This is a great piece on the art of criticism, by film critic Alissa Wilkinson. Alissa used to write for Christianity Today and now she writes for Vox, and in my opinion constitutes the best of contemporary film criticism. She’s easy to read, yet intelligent and insightful. Here she talks about how she sees her craft. From the article: “Critics are, themselves, creators of art. It’s an art that’s usually funneled through the medium of journalism, but criticism is still fundamentally an art form. The art a critic makes is a review or an essay, something that is less about “supporting” a movie and more about drawing on an individual’s experience with a film to make an argument about that movie. It includes evaluation of the film, but it also, done well, is a passionate argument for the importance of art itself.” “The marketing departments of film studios and distribution companies exist to deal with those commercial aspects of film. But critics have a different job. Critics are primarily interested in the art of the film. That means that critics are looking for things about the film that work or don’t work. They’re interested in the aesthetics and the content. And their […]

It’s no secret that Sigmund Freud, in what he called the talking cure, drew on the tradition of confession in western civilization. In the therapeutic session, the patient seeks to gain psychological health by exploring their thoughts and feelings, and thereby attaining a sense of self-awareness regarding their unconscious desires and feelings. Again, it is necessary for another person to be present in order for the process to work. We have a need as humans, in other words, to reveal that which lies behind our public persona, or the walls we put up, or the masks that we wear (choose your metaphor) to other people. In doing so, we are making ourselves vulnerable and placing our trust in the listener, that they will not judge or use the information against us.   – from the upcoming book “How to Film the Truth: The Story of Documentary Film As a Spiritual Journey” to be released in the Summer of 2018 by Wipf & Stock

Documentary historian Bill Nichols notes that the interview in documentary draws from several cultural institutions, the religious confessional, Freudian psychoanalysis and evangelical testimony. These institutions, as theologian Wiliam Dyrness points out in Poetic Theology, have liturgical and religious roots. Famously, it was Augustine’s Confessions that marked an inward turn (or the exploration of one’s self) in the search for God. But what is telling about the literary genre of confession is that it is apparently not enough to simply confess to one’s self. Rather we have to make those thoughts public, as Augustine does in the Confessions. The confessor, in other words, seeks to speak the truth, in a very personal and revealing way to someone else. Through history this practice has taken on various forms, not least of which is the practice of psychoanalysis.   – from the upcoming book “How to Film the Truth: The Story of Documentary Film As a Spiritual Journey” to be released in the Summer of 2018 by Wipf & Stock

The process of inversion by the prophetic voice is a tactic that is used quite often to this day. For example, the 2012 film The House I Live In, a film about the war on drugs, sets up two opposing narratives right away. On the one hand there is the dominant narrative: America is a free society and drug abuse is “public enemy number one.” In the first few minutes of the film, we are treated to a press conference of President Nixon saying just that: drug abuse is “public enemy number one.” Next, director Eugene Jarecki constructs a montage consisting of images of this “war on drugs” set to the audio of subsequent presidents and public officials essentially expressing the idea that American is a free democracy for all. After Nixon, we hear (among others) Ronald Reagan, LBJ, and finally Barack Obama telling this same story. The rest of the film, consisting of details, interviews and on the ground encounters within the actual war on drugs, systematically dismantles or inverts this dominant narrative. Jarecki reveals that our American society is far from free for many people, and public enemy number one for this section of society may in fact […]

The pastoral voice in documentary film is widely employed to this day. For example, the 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary, Life, Animated tells the story of Owen Suskind, a boy who developed advanced autism at the age of three. In the film, doctors and experts inform the parents that Owen will likely never learn to speak, and that he will be dependent on others for the rest of his life. However, in the film, Owen develops an intense love and passion for animated Disney films and, miraculously, begins repeating lines from the cartoons to his family. One night, using a stuffed animal version the character of Iago from Aladdin, Owen’s father is able to engage in a conversation with Owen using lines from the film. Slowly, Owen begins to learn to speak with the help of these animated films, go to school, learn to read, and finally to get his own apartment, a girlfriend and a job. The documentary clearly has a pastoral voice, as it offers a testimonial story of hope and faith in the face of despair or loss. The film is an inspiration, not only to those who have children or relatives dealing with autism, but to all of […]

The evolution of style and approach that we see in Huston during his war years illustrates the tension that was going on in the world of documentary between the pastoral and the prophetic voice. We might say the desire to comfort and reassure, versus the desire to question and upset. After Houston’s Let There Be Light, one is left with the sense that the injustices of war cannot be quantified, or even fully understood. The prophetic voice here takes on the character of a lament, a mourning for the lives lost in The Battle of San Pietro (staging of events notwithstanding), and the personalities lost in Let There Be Light. Due to the care with which Houston treated his characters, there is a certain intimacy, particularly in Let There Be Light, that straightforward expository films tended to lack. As we shall see, the next stage of development in documentary would seek to highlight and embrace that intimacy, and create space for the subjects and the audience to commune in unexpected ways.      – from the upcoming book “How to Film the Truth: The Story of Documentary Film As a Spiritual Journey” to be released in the Summer of […]

Just before Let There Be Light was about to be shown to the public at a film festival put on by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the print was confiscated by military police. The Pictorial Service, the army organization in charge of clearing the film for general release nixed it on a technicality, claiming it would be an invasion of the privacy rights of the men that he filmed. The truth of the matter was that the war department was going to find some way to suppress it because they thought it was too harsh for the public to see (“too strong medicine” Huston later said). Huston tried everything to change their minds, from secretly showing it to friends in Hollywood and trying to get them to lobby for its release, to calling anyone he knew in the Truman administration, all to no avail. It wasn’t until 1981 that it was allowed to be released to the public, at which point it garnered critical acclaim and was heralded as a milestone.   – from the upcoming book “How to Film the Truth: The Story of Documentary Film As a Spiritual Journey” to be released in the Summer of […]

Josh Larsen, in his book, Movies Are Prayers, explores the notion that a film can function as a “prayer of lament.” Larsen traces the sentiment of lament from the African American spiritual songs of the 1800’s, all the way back to the Old Testament Hebrew prophets. A lament, he contends, is “an expression of despair in hope of being heard.” Both parts are important: the honest and unblinking look at injustice and suffering in the world, and the need to express it, to deal with that which is so exceedingly wrong with these things. There is a sense in which Huston was led to this place through the course of his tenure in the war. He felt the need to fully and poignantly express the incredible tragedy of war, and in spite of pushback from his superiors and the risk of being discharged or damaging his career, concluded that this lament needed to be heard. Larsen contends that while the prayer of lament is focused on injustice and suffering, and therefore by design, dark and depressing, there is always an element of hope embedded in the act of expression. If Huston were to truly despair, he would of course not […]

In what appears to be another attempt to atone for his earlier sins, this time for the staging San Pietro, or if nothing else, to simply dispel all doubt, Huston is very clear to state up front in the film that, “no scenes were staged.” In the film the psychiatrists try different techniques such as hypnosis, one-on-one sessions and group exercises in an attempt to help the men deal with their psychological problems. The film is very sobering. One soldier thinks that he cannot walk, another cannot remember who he is, another cannot talk, and another claims he suffers from intermittent “crying spells.” In essence, Huston was pushing back against a very powerful narrative in American society at the time, that Americans were tough, not afraid of a fight, and won the war on sheer strength of will. One psychiatrist illustrated the inversion of the narrative Huston was engaged in nicely by criticizing his technique thusly: “I didn’t feel comfortable about the way he conveyed the feeling” he said, “…that we had a lot of weak-willed namby-pambies.” The army, Huston would later say, “wanted to maintain the ‘warrior myth’… which said that our American soldiers went to war and came […]