Finally, a documentary in the “golden age of documentaries” that addresses the long-ignored thousand-pound gorilla in the screening room: How should human cost be considered in a nonfiction filmmaking mode that by definition uses people’s real lives as material? Perhaps we needed a few decades of mounting, accelerating documentary fever, fueled by streaming and low-cost production, to aggregate enough stories to make that question imperative, in a way it never seemed to be in the bygone Direct Cinema of Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles.
Back in the ’60s and ’70s, not many thought to ask how the Bible hawkers in the Maysles’ Salesman (1969) or the striking miners in Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA (1976) were impacted by either the filmmaking or by those films’ subsequent public success. Today, with our hound-dog noses primed and poised to sniff out every symptom of privilege or exploitation, and with documentaries bubbling over in every cultural corner, it’s a different story. We’re savvier about, as well as being hungrier for, media exposure, and concerns about moviemaking ethics are ever-present, since nearly any one of us could as easily be the filmmaker as the subject.
Genre-immersive and gimlet-eyed, Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall’s film, Subject, is built around asking the big questions: Does a film’s subject know the risks of exposing themselves? Do they know how little control they have? Are they ready to surrender their privacy? Are they prepared to perhaps become famous, in ways the final film determines? A simple rule is followed: The filmmakers are not interviewed, and therefore not allowed to defend themselves. (Producers and distributors are, however; Minding the Gap’s Bing Liu is sat down, but that’s because he ended up being one of his own coming-of-age subjects.)
Mostly, it’s ordinary people in the films, looking back on the experience of filmmaking and, more vitally, what it was like to see the final film and feel the brunt of its distortions, its telescoped portrayal of life, and its success as a public object watched by millions. We meet Arthur Agee, of Hoop Dreams (1994); Jesse Friedman, of Capturing the Friedmans (2003); Ahmad Hassan, of The Square (2013); Mukunda Angulo, of The Wolfpack (2015); Michael Peterson and his stepdaughter Margaret Ratliff, of The Staircase (2004), and so on, and if Tiexiera and Hall had a j’accuse agenda going in, they are met with a cataract of mixed feelings and ambiguity. Some subjects feel blessed — Andrew Jarecki’s film essentially got Friedman out of prison, and the success of Crystal Moselle’s Wolfpack was a lifeline for both Angulo and his battered mother — while others are bedeviled after having their private lives shredded into a spectacle for public consumption.
Documentary filmmaking is by its nature a vexing, even vampiric system that compromises everyone it touches.
Subject is very much a film critic’s movie, picking at the same conundrums and textual questions any decent critic must in the course of the job — how much is real and how did this happen and at what price? (In the ’80s and ’90s, the Village Voice’s Georgia Brown, being a mom, used to worry as no other critic did in print about how narrative filmmakers got small children, for whom every film is a documentary, to cry.) Inevitably, Subject wades deeply into the rhetoric of victimization and trauma, sometimes a little naively — one fact that seems to be overlooked by everyone is that absolutely no one ever forgets that there’s a film crew in the room, so the subject is at least to a small degree responsible for what ends up in a film. There’s much cant about “accountability,” without actually nailing down what that might consist of. Sure, we “need to have the conversation,” but as any listener to NPR knows, saying that over and over again is not the same as actually having the conversation.
The three white filmmakers who made Hoop Dreams (Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert) even catch some shit for not being of the Black neighborhoods they invaded — even though their film has always been revered as a sincere and unimpeachable document, and even though, we’re told, once it started to earn at the box office, everyone with a speaking “role” got a cut of the income stream. (Agee’s first check was for $60K.)
The ambivalences in Subject pile up beautifully, and we can’t grump too hard on the filmmakers for posing dilemmas they can’t immediately solve. The issues don’t, in fact, actually seem solvable — documentary filmmaking is by its nature a vexing, even vampiric system that compromises everyone it touches, drawing energy from the living in exchange for the varying rewards of public exposure and artistic triumph. It’s unregulatable, susceptible to amoral misuse and dishonesty, and dependent on the clueless trust of subjects, who often get nothing in return. It’s also, most often, executed by filmmakers with the purest humanitarian motives and with little hope of profit. No wonder it’s become the emblematic mode for our day and age. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.