Leftie Cinema

Will you ever go see another Michael Moore movie? The surge of popularity in documentary films, specifically those that are the cinematic equivalent of advocacy journalism, has crested. "Docu-ganda" such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me, An Inconvenient Truth no longer rules at the cinema.

And whether the truth is there to be found in contemporary documentaries is a question.

Balance and fact-checking are not needed in personal, polemical cinema, just a good story, a quirky style, and/or an endearing central figure. Eric Schlosser's 2001 investigative book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal even spawned a fictional, narrative reworking of the same material in 2006, directed by Richard Linklater of "Slacker" and the new "Me and Orson Welles."

Maybe we're overdosing on reality. Anyone can create his or her own documentary, or at least audition for a reality show. The most popular film fictions, from Erin Brockovich to The Pianist to Milk, are all based on true stories. The tangle of fact with fancy has never been so pronounced. Can you or do you want to factor out the part of the documentary that involves selling the story, plain and simple?

Two films I saw back-to-back at the Denver International Film Festival this fall exercise social criticism. Another Glorious Day (2009, Dir: Karin Kaper and Dirk Szuszies) follows a restaging of "The Brig," a highly controversial early anti-war play put on by New York's Living Theatre in May, 1963 - the last summer of the American Empire, in retrospect, before Kennedy's assassination seemed to curse the times.

The play's author, Kenneth H. Brown, a former Marine, states in the documentary that he meant to make his account of his time in a Korean War-era Marine Corps prison (30 days for going AWOL) as accurate as possible.

"The Corps wrote this," he says. The script is a telescoping of a typical, brutal day in the prison. Inmates are issued numbers. They perform every action double-time, with a formal attention that resembles a demented ballet. Minor infractions are met with beatings. The prisoners have forfeited their right to be human, to exercise autonomy.

Defenders of the system would that the inmates have given up their rights by breaking regulations, and that hard-core screw-ups need to have all traces of individuality pressed out of them so that they can be rebuilt in a functional, military manner. Oddly, that would be the same argument of the opponents of the system.

Most disturbingly, the Marine warders refer to the brig as "my house," and the prisoners as their children. We are back to infancy, and a bizarre kind of tenderness in the byplay of domination and submission.

The style of the action is excruciating, a confrontational exhibit of constant pain. Finally, one man beaks down and is taken out in a straitjacket. Another takes his place. It's called the Theatre of Cruelty, and that was invented in 1938 by a crazy French actor best known for playing the compassionate monk Massieu in Carl Dreyer's silent masterpiece, 1928's "The Passion of Joan of Arc."

But I digress.

Although the original production was filmed by legendary avant-garde film figure Jonas Mekas in 1964, only a single slow, blurry shot from that production is seen. We are watching a 2007 revival by the still-extant group. The directors shoot in aggressive, jagged close-ups that work. The actors are vocally anti-war, work collectively, and the vibe is the feeling that we are all encased in an evil American imperialist nightmare.

They play Berlin, in a theater and on the street, taking the U-Bahn in costume. They sing "Stop the War" to the tune of the national anthem. They are sincere and committed and intense and disciplined in their performances. Like soldiers for peace.

A distinct turn in approach, style and attitude in evident in Citizen Havel (2008, Dir: Miroslav Janek and Pavel Kouteck). This is an up-close-and-personal multi-year portrait of the charismatic and witty Vaclav Havel, erstwhile playwright, dissident, political prisoner, then Czechoslovakia's last President, and the Czech Republic's first.

The famed humanitarian is followed for seven years, which chronicle most of his decade-long term as Czech President, his wife's death, his remarriage, his health problems, and his ready mind. He chain-smokes (everyone smokes), he drinks (everyone drinks all the time there) - wow! How do I get to Prague?

Havel is so ironic and self-effacing that it's difficult to remember that he willed himself into the position of power, and he seems to pay no mind to the camera in his presence. He juggles opponents adroitly, he's a charmer, and we can't help rooting for him. Is his congeniality a natural political gift as well?

The border between playwright, performer and politician dissolves. He fiddles with his ties, he rehearses moves during a presentation, he stage-manages. I'm sure he's more aware of the dilemma than anyone else. In Citizen Havel, the personal IS the political, and theater, and an expression of belief, all bundled in human form. He erodes, slightly but distinctly, before our eyes.

There is no climax, no great sweep of emotion. He persists in office, and then he moves out. The last thing he talks about in the movie is an old play of his that he found. One of the characters is a pathetic former President. His eyes shrug.

Citizen Havel is going to be seen more widely. In it, a seeming idealist learns how to work in the real world, which is itself a political world, which is illusory and false, in which fictional plans are concocted that govern our reality . . . Despite its hagiographic tendencies, Citizen Havel ends up making just as jarring an examination of politics and, and as, theater as Another Glorious Day does.

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