“I was the smartest kid in town, and the reporters knew it,” brags Josh Harris in We Live in Public, Ondi Timoner’s documentary on the rise and fall of the Internet’s first (and still its most charismatic) video mogul. It’s a telling statement, in that it points to both Harris’ 1990s raison d’etre, and also his Achilles heel: it’s not what you do that matters, it’s that people are watching you do it. Timoner’s portrait of the prescient (and quite possibly crazy) web pioneer will be a must see for anyone interested in internet fame and the phenomenon of casual over-sharing, even if her storytelling tactics are surprisingly stale.

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This review was originally published during the 2009 SXSW Film Festival. Died Young, Stayed Pretty opens in New York today at the IFC Center. There is also an opening party tonight at the 92Y Tribeca.

I’ve hung out with enough graphic design nerds to know how tedious their fetish can be to the unconverted, and the options for a documentary about rock posters seemed to be either that kind of geekery or hipster hagiography. “Culture is that thing you shovel out of your window in the evening,” interviewee Mike King wisely announces in Died Young, Stayed Pretty; “otherwise, it will drown you.” The danger in such a project is obviously that kind of self-valorizing mythology, when your clique’s self-evident importance is inaccessible (or just stupid-looking) to outsiders. But Eileen Yaghoobian’s documentary is unexpectedly excellent, a bracingly free-form group portrait of people who only recently discovered each other’s existence when the founding of GigPosters.com showed isolated artists they weren’t just working alone in the dark. I’ll have to take Yaghoobian’s word for it that eminently quotable interviewees like Art Charney and Tom Hazelmyer are actually luminaries of the poster world, but this is one entertaining film regardless of how its profiled community receives it .

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On Friday evening at SilverDocs, I attended a panel on film criticism moderated by Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post, and featuring contributions from critics David Edelstein, Lisa Schwarzbaum and Amy Taubin, and filmmaker/documentary programmer Thom Powers. In his opening remarks, Kennicott positioned the panel as a referendum of sorts on “Wanted: Documentary Critics”, a blog post by Powers in which he posed the question, “Auteurism had Andrew Sarris. Abstract expressionism had Clement Greenberg. Punk rock had Lester Bangs. Where is the equivalent voice for today’s documentary scene?” I was surprised that the conversation that ensued mostly skirted the issue of “where” contemporary documentary film will find its defining critic, and was instead weighed down by argument as to whether or not this is a valid question at all.

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On a panel discussion before its world premiere screening at SilverDocs last night, AJ Schnack used the phrase “Robert Altman-esque” to describe the construction of his new film, Convention. This is accurate as a reference to the stylistic tropes we classically think of when we think of Altman — shot by nine filmmaker/camerapersons, Convention tracks the interwoven stories of a number of semi-interrelated characters as they produce, participate in, protest, protect and/or report on the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver — but the film also shares what Roger Ebert, in his review of Nashville, refered to as Altman’s “humanism”, the way he “sees people with his camera in such a way as to enlarge our own experience.” The multiple cameras and the multi-faceted streams of vision that they bring to Convention accomplish two major feats in terms of altering the scale of perspective: they condense nearly an entire city’s goings-on during the biggest international event in its recent history into the managable microcosmic experiences of a few of its thoroughly “normal” citizens, while at the same time opening up spaces in the lives of strangers that the viewer can sink into, and thus sync up to a communal sense of Something Happening. It seems so simple, and yet it’s so rare that you actually find yourself in a theater, having a moment of collective transcendance that makes you think, “This is why movies exist.”

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“Why is it so hard to make a film about yourself?” asks Richard Rogers in Alexander Olch’s The Windmill Movie. He shortly thereafter unwittingly answers his own question via another question: “Is there anything to say?” Opening today at Film Forum in New York, Windmill is a kind of personal documentary by proxy. After his teacher/mentor/collaborator Rogers died of cancer, Olch was invited by Rogers’ widow, world-renowned photographer Susan Meiselas, to comb through the Harvard professor/documentarian’s vast archives of film and video, shot towards a hypothetical autobiographical movie that Rogers was never able to put together.
For Rogers, self-examination lead to a kind of tunnel-vision, embodied by an oft-seen image in Windmill of Rogers looking into the mirror from behind the camera. One of Windmill’s key ideas seems to be that the camera actually got in the way of Rogers’ ability to clearly see his own reflection. that, because of constant self-doubt as to whether he, as a white man born into money, had anything worthwhile to say, the apparatus through which he made his living filming other people couldn’t double as a tool through which to see himself. The service that Rogers provided to his subjects — of finding the truth in the raw material they offered up — Olch attempts to perform by any means necessary for his lost friend.

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Last night, Stranger Than Fiction and the Woodstock Film Festival co-presented a screening of Swimming to Cambodia, Jonathan Demme’s 1987 performance document of Spalding Gray’s monologue ruminating on sex, drugs, genocide, “perfect moments” and “invisible clouds of evil.” Inspired by Gray’s real-life experience playing a small role in Roland Jaffe’s The Killing Fields (”I’m not making up any of these stories I’m telling you tonight,” he swears. “Except for the fact that the banana sticks to wall when it hits. Everything else is true.”), Swimming, the first of three films based on Gray’s monologues, easily eclipses Jaffe’s film in contemporary freshness and replayability. Gray’s stream-of-consciousness style of deeply personal social documentary has never been equalled on as mainstream a scale. Gray may have been great at self-documentation, but it’s the subtle sinematic shaping employed by Demme, cinematographer John Bailey, editor Carole Littleton and composer Laurie Anderson that takes the raw material of a guy sitting in front of a map at a desk with a glass of water and a MacDonalds notebook, and turns it into great documentary.

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Where Jesus Camp played the conflict between contemporary evangelical Christianity and the secular community for liberal-baiting horror, Michael Jacobs takes the route of real-life mockumentary with Audience of One, which debuted at SXSW in 2007 and concludes a long festival run with a run in Chicago last week and its New York premiere this weekend. It’s a lighter approach applied to a culture war battle with somewhat less urgency, but its own less-than-optimistic implications.

Jacobs finds an unwitting star in Richard Gazowsky, second-generation pastor of the Voice of Pentecost church in San Francisco, and the would-be director of Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph, an epic evangelical sci-flick to which he and his churchgoers have devoted their lives and sunk their savings. Gazowsky calls his “studio” WYSIWYG –– that is, “What you see is what you get”; though Richard explains that the name has something to do with battling the “cliques” of both Hollywood and other religious sects, this is one of many instances in which Gazowsky offers a ramble that seems to insufficiently explicate his case. Regardless, under the auspices of WYSIWYG, Gazowsy has assembled a crew that’s an uneasy blending of enthusiastic Craig’s List-sourced amateurs, devout family members/parishioners — none of whom have any experience with filmmaking — and non-believing professional technicians drawn in by the scope of Richard’s vision. Jacobs follows, patiently and without apparent intervention, as Gazowsky leads his clan from pre-production in San Francisco to a disastrous five-day shoot in Italy, then back home, where WYSIWYG sets up shop in a film studio on Treasure Island and ultimately refuse to leave, even after the city has shut off their power for non payment of rent. So basically, it’s just like any indie film production, except that any problem large or small is ameliorated with the faith that “God will save us all.”

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It was sold weeks in advance as the sure-thing controversy of the Tribeca Film Festival. Outrage, Kirby Dick’s follow-up to This Film Has Not Been Rated, would surely apply that documentary’s tactics of unapologetically biased filmed detective work to a far more incendiary and potentially politically relevant collusion of power: the “brilliantly orchestrated conspiracy” of secretly gay Republican politicians, “self-hating gay people” all who secretly, shamefully practice the same acts for which they seek to punish others via discriminatory policy. But as it turns out, Outrage is less a work of original, intrepid muckraking than a ride-along with a few full-time muckrakers of the blog and satellite radio spheres, one that considers arguments for and against involuntary outing on the road to defending the responsibility of the public servants to practice what they preach.

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I saw and reviewed James Toback’s Tyson at its world premiere at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and the docu-confessional certainly left a lasting impression … for the wrong reasons. Mike Tyson himself walked down the long aisle of the Lumiere theater after the screening to both a rapturous standing ovation from the home crowd, and a dimly heard protest cry of “rapist!” drifting down from the balcony (a female film critic later took credit for the latter). Suffice it to say, that contradiction made that Cannes premiere  … uh … memorable, regardless of the content of the film.

Almost a year later, there seem to be as few contrasting voices in regards to Tyson as there are in regards to Tyson within the film itself. The way this non-conventional nonfiction film, and what a cynic might see as the nefarious project behind it, has been accepted by the media virtually unquestioningly, even appreciatively (see the 85% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, higher than the current rating for the latest film from the critically beloved Dardennes brothers), cements that Cannes premiere as a crucial moment in documentary evolution. That night in May, the freak show aesthetic that marks salacious, nonfiction-in-name (if questionably in content) VH1 product like Flava of Love, Celebrity Rehab and Confessions of a Teen Idol, slipped seamlessly into Cannes, en route to a US arthouse release from the same company that brought you very classy recent Oscar nominees Frozen River, Waltz with Bashir and The Class. That night, any remaining distinction between the lowbrow non-fiction of reality TV and the rarefied space of the world’s most revered film festival ceased to exist.

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Hours after Al Franken’s latest victory in the 2008 Minnesota senate race, Thom Powers hosted a special screening of Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob’s documentary Al Franken: God Spoke at Stranger Than Fiction in New York. Though the film, released in 2006, only extend into the very beginning of Franken’s senate run, thanks to recent events it plays as an invaluable portrait of the bridge Franken travelled from Saturday Night Live mainstay to Fox News punching bag, from humiliated Kerry supporter to quiet victor in a vote that his opponent won’t let lie.

Early on in the film there’s footage of a public spat on some kind of book panel between Franken and Bill O’Reilly, which basically ends when the Fox star aggressively tells the then-comedian to “shut up!” At that point in their careers, they’re both personalities. The story of the film is Franken’s evolution up the food chain, from being a dog nipping at O’Reilly’s ankles to being his more-or-less equal,  and on to Franken’s determination to grasp an actual position of power, thus putting him in a different league altogether from a media star whose power is largely percieved and mostly conferred by his associated institution. And though it ends not long after the 2004 re-annointing of George W. Bush, seen a full election cycle later God Spoke feels like the beginning of the story of the rise of the left as an organized mainstream media presence, and the eventual triumph of the Democratic Party. (Which is not to say that it’s not occasionally dated; at one point Tucker Carlson, who spent much of the 2006 and 2008 election clouds associated with liberal bastion MSNBC, is here held up as a tool of the right via his then-role as anchor of Crossfire on CNN).

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Jeremiah Zagar’s In a Dream premiered at SXSW in 2008, two months before Synecdoche, NY was unveiled at Cannes, but seen in the run up to its release in New York on Friday, Zagar’s family documentary pops out as a true-life analogue to Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut. Dream’s counterpart to Caden Cotard is Isaiah Zagar, the filmmaker’s father and a mosaic mural artist who, in the film’s earliest frames, confesses to an attraction to the “gigantic.” As In a Dream unfolds (in three parts, detailing Jeremiah’s parents’ courtship and formation of a family life around the patriarch’s art practice, the eventual threats to their way of life and ultimately its tentative rebirth), more Synecdoche similarities emerge. Like the protagonist of Kaufman’s masterwork, Isaiah Zagar deals with the internal by projecting it on the external, making an art work that conquers a city, that blurs the line between public space and domestic, and that never ends. His work becomes an addiction that unwittingly distances him from the people he loves. Both films even feature protagonists who handle their own feces. Oddly enough, it’s the indie documentary, not the studio-released drama with an ensemble full of stars, that points to the possibility of a happy ending.
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It takes a special brand of moxie (or delusion or intoxication) to play metal seriously. For the Toronto, Canada based Anvil, who are the subject of The Terminal screenwriter and former #1 Anvil fan Sasha Gervasi’s documentary, the outrageous dream of everlasting youth that fuels even the most pedestrian of aging rock bands to continue on is still in full force as its members grapple with life in their fifties.

The film, which opens on Friday after a stellar, year long trip around the American festival circuit, chronicles the band’s origins, their decade of relative success and their fall into obscurity. For its members, Steve “Lips” Kudlow (lead vocals, lead guitar), Robb Reiner (the drummer, not the director of This Is Spinal Tap), Dave Allison (vocals, rhythm guitar) and Ian Dickson (bass), Metal is not something to be outgrown, to be cast aside as an embarrassing folly of youth. While it may seem that being a faded eighties hair metal band star is one of the more unfortunate paths that could befall a professional musician, for the members of Anvil, who began a new tour last night that is largely due to the publicity the film has generated, perhaps a third act can still exist. I doubt we can say the same for the following bands.

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Last week, I sat on the Documentary Competition Jury at the Sarasota Film Festival. The lineup was extraordinarily strong, and my fellow jurors and I found something to admire about most of the eight films on the slate. In the end, we gave the grand prize (which included a DVD/VOD/Educational/Television and “first look” theatrical offer from First Run Features, as well as a guaranteed slot on the Fall 2009 lineup of Stranger Than Fiction at the IFC Center in NY) to Ben Steinbauer’s Winnebago Man, and a special cinematography award to Jody Lee Lipes, the director and camera operator of Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same. I’ll write about the winning films individually as they continue their travels on the festival circuit. Below the jump, some notes on the other six films in competition.

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I saw Anna Broinowski’s Forbidden Lie$ at True/False in 2008 and was blown away by the filmmaker’s fearless experimentation with construction and story structure. The film is a portrait of Norma Khouri, a Jordanian living in exile in Australia who became a literary star when she published a purported memoir of her best friend’s honor killing. The book was eventually revealed as mostly or entirely fabricated; Khouri admitted to embellishment but insisted that the core of the story was true. Broinowski followed the disgraced author back to Jordan in the name of clearing her name, but inevitably uncovered a massive web of lies. Khouri reveals herself as a con artist for whom publishing a fake memoir (and the year of adulation and celebrity that ensued) waas jsut one act in a life-long performance; Broinowski reveals just what makes that performance work, and how Norma gets away with it.

I named Forbidden Lie$ as one of the Best Undistributed Films of last year; now, thanks to Roxie Releasing, the film is opening at the Cinema Village in New York this Friday, and in Los Angeles on April 10. Via email, I talked to Broinowski about her ongoing relationship with her subject, the inherently artificial tropes of documentary, and the natural symbiosis between a filmmaker and a con artist.

How did you discover Norma’s story, and how many of its twists and turns were you aware of when you started working on the film?

I was aware of Norma when her book first came out and she was a Jordanian celebrity in Australia, having chosen to live in exile here with the help of the Australian government, who gave her a special protection visa to help her escape the blood-thirsty Muslim terrorists who had supposedly put a fatwah on her head. But I had no interest in buying Norma’s book because the whole thing stank of anti-Arab propaganda, at a time when we were being encouraged to support the illegal invasion of Iraq.

I became keenly interested in Norma about a year later, when journalist Malcolm Knox exposed her as a hoax and a Chicago fraudster on the run from the FBI. I was hooked: what kind of woman could be so brilliant that while on the run from the FBI she could reinvent herself as a 32 year old virgin from Jordan, write a “true story” that became a best-seller around the world, and go on a book promotion tour pretending to be seeing the West for the first time, convincing the best minds in publishing and the media that she was telling the truth?

That’s when I emailed her. I said I am a filmmaker and I want to hear your side of the story. Obviously she agreed.

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