Lessons of Darkness [1992]

 Werner Herzog’s hypnotic essay Lessons of Darkness was an assemblage of two strikingly contrasting facets. It was an intensely grim and fatalistic meditation on warfare, carnage, the abyss of human folly and madness, and their infinite capacities for cruelty. This bleak meditation was accompanied by spectacular aerial photography of the ecological disaster wrought upon by the 1991 Gulf War, and these were made even more viscerally arresting through slow-mo shots, long takes, Herzog’s distinctively clipped style of speaking, and grand Wagnerian score. This, therefore, was akin to an apocalyptic tone poem on derangement and destruction by a filmmaker who’s been classified as a “poet of doom”. No wonder, some viewers were offended by it upon its release – alleging that this was akin to aestheticization of wars – and which Herzog angrily countered by quoting examples of Hieronymous Bosch and Goya who’d also made breathtaking artistic works foregrounded on violence and grotesquerie. Broken into thirteen short chapters, the moody docu shows us scarred and damaged landscapes, and in particular nightmarish images of the Kuwaiti oil fires, albeit largely without any political or geographical contexts. In his typically ironic tone, he even shows us how the expert fire extinguishing team reignited the fires – by throwing torches into the gushing oil flows – so that they have something more to extinguish. These flamboyant, widescreen and “obscenely beautiful” vistas were briefly interspersed with sobering chronicles of torture and trauma experienced by the locals, and shared by a couple of women. The film’s ominous undercurrents, vivid abstractions, and counterpointing of sparse and lurid expressions made it a fitting member of the German filmmaker’s oeuvre that’s filled with similar exercises across both narrative fictions and essayistic nonfictions.

Director: Werner Herzog

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War

Language: German/Arabic

Country: Germany

Prison Images [2000]

 If seeing, prying and witnessing were the running motifs in Harun Farocki’s filmography, then his analytic video montage Prison Images can well be his most emblematic work. Through this hour-long essay, he delved into a pointed examination of the carceral society through images of prisons from two parallel streams – viz. representation of prisons in cinema, interspersed with actual camera footage from American prisons. While he sourced sequences from multiple films for the former, two particularly stood out in their imagery – Jean Genet’s unnerving Un Chant d’Amour, where the prisoners adopt performative roles for the gratification of guards peeping into their cells, and Robert Bresson’s masterful A Man Escaped, where the protagonist meticulously stages an escape – as these two thematic tropes have recurred in countless films. These were juxtaposed with CCTV camera footage, and the message underpinning them was one of power, control, and the transformation of societies into surveillance states. In a mordant comparative analysis, Farocki posited that prisons, departmental stores and shopfloors are bound by their shared obsession with endless surveillance both as a means and an end. We therefore see how inmates are made to wear tracking devices so that their every movement can be monitored and inspected. In the essay’s most disturbing sequences, we see footage of how the authorities deliberately instigate prison fights – e.g. by placing antagonistic groups or inmates in closed spaces – and then stopping them through violent means. Through these, the Marxist director’s disdain for what prisons embody was unequivocally evoked. Hence, though not expressed in as many words, the underlying tenor was emphatically analogous to Joan Baez’s battle cry “raze the prisons to the ground” in her powerful protest song ‘Prison Trilogy’.

Director: Harun Farocki

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: German

Country: Germany

Images of the World and the Inscription of War [1989]

 The German word “Aufklärung”, as Harun Farocki informs in this intellectually rigorous meditation and exceptionally dialectical video essay, means both “enlightenment” and “reconnaissance”. This paradoxical implication intrinsically informed the work and what it posited – viz. scientific reasoning and technological progress are intimately related to the military-industrial complex and warfare. The specific technology under Farocki’s forensic investigation, here, was that of photography, and in turn a branching into how perception of an image and the contexts and meanings that one infers from it, are heavily influenced by what we’re trying or intending to see. These complex aspects were clinically evoked, principally, through the examination of an aerial photograph of the IG Farben industrial plan that was taken by an American aircraft in 1944, as a precursor to bombing it (though that wasn’t ultimately carried out). It was only 30 years later that 2 CIA analysts realized that it had also captured the Auschwitz extermination camp – the barracks, gas chambers, crematoria and even trucks delivering poison pellets disguised as a Red Cross vehicle – but which remained a “blind spot” until then. Hence, if the American bombers had destroyed IG Farben it, ironically, wouldn’t have been for its role in the Holocaust. The essay also covered enquiries into surveillance and camouflage – from WW2 to police identikits – which makes images inherently political and induces image manipulations. In perhaps the film’s most haunting moment, Farocki showed an inmate at a Nazi concentration camp – a beautiful woman – instinctively striking a pose for the camera. The docu was especially fascinating in the massive ground covered in its slender length, and also how it turned out to be such a riveting work despite its highly analytic form.

Director: Harun Farocki

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War

Language: English

Country: Germany

Videograms of a Revolution [1992]

 Prolific experimental German documentarian Harun Farocki’s dazzling masterpiece Videograms of a Revolution, which he co-directed with Romanian documentarian and scholar Andrei Ujică, was both a riveting historical reconstruction of the 1989 Romanian Revolution and a powerful analytical thesis on the role of formal and informal media in both revealing and shaping political history. On the former aspect, its post-facto documentation of one revolution – one that, in around 5 days, witnessed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu from getting ready to deliver what turned out to be his final public speech (the thrilling climatic moment in Bogdan Mureșanu’s The New Year That Never Came) to being executed after a summary trial – made it a fascinating companion piece to, on one hand, Patricio Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile and My Imaginary Country, which were immersive reportages of mass uprisings, and on the other Chris Marker’s A Grin Without A Cat, which was an expansive essay that navigated through multiple global revolts. As for the latter aspect, it underscored the role of cameras and images in mobilizing public actions and as sources for historiography. It accomplished that by meticulously piecing together those 5 days from a myriad sources which included state television broadcasts, which transitioned from Ceaușescu’s lackeys to those seizing control, and ‘found footage’ secretly shot by citizen journalists that Ujică had unearthed through his contacts. Accompanied by a narration analysing and interpreting these images, thus creating a distancing effect from the immediacy of the upheaval, this magnetic work strikingly elucidated how mass and alternative media had been both observers and participants in recording and constructing epochal political changes far before the advent of 24/7 television channels, mobile phone cameras and social media.

Director: Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History/Reportage

Language: German/Romanian

Country: Germany

Love Meetings [1964]

 Taking inspiration from Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s landmark cinéma vérité documentary Chronicle of a Summer, Pasolini crisscrossed Italy – from the industrialized north to the impoverished south, from bustling urban locales to relaxing beaches, from prestigious universities to crowded factories, from charming cafés to working-class neighbourhoods – accompanied by his camera, interviewing vast swathes of people, freely inserting himself into the frames, and shaping the conversations. Love Meetings, however, wasn’t just an Italian response to a pioneering French work. Pasolini, being the radical, interrogative and profoundly political intellectual that he was, brought in his uncompromising and insolent self into the mix, as he went about composing a fascinating essay about his fellow citizens’ complicated, conflicted and reactionary attitudes and mores related to sex in everyday life, and branching off to gender equality, homosexuality, prostitution and divorce (which was illegal at that time in Italy). What must’ve been deeply disappointing to Pasolini, nearly every male person he interviewed – old and young, well-off and poor, educated and not – expressed different shades of conservative and regressive mindsets; but what must’ve provided him cause to cheer, the women were oftentimes more liberal and open-minded. He therefore interspersed his indefatigable investigations with weary meditations with fellow intellectuals – celebrated novelist Alberto Moravia, psychologist Cesare Musatti, journalist Oriana Fallaci, actress Antonella Lualdi – on trying to make sense of what he heard, engaging in Marxist interpretations of social prejudices, and quipping on how the middle-class steadfastly refused to participate. That this was the 1960s – when Italy was rocked by social protests and political rebelliousness – made this a particularly ironic time capsule of that period. Curiously and amusingly, he followed this up with The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Genre: Documentary/Cinema Verite/Reportage

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

F for Fake [1973]

 Orson Welles’ delightfully irreverent, discursive and playful film F for Fake – through its impish and exuberant celebration of fakery, chicanery and double bluffs – was one final act of wily chutzpah by the man who loved subverting boundaries. Conjoined with Abbas Kiarostami’s late-career masterpiece Certified Copy in their shared admiration for fakes and teasing questions on authenticity, while ironically being ravishingly original works themselves, it operated in the intersection of documentary, essay and hybrid – as it often blurred the lines separating non-fiction from fiction. It primarily focused on two fascinating charlatans who drew Welles to this film in the first place (François Reichenbach had initially planned to direct it, but happily became its producer instead). On one hand there was Elmyr de Hory, a master art forger who fooled renowned art galleries with his fakes thanks to his insouciance and brilliance; now retired, he’s settled at Ibiza where he regales his guests with wry anecdotes. Joining him was Clifford Irving, de Hory’s biographer, who then insolently walked in his subject’s footsteps by writing a fake “authorized autobiography” of Howard Hughes. Along with his infectious portraits on the two men – who he treated with undisguised fondness as fellow journeymen – Welles freely deployed the canvas for musings on how art, like magic, is an amalgamation of truth, lies, illusions and sleight of hand, and then proceeded to self-deprecatory reflections on his own journey as an artist – using false identities and fake stories, and even fictionalizing Howard Hughes in Citizen Kane – and, in arguably its most irresistible sections, amusing meditations and “stories” on Picasso. Captivatingly shot in grainy colours, it extensively featured his muse Oja Kodar in a series of sultry, shape-shifting personas.

Director: Orson Welles

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Social Satire

Language: English

Country: France

Monterey Pop [1968]

 The three-day Monterey Festival in 1967 was a watershed moment in the context of both popular music – in elevating the stature of pop and rock-and-roll as artforms and providing an enormous fillip for all future music festivals – and the 1960s counterculture movement that embodied the ideas of love, peace, communal living and non-conformism. D.A. Pennebaker, who’d pioneered the “rockumentary” with his seminal ‘direct cinema’ work Dont Look Back, established the enduring template for all future concert films – from the filming and editing styles to the look and atmosphere – with Monterey Pop, his exhilarating documentary on this phenomenal event co-organized by Lou Adler and the Mamas & the Papas front-man John Phillips, among others. It was only appropriate, therefore, that it began with infectious visuals of people streaming in, in their delightfully sunny attires and carefree demeanours, to the sounds of ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’, the unofficial anthem for that age written by Phillips. Seamlessly alternating between rousing performers and enthralled audience as a distinctive formal choice, it covered 12 out of the 30+ artists who took stage, using 5 portable sync cameras operated by fellow documentarians Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles. The film’s most iconoclastic and indelible moments included The Who’s Pete Townshend smashing his guitar after ‘My Generation’, only for Jimi Hendrix, after an exceptionally risqué act, putting his on fire; stirring vocals by Janis Joplin and Otis Redding; and elucidation of the show’s international spirit through electrifying South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and the virtuoso Indian duo of sitarist Ravi Shankar and tabla player Alla Rakha Khan to whom the final 15 minutes – a whopping 19% of the runtime – were devoted.

Director: D.A. Pennebaker

Genre: Documentary/Musical/Concert Film

Language: English

Country: US