The True/False festival’s theme this year is “Foresight,” a switcheroo on the usual direction of sight associated with the year 20(/)20. Our film selections made a past sandwich with future bread today. The two middle films looked mostly backward at what brought their subjects to the moment the documentary started filming. The first and last selections tried to anticipate the future and specifically what role film can play in contending with it.
In The Viewing Booth, a student muses on video content she views through an Interrotron-like setup. Among a couple other angles on the cramped space, we look directly into her eyes as she contends with videos of confrontations between the Isreali army and Palestinian citizens. Her parents are Isreali, and she articulates her perception of the videos and later her perception of her earlier perceptions of the videos. It’s a compelling idea for an experiment with intriguing setups that avoids being too cute with its premise. But much of the time is spent fishing for an epiphany that never really comes. Director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s exploration of the possibility of changing a mind with video is a good starting place for a discussion, though it falls short as either gripping story or rigorous study.
Feels Good, Man is a dizzying and often sloppy exploration of a strange Internet rabbit hole, the innocent cartoonist who stumbled into it, and the consequences to the real world. Whether you’re familiar or not with the rise and fall of Pepe the Frog, the stoner cartoon character who became the unlikely avatar of the alt-right, the movie lays out a story too bizarre and fascinating not to stay entertaining throughout. But the movie pulls on too many threads and ultimately becomes undone. Some of the sprawl is natural when trying to distill a complex online ecosystem into an intelligible narrative, but the film doesn’t have the discipline to stick to a particular lens, switching away from its affable cartoonist protagonist for tangents into occultism, cryptocurrency and politics. All of these things are part of the Pepe story, but without a consistent viewpoint the film succeeds in producing highlights from the glut of online poison it documents while finally failing to cohere completely.
Animating previously still cartoon material for illustrative purposes is officially tiresome. The “Searching for Gary Larson” episode of Documentary Now should have been the final example.
Time, is a movie of aching, wonderful beauty. Crisp black and white footage from the present cuts with home movies from the past which, in a brilliant move, have been converted to black and white also, collapsing the distance between the past and the present. A small boy becomes in a single cut a grown man and we feel the weight of the twenty long years that Fox Rich’s family has waited for the release of her husband Rob from prison. Some, especially those married to the Ploughman, will demand more context. But the film’s concern is with the feeling of the slipping years experienced by the strong-willed and outspoken Fox. It’s poetry, and powerful in its breadth and weight.
Finally, Kirsten Johnson (cameraperson, Cameraperson) brought Dick Johnson is Dead, a film financed by Netflix that will appear on that service in the coming months. For sure the funniest film you’ll see where you watch a real, kindly old man die. Johnson, observing the effects of dementia creeping into her father’s life and foreseeing grief on the horizon, creates a film with her father that imagines his death in horrific accidents (and the chocolate and dance numbers that await him in the afterlife). Johnson is quickly becoming one of the most interesting figures in film, and the humor and honesty of this movie has to be witnessed, a film that is brutal in its observation and humor and yet so gentle it can be shared between anyone. This is a film I will think about periodically until I die, whenever or in whatever comically macabre fashion that may be.
Q&A highlight: Kirsten Johnson insists on eye contact when taking questions from the audience, and jumps into the crowd with a mic in hand (like Phil Donahue, as her editor dryly described it) to make the connection.
Tomorrow: The final day of the festival brings the Obamas’ second foray into documentary distribution.
