Deputy Editor Michael Leader samples two documentaries playing out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, ahead of their appearances at the London Film Festival in October…
The Venice film festival has been flying by in a blur of screenings and gelato, so now we’re into the second week I’ve resolved to step away from the mad rush of the Competition whenever I can, and spend a few indulgent hours with the programme’s special out-of-competition screenings.
At Berkeley
And, frankly, where else would you be able to see a four-hour documentary about UC Berkeley, one of America’s largest publicly-funded higher education institutions? At Berkeley is the latest opus from veteran filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who has been documenting human behaviour in various contexts for upwards of 40 years, and has perfected a purely observational style that dispenses with narration and the overt directorial fingerprints of intertitles and interviews in favour of placing the camera in the middle of a room and watching conversations unfold.
By that token, 244 minutes of university seminars, lectures and administrative meetings may sound dull, but Wiseman’s gentle, seamless editing and delicate storytelling allow these voyeuristic sequences to build meaning en masse – an effect that, by the time the credits roll, is truly staggering. By mixing classroom discussions on social policy in a post-financial crisis America with the bureaucratic realities that the Chancellor’s cabinet deal with behind closed doors, a full picture starts to appear.
Students are encouraged to aggressively question and criticise, but cynicism is staved off as discussions range from access to education and the rise in college fees to the invisible prejudices that haunt even a world-class institution like Berkeley. Meanwhile, the administrative staff deal with diminishing public funding to keep the university accessible in testing economic times – a particular coup, and recurring theme, being that they had just admitted the most scholarship-assisted students in Berkeley’s history. So when, in the film’s third hour, a student protest breaks out, demanding “no cuts, no fees” and occupying one of the college’s libraries, we’re treated to both sides of the matter – and wonder whether, in this intellectually engaged community, such action is tolerated and even encouraged as an expression of the students’ passion.
But to focus on that thread would be to ignore the little glimpses of campus life that Wiseman wisely inserts among the discourse: close-harmony groups, a robotics lab, the Kronos Quartet in concert, poetry readings and, in the film’s closing moments, a lecture on human life on other planets open up the film even further, adding up to a voluminous observation of American higher education in action.
The Armstrong Lie
At the other end of the documentary filmmaking spectrum is The Armstrong Lie, which is both half as long as At Berkeley and features all of of the stylistic bells-and-whistles that Wiseman rejects. Back when I interviewed him in June, director Alex Gibney told me that he saw himself as a filmmaker as opposed to a journalist, and therefore he marshals all sorts of cinematic technique when producing his documentaries. But the process, he said, is often a stop-start affair.
The Armstrong Lie, following the release of We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks by a couple of months, has been in production since 2008. Initially a film following cyclist Lance Armstrong’s comeback and subsequent Tour de France race in 2009, Gibney found that the entire scope of his film changed when, in the last two years, Armstrong was finally outed as – and latterly admitted to being – a doper on all seven of his winning Tours.
There’s obviously a personal dimension to the film – and very early on Gibney makes a point to say that Armstrong “lied to [him] on camera,” – but while the director admits that his original 2009 movie attracted flak from the anti-Armstrong camp, who accused him of crafting a puff piece for a fraud, The Armstrong Lie maintains a similar style to We Steal Secrets, wherein Gibney only interjects with his own baggage intermittently, instead letting archive footage and interviews lead the narrative.
This means that the film is definitely more of a traditional sports doc than anything else, and in Gibney’s later interviews with Armstrong he doesn’t really grill the cyclist, at least not on a par with Oprah in her famous lie-revealing chat, which the film quotes generously. Instead, he studies the wholly corrupt professional cycling community – which tolerated doping at a time when Armstrong brought the sport into the spotlight – and explores the allure of myth and the drive that pushes top-flight athletes to succeed by any means necessary. Some may wish for Gibney to stick the knife in more firmly, but others will conclude that the haggard, hounded expression on Armstrong’s face in the 2013 interviews, after the brash, bronzed braggadocio of the past, is more than enough evidence of remorse.
