Re: What Documentaries Influenced You Most and Why?

"Chronique d'un été." Seemed almost formless, following a number of people for one Parisian summer. No narrator, as far as I can recall. No interviews. You gradually become aware that many of these people know each other, and you start to make the connections -- oh, this must be the guy whose girlfriend is cheating, etc. The final scene is a movie theater, where the people in the film have just finished watching the film, and start disputing the way they were portrayed. I think the filmmakers must have had "Rashomon" on their minds. Anyway it was terrific. Learned about it from my first and only history-of-film teacher, who maintained that what was known as "cinema verité" was rarely that. Films like "Gimme Shelter," he maintained, couldn't be considered verité because they were about celebrities who acted all the time. "Chronique d'un été" was also significant in terms of film technology: one of the first films to take advantage of the low profile and portability of a Nagra and an Eclair.

Also: "The Farmer's Wife." Absolutely breathtaking multi-part doc. on PBS. Promising young couple, with three young kids, struggling to make a living in Nebraska or someplace like that. To get by in hard times, the wife has to go to town to wash the bathrooms of her former high school classmates in their MacMansions. I'll never forget one shot, where the young farmer and his wife are sitting in their kitchen having a very serious conversation about their future together, after the kids are asleep. It's a two-shot. The husband gets so overwrought at their situation that he rises and walks out of shot, out of the room. The cameraman was a genius -- he did NOTHING. Kept the camera running, didn't pan, didn't zoom, just kept us looking at the wife in her chair and the empty chair on the other side of the frame. You can tell that the dream has died, the marriage just ended.

Also: my first doc., because it blew my mind how hard this Dr. Frankenstein process is, how tricky it is to pull all the levers, put it all together, bring it all to life and keep the patient's heart beating.

Bob C

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