Still Alive. A Film About Krzysztof Kieslowski

If you're wondering why the last couple of entries here are so sparse, it's because I've had to interrupt my dream vacation with some work. Now I'm really free, so it's time to ramp things up and watch some freakin' movies.

Starting tomorrow.

Tonight, I'm bailing out on the last one, The Last Winter, to chill out a bit this evening. Partly because I'd like a break, partly because Greg's bailing out due to sickness, and partly because I'm a little burned out with SIFF right now.

Most of my latest movie commentary here has had a distinct lean towards the negative. While I've picked a couple of good winners to start SIFF off this year, the rest seem to have resulted in mainly medicore to poor losers.

Now consider this: I have seen 18 movies, and of those, 7 have been documentaries. SIFF always has a strong documentary lineup, and it's sort of a fluke that I've scheduled most of them towards the beginning of the festival, but I see it as something that plays a bit into my budding burnout. What it is to me is a large presence this year of poorly produced documentaries with highly specific subject matter. Examples like Murch, Sanctuary, Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox or today's showing of Still Alive. A Film About Krzysztof Kieslowski really start to beg the question: what is a documentary? All of these were fascinating portraits, disposing a great amount of useful information, but all were clumsily shot and even more shoddily edited together. All of them, perhaps arguably excluding Sanctuary and Dr. Bronner, were geared towards a very specific audience. None of these really had a story to tell, other than the general career timeline of each individual. Even Manufactured Landscapes with its addition of supplemental material suffers from similar issues.

This leaves only 2 films that I have seen so far at SIFF that I feel are strong enough to be considered true documentary cinema: In The Shadow of the Moon and King of Kong. They each have their faults too, but their writing, which is the true core of these films, push them to a level far and above the rest. There is hope, fear of failure, self-doubt, heroes, and big challenges that people must rise to overcome. It's not just the dispensing information that completes the experience of watching these documentaries, it's the sensation of being in those experiences with those heroes that make them so powerful. I forgive the sometimes shoddy camera-work in King of Kong, and the rampant talking heads in In The Shadow of the Moon, because above all else their stories are solid, their music is spot-on, and the feelings these create when they come together far outweigh the individual quirks. In fact, over-production might even detract from the authenticity in something like King of Kong. We've all seen the footage of Neil Armstrong a million times, we all know the end of the story about how the astronauts made it to the moon, but I would be shocked at anyone who actually found the retelling of this story, through voices, music and images, to be anything but totally fascinating.

So, getting back to Still Alive. A Film About Krzysztof Kieslowski. The film covers Kieslowski's career from the time he attended film school until his death. We learn about him through interviews with colleagues and archived footage of himself, as well as through clips of his films and on the sets of his films. It's an educational portrait of him, though at times seems very geared towards one who is more familiar with his work since not enough of each film is covered in any particular depth. There is no narration in this movie, so there is a very strong reliance upon interview soundbites. This causes the movie to become very wordy at times, stringing together one person talking against another and then another and so on. Watching this film in English compounds the issue even further by having to read all of this in subtitles, making the experience akin to reading a book for about an hour with a few supplemental images. It's not really a fault of the movie that the subtitles were very wordy, but it should have included some breathing room from the voices as we need some time to digest regardless of the language. And, again, the camera work was pretty unremarkable here as well.

Fortunately that ends a large chunk of documentaries this week, and only 3 are scheduled next week and the week after. It may sound pretty negative, but there's only so much you can wade through before it starts getting tedious. Documentary filmmaking has become pretty big and it's great that anyone can pick up a movie camera and shoot, but I think there is a fundamental lack of understanding of what actually makes a good documentary and too frequently the uniqueness of the subject matter seems to overshadow the importance of the other traits of a good quality film.

Audience Watch: Random wafts of a soapy perfume emanating from some distant seat location at the Egyptian caused some occasional sensory disconnects during the viewing of the Kieslowski film. Several people walked out during the first 20min.