Docs in the House

Well before Michael Moore, influential British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, the director of documentaries about the Florida serial killer Aileen Wuornos, Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, and the death of Kurt Cobain, had enraged purists by using his own performance as the reporter to blur the gap between impartiality and point of view. Again and again, Broomfield is clearly being manipulated by his subjects, yet his stubborn struggle to reveal the truth, or at least the truth as he sees it, creates films that aim at the very heart of documentary’s traditional claims of objectivity. After years of listening to politicians, sports figures, business leaders, and government inquiry witnesses lie to us, we cannot help but identify with Broomfield’s frustration, anger, and futile efforts to reveal the truth.

One film last year seemed to reflect all the strengths of the modern documentary. Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans told the complex and tangled story of the Friedman family of Great Neck, Long Island. In a sensational trial in 1987, the father, Arnold Friedman, and the youngest of his three sons, Jesse, were charged with sexually molesting children who were attending computer classes held in the family basement.

While Broomfield punctuates documentary’s traditional balance of interviews and testimonials with scenes of his own humiliation, Jarecki has an even more powerful resource: the hundreds of hours of home movies made by the Friedmans themselves. The family members obsessively documented their lives and continued to do so right through the trials. Both Broomfield’s scenes of direct confrontation and Jarecki’s use of the Friedmans’ home movies expose the filmmaker’s inability to understand fully, let alone reveal, the complete truth. As witnesses and friends provide conflicting pieces of evidence, we see that much of the abused kids’ testimony is untrustworthy, while Arnold Friedman is exposed as a collector of child pornography; the sequences filmed by the family comment on and then destroy our perceptions and expectations. It is as if Greek tragedy has been turned on its head. While the gods desperately make a case for their champions below, the mortals on stage refuse to co-operate, holding up damning evidence and uncomfortable information that can be used against them.

More than with any film I can remember, with Capturing The Friedmans I was forced to question why and what I was watching. Why did the middle son, David, film these terrible moments, and why would he even consider allowing Jarecki to use the material? The lines from the film’s opening music—“They’re gonna put me in the movies, they’re gonna make a big star out of me,” by Buck Owens—do not answer the question or explain our own sense of voyeurism. Does David’s decision to show his family being destroyed make it all right for us to watch? Days after seeing the film, my wife and I were still arguing about the guilt or innocence of the family.

Two sequences in particular reveal the power of using home movies in this framework. A few days before Arnold Friedman is to go to jail, found guilty of sexual abuse, the whole family sits at the meal table discussing the trial and Dad’s still-proclaimed innocence. As always, David is filming with his video camera. The three sons are outraged: “Of course, the trial was rigged, the charges outrageous, the whole process a grotesque distortion of justice!” The scene seems like a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, as the camera pans from face to face around patriarch Arnold until the mother, Elaine, is forced to speak. She alone feels uncomfortable being filmed. Marginalized by the men of the family, her opinion never truly valued, she is now being forced to commit herself on the record to family and husband—and she cannot. Perhaps Arnold, her brilliant and charismatic husband, is indeed capable of these crimes. She has lived and slept with this man for years but now does not know, or is unwilling to face her three sons and husband, about her suspicions. If she is the Judas at the table, Arnold makes no effort to defend himself. Like the self-satisfied smirk on President Bush’s face in Fahrenheit 9/11 or Jonathan Caouette’s desperate body language in the early vignettes of Tarnation, the fleeting shots of Arnold’s indifference beside Elaine’s anguish are more powerful than any statement by filmmaker or subject.

Later in the film, Jesse Friedman, Arnold’s youngest son and teaching assistant, is about to join his father in jail. Waiting to be sentenced, the young man clowns and dances on the courthouse steps for his brother’s camera. The scene is tragic, enraging, and amusing all at once—proving neither guilt nor innocence, but rather simply showing human behaviour without comment. Only later do we consider David’s almost desperate need to document the moment.

Ambiguity lies at the heart of the film, as Jarecki examines the complexity of character and behaviour without any claims to objective truth. Later, David will tell the filmmaker that he recorded the destruction of his family so that he does not need to remember it. The subtext of this movie—our obsession with documenting the details of our lives in order to find some bigger meaning—eventually becomes its message.

You are changed by the film because you cannot watch it without at least considering changing your own mind. Leaving the theatre drained, I felt I had experienced the start of a new chapter in film. Not since first seeing Pulp Fiction had I felt this hopeful for cinema.

It is exciting to watch an art form bursting into its own, but it is the ability of documentaries to portray character that stays with you. Aspiring inner-city Chicago basketball players William Gates and Arthur Agee, growing up before our eyes in the wonderful Hoop Dreams, or even the racist Coach Pingatore in the same movie; Robert Crumb and his strange family in Crumb; Roméo Dallaire in Peter Raymont’s Shake Hands with the Devil; above all the pathetic and ultimately frightening Fred Leuchter in Errol Morris’s brilliant Mr. Death, linger in your memory long after Hollywood heroes have faded.

A few years ago pbs ran the film The Farmer’s Wife over three evenings. The six-hour documentary, directed by David Sutherland, is about Juanita and Darrel Buschkoetter’s struggle to survive as small farmers in the American Midwest. As the film unfolds, the viewer cannot help but be sucked into the rhythms of their world of harvests and birthdays, bank loans, and planting. The quiet intimacy and measured pace of the film take on the transcendental power of a Robert Bresson movie as the couple’s dreams of raising a loving family on their Nebraska farm are slowly crushed by modern economics. After years of heroically struggling together, their marriage suddenly falls apart, and, as with any true tragedy, we are left shocked and drained by the inevitability of the climax. By the last episode, the series had won an emotional depth most feature films seem incapable of even attempting. For once, a happy coda, as the couple reunites in the end, seems well-earned.