Documentaries about musicians gravitate towards dysfunction, because that’s how you get drama into documentaries and most musicians — especially in bands, where too much time spent together yields unnatural tensions — seem to be pretty dramatic anyway. So it’s curious that both Anvil!: The Story Of Anvil and Iron Maiden: Flight 666 played at SXSW, because they’re about as diametrically opposed as movies about metal bands that’ve lasted over 30 years could be. They’re both love letters, but one has to convince the audience to care; the other is pre-sold.
As for which is better, that’d be Anvil. This is made out of love as much as any sense of “what a story”; the last shot (a post-credits photo of director Sacha Gervasi as 1985’s best-coiffed teen metalhead with his then-favorite band) confirms that it’s a gift from a former teen fan, when music matters most. In the early ’80s Anvil was on track to join Metallica and Anthrax in the upper echelons of commercial success; their hit “Metal on Metal” led to them playing alongside Bon Jovi in 1984 in Japan. But something stopped them, and though Slash, Lemmy, Scott Ian and Lars Ulrich all turn up at the start to testify to Anvil’s lasting importance to metal, none of them have any clue what happened to them or why.
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On Sunday at True/False, filmmaker/blogger AJ Schnack screened the first thirty minutes of Convention, his verite-style film documenting the 2008 Democratic National Convention with an eye on the Denver locals (politicians, city administrators, journalists, protesters) who were in the mix. Shot by Schnack in collaboration with nearly a dozen documentarians (including the Oscar-nominated directors Laura Poitras and Julia Reichert, and Daniel Junge, who directed the Oscar-shortlisted They Killed Sister Dorothy), the film’s making-of process was almost as much of a serendipity-dependent feat of execution as the event captured on screen.
As his, uh, primary inspiration, Schnack cites Robert Drew’s Primary, a Direct Cinema landmark documenting the Wisconsin primary race between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The first American nonfiction picture filmed with sync sound, its IMDb profile reads today as a who’s-who of 60s documentary film: Drew as audio recordist, Albert Maysles and Ricky Leacock behind the camera and D.A. Pennebaker in the editing room. Time will tell if Convention’s slate of collaborators seems as starry 50 years on, but in the present it stands out as a film built out of and on top of connections made on the film festival circuit. If, in the context of the incestuous world of indie film, that hardly seems all that noteworthy, it is relevant that the production seems to have harnessed the scrappy, obsessive energy of that rather insular community and put it to the service of documenting an event that could potentially have meaning to a much larger segment of the population. …Read more
When filmmakers betray the documentary they’re making. Karina wrestles with The Axe in the Attic, a documentary where the filmmakers hijack their own story by inserting themselves into it. Kurt & Courtney (1998), Nick Broomfield’s attempted investigation into Kurt Cobain’s life and death, is a classic example of the same folly. But AJ Schnack’s Kurt Cobain About a Son (opening tonight) sets a new gold standard for self-restraint.
FilmCouch #40 [25:33m]:
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FilmCouch #40
Kurt Cobain About a Son, Kurt & Courtney
