough to spend large amounts of money giving Fido a proper burial can only ever be mildly amusing (in a sort of ‘ha ha, she thinks he’s people’ kind of a way) or perhaps even just a bit pathetic. Surely, it can’t be one of the greatest and most profound works about mortality, loneliness and the human condition ever made, right?

 

Wrong. Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven is, quite simply and quite literally, an incredible film. It’s the sort of film you could watch every day for the rest of your life and it would still be deeply rewarding. Throughout this article I’ve touched on what I believe makes a great documentary and I’ve suggested two things. Firstly, I’ve stated that a great documentary should be impartial and force the audience to form their own judgements

An enthusiastic pet owner.

without telling them what to think.  Because of Morris’ unobtrusive style and the fact that he lets his subjects speak for themselves and is neither nor seen nor heard throughout the entire film (Michael Moore could certainly learn from him), Gates of Heaven does this so effectively that that at any given moment of the film one section of the audience might be in tears while another suppresses giggles. Secondly, I have suggested that the great documentary will often take a subject and use it as a springboard to touch upon much broader or challenging themes. Gates of Heaven is a movie about freaking pet cemeteries that deals head on with humankind’s most terrifying and impossible question: that of its own mortality and solitude. This is truly the stuff of genius. It is one of the greatest documentaries of all time, by one of the greatest documentarians of all time and quite frankly one of the greatest films of all time. It’s also one of my favourites.

 

     Gates of Heaven takes as its inspiration the story of the exhumation and transportation of 450 pets from one cemetery to another. This fascinating and odd story is used to shape the film, which is structurally little more than a series of talking heads, into two halves. The first of these focuses on the story of Floyd “Mac” McClure, a paraplegic man who had dreamt of building a pet cemetery after the death of his childhood dog, and uses interviews with pet owners and investors in order to explore how his dream briefly became a reality. Particularly memorable interviewees include Mac’s rival, the owner of the local rendering plant who attempts to defend his unglamorous profession to hilarious effect, and a woman who holds conversations with her dog.  Most of Morris’ subjects have their eccentricities, and the film is not short of humour, but he has a unique skill for looking beyond these to the humanity below, frequently unearthing

Devastating

accounts of loss and loneliness. The story of the failure of Mac’s cemetery is a particularly resonant example of these and the tragedy of the matter is that this compassionate man was unable to translate his dream and his passion into a workable business.  It is a tragedy that occurs daily but that does not make it any less heart breaking and I imagine that it will resonate with many people, perhaps even more so now than in 1978. The final shot of Mac sitting in his wheelchair under a willow tree, surveying the former site of his failed cemetery is entirely devastating, a perfect, wordless evocation of loneliness and despair and a prime example of Morris’s subtle and unobtrusive early style.

 

 

Florence Rasmussen sits on her stoop.

At the film’s centre, acting as a kind of transitional moment between the two distinct halves, is a monologue by an elderly woman named Florence Rasmussen. It is truly one of the most bizarre, moving and hilarious few minutes of any film I have ever seen. Sitting on her stoop outside her house, which overlooks Mac’s cemetery, this fascinating woman recounts her baffling life story in short bursts, constantly contradicting herself as she attempts to explain her troubled relationship with her son. In another’s hands this might have come across as exploitative or condescending and it is abundantly clear that Rasmussen could easily have been mocked as a stereotypical madwoman. Morris’ camera however does not judge, merely records and the entire film is mercifully devoid of any cruel reality tv editing or Louis Theroux-style winks to the audience. Instead Florence is allowed to speak for herself and the result is a frustrating, funny and ultimately sad meditation on one woman’s delusion and loneliness. It is a stunning monologue and one that, as Roger Ebert states, ‘William Faulkner or Mark Twain would have wept with joy to have created.’ And yet, it is reality. It is reality, in its most pure, unedited and unscripted form. Sometimes real life truly is stranger than fiction.

 

 

A funeral at Bubbling Wells

The film’s focus then moves to The Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park, which is run by the Harberts family. Patriarch Cal is a lot more ambitious and business savvy than Mac but shares his compassion for animals and has even built a church in order to celebrate God’s love for pets. His wife Scottie shares this view stating that, ‘God is not going to say, well, you’re walking in on two legs, you can go in. You’re walking in on four legs, we can’t take you.’ Although clearly successful in their business endeavours, the Harbarts family also harbours some unhappiness and this is particularly obvious in their sons Danny and Philip who both left their other lives (college and a job as an insurance salesman) to come back to the family business.

 

 

A bereaved couple reminisces in Gates of Heaven

There is one moment from this second half of the film that never fails to move me: a long silent montage of the headstones at Bubbling Well. If I had seen it on it’s own without the benefit of the rest of the film, I admit that it would probably have left me cold and it is true that some of the inscriptions are at first glance rather trite, silly even (‘God spelled backwards is dog’ etc). However after 80 minutes spent in the company of animal lovers and grieving pet owners and hearing them express their loneliness and grief, these inscriptions become a profound articulation of a universal and fundamental need for companionship and love. One of them reads ‘I knew love: I knew this Dog’ while another simply reads ‘For saving my life’. It is clear that there are stories behind each of these inscriptions, heart-breaking, heart-warming stories behind every headstone, stories about what it means to be alive, what it means to love and what it means to experience profound loss. They are stories about what it means to be human. Gates of Heaven merely touches on a few of these stories and in doing so it earns its place as one of the greatest documentary films of all time.

 

 

Gates of Heaven is currently available on DVD as part of ‘The Errol Morris Collection’ box set along with Vernon, Florida and The Thin Blue Line, which are both excellent.

 

 

 

Have You Seen… Five Documentaries To Seek Out (Part One)

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   In a special three part ‘Have You Seen…’, Charles Rivington explains that reality does not necessarily bite…

 

Reality is a dirty word. With the recent tragic suicide of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member Russell Armstrong hitting headlines, the debate about the cruelty of so-called ‘reality’ television has once again captured public imagination. I’m not here to debate the culpability of the show but there is a well-known saying that suggests, and I’m paraphrasing, that every innovation or new piece of technology, even those conceived with the best of intentions, will eventually be used to bring mankind one step closer to destruction. In a sense, this is exactly what happened to the documentary genre when its techniques and style were first appropriated, bastardised and reduced to their most shallow and cruel form by the reality tv docu-soap. I believe that, now more than ever, we should learn to value, appreciate and celebrate reality again, not Bravo’s ‘reality’ but the unscripted, impartial and thought-provoking reality of cinema’s great documentaries. This edition of ‘Have You Seen…’ is therefore a little bit different as, rather than focusing on one film, I have decided to focus on a genre, that of feature-length documentaries. Due to its length, I have split it into three parts.

 

The documentary genre  is as old as cinema itself and almost everything you can imagine has been the subject of a documentary film.  Narrowing this vast category down to a definitive ‘five greatest’ would thus be pretty much impossible not to mention entirely redundant given the subjectivity of this criteria (how do we define greatness? Is my great the same as your great and is your great the same as Leonard Maltin’s great? Probably not.). Having said this, I do believe that a great documentary, regardless of whether its subject is penguins or the Second World War or a spelling competition, should challenge its viewers and force them to consider an idea or a point of view that might never have occurred to them. Whereas the great documentary-maker simply observes and questions without judgement, the great documentary connects with the audience by insisting that they think for themselves, forcing them to evolve from passive observers to active participants. This list is simply five films that did that to me.

 

I've heard great things about Hoop Dreams

I have limited the field to just feature length films (no Attenborough here I’m afraid) and excluded films that I think most people have already seen and therefore don’t fall under the remit of ‘Have You Seen…’ (Bowling For Columbine and Man on Wire for example are both wonderful films but are excluded for this reason).  I should probably still apologise in advance because I am bound to have omitted one of your personal favourites either because I don’t share your opinion or because I simply haven’t seen it yet (Hoop Dreams, often regarded as one of the greatest documentaries of all time, is omitted from this list for the simple reason that I’ve never watched it). These five films are presented in no particular order. Feel free to disagree/put forward your own suggestions/advertise a dating website for rich singles in the comments below.

 

The Early Actualities of the Lumière Brothers (1895)

 

Having spent quite a bit of time defining the rules for this list, I have gone and broken at least one of them in the first entry because this is not one film, but rather a collection of one-reel films – the first ten of which were debuted at the Grand Café in Paris in 1895. It is also arguable the extent to which they are documentaries as given their short length (one-reel is usually less than a minute) it seems that most of them were probably at least partly choreographed and the comic L’Arroseur Arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled) is often hailed as the first narrative film. Regardless of this, they are remarkable records of a bygone age and are therefore more than worthy of mention.

 

Filmed in their hometown of Lyon, Auguste and Louis Lumière’s fascinating actualities, among the first films ever made, give us an unparallelled glimpse at the lives of the French working class at the turn of the century. Among these first ten are La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon)

The Lumiere Brothers

and Les Forgerons (The Blacksmiths). Their depiction of the working class, and the fact that they were screened to audiences of all backgrounds, makes them as much a document and engine (pun intended) of social change as they are the remarkable first gasps of an emerging technology. Of course, at the time, the draw of these films was the amazing technology on display and the Lumière’s cinématographe, a device that recorded, developed and projected films, was the real star. These early audiences, used to the flat painted backgrounds of the stage, were particularly impressed by the capturing of nature on film and it is said that the popularity of films such as Repas de bébé (Baby’s Breakfast, which featured Auguste’s own family thus making it the first home movie) owed more to the movement of the leaves in the background than to the film’s charming subject matter.  Because of this, this early, pre-narrative period of cinema is often referred to as ‘The Cinema of Attractions’  (a term coined by film scholar Tom Gunning). Nowadays, the opposite is true and it is these actualities’ remarkable depiction of every day life in France at the turn of the century that makes them so fascinating.

 

For a set of ‘local films for local people’ featuring an interesting look at British life during a similar, slightly later period, check out Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon’s actualities which were often filmed and projected on the same day and feature many other entries into the ‘factory-gate’ subgenre.

 Both the Lumière Brothers and Mitchell and Kenyon films are currently available on DVD. As they are out of copyright, they can also be legally watched online for free and are relatively easy to find.

 Crumb (1994)

Part of my fascination with the documentary genre lies in its wonderful breadth. Anything from pet cemeteries to the horror of war to cave paintings to parrots, when handled in the right way can make, and have made, incredible documentaries. That this list’s second entry should be so wildly far-removed from its first is a testament to this breadth and I make no apologies for the jarring shift in tone. I can’t begin to imagine what the Lumières and Mitchell and Kenyon would have made of Terry Zwigoff’s moving and shocking Crumb, a film apparently so depraved that the 1996 Academy Award nominating committee switched it off after only 20 minutes, but I like to think that, unlike the prudish Oscar snobs, they would have persevered and recognised it as a worthy and spellbinding entry into the genre they helped to create.

 

     Crumb is very hard to describe and like the best documentaries doesn’t tell you how you should respond to it so that laughter, tears and repulsion are all equally valid reactions. It takes as its subject Robert Crumb, the

A self-portrait of R. Crumb. He's not kidding either...

subversive comic artist most famous for creating Fritz the Cat, the counter-cultural slogan, ‘Keep on Truckin’’ and a myriad of other works that were at the forefront of the underground comics movement of the 1960s. I have to admit that I was wholly unfamiliar with Crumb’s work before I saw this film (I only sought it out because I’d seen and loved Zwigoff’s rather more mainstream, Ghost World) and even now I’m not sure if I can say that I actually like his drawings with their garishly warped figures and often challenging and unsettling depictions of women and African Americans. However, as is the case with many great documentaries, the ostensible subject is merely a way in to much richer territory and the heart of Crumb lies not in these drawings (although their geneses are often as fascinating as they are disturbing) but in the man himself and his bizarre and tragic family, most notably his disturbed and equally artistic brothers, Maxon, who developed a penchant for sitting on nails and sexually harassing women, and Charles, a recluse who committed suicide before the film was released.

 

Featuring various interviews with family members, friends, critics and ex-girlfriends as well as his surprisingly well-adjusted wife and daughter, Crumb paints a picture of an intelligent and sensitive man who escaped a

Robert Crumb and friends

horrible childhood and went on to find salvation through art when others around him who were not as lucky.  Crumb is a disturbing yet frequently amusing portrayal of mental illness and people on the fringes of the society that is frequently depressing but also strangely relatable. Crumb himself is a tapestry of quirks and odd sexual fetishes. As a young child he developed an attraction to Bugs Bunny to the extent that he would carry a picture of the cartoon rabbit around with him, periodically taking it out to look at it and much of the film deals with his life-long obsession with women with disproportionately large hindquarters. Despite these quirks Robert Crumb emerges as an oddly charming character whose quiet sense of humour and bafflement and disgust at the world around him is remarkably sympathetic, perhaps even inspirational.

 

Needless to say, Crumb is unsuitable for children and the prudish but if you can stomach it, it is a very rewarding experience. It is currently available on Region 2 DVD (annoyingly this print does not feature the fantastic Roger Ebert commentary that is available to our American cousins, so if you watch the film and like it – and have a region free DVD player – the Region 1 DVD is well-worth seeking out for this alone).

 

Coming Soon… Part 2!