Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to VOD today, Monday, April 4: ONLY THE DEAD

Michael Ware and William Guttentag’s first-hand portrait of war premiered at Sydney last year. Other festival engagements have included Melbourne, New Zealand, Adelaide, Telluride, and IDFA, while its recent HBO broadcast was under the longer title ONLY THE DEAD SEE THE END OF WAR. The doc now comes to iTunes.

I previously wrote about the doc upon its theatrical release here.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, April 1: MARINONI: THE FIRE IN THE FRAME

Tony Girardin’s portrait of an acclaimed bicycle craftsman made its debut at Hot Docs in 2014. It has since screened at other Canadian events, including the Global Visions fest.

Girardin relates the story of Giuseppe Marinoni, an Italian cyclist who came to Canada for a race and decided to stay, transitioning from competitive cycling to a successful career manufacturing racing bikes, most notably building the cycle used by Jocelyn Lovell, the winningest Canadian cyclist in history who later became paralyzed. Now 75, the curmudgeon decides to challenge himself to set a record in his age class in a race held in his Italian hometown, using Lovell’s legendary bicycle. While Marinoni’s crotchetiness makes him watchable, Girardin maintains far too much of a presence in the project through excessive narration and conversation, making it feel padded, and there’s only so much interest this decidedly-niche-oriented film can generate for non-cyclists.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, April 1: THE FLIGHT FANTASTIC

Tom Moore’s tribute to the art of the flying trapeze made its bow at Australia’s Byron Bay fest last year. The doc also screened at the Sarasota and Louisiana fests and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Dance on Camera series.

Moore’s focus is on the Flying Gaonas, a family act that headlined Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus in the 1960s and ’70s, and the Big Apple Circus in the ’80s, but who count relatives in the Mexican circus dating back to 1891. The film generally sticks to the careers of four children of Victor Gaona Murillo however: Tito, Armando, Chela, and Richie. Much is made of Tito’s attempts to successfully complete a quadruple somersault during a performance, but the doc otherwise follows a meandering, anecdotal path – additionally hampered by an excessive, distracting score – as it recounts the act’s storied heights and gradual fall from popularity, leading the family to run trapeze schools in the present day for sick children and for curious adults, and making this primarily of interest to circus history fans more than a general audience.

Coming to theatres tomorrow, Friday, April 1: NOTFILM

Ross Lipman’s comprehensive exploration of Samuel Beckett’s only film made its bow at BFI London last year. Other engagements have included CPH:DOX, Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Dublin, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Film Comment Selects series, and BAFICI.

Presented in conjunction with screenings of FILM, the twenty-minute short Beckett wrote starring Buster Keaton which was directed by Alan Schneider in 1965, Lipman’s ambitious, sprawling essay takes a deep dive into all aspects of that divisive project, from its origins to its legacy among Beckettian scholars and cinephiles. Approaching Beckett’s cinematic foray as a fundamental chase film, the story of “O,” or Object, portrayed by Keaton, as he tries to evade “E,” or Eye, the camera, Lipman contextualizes FILM within the larger bodies of work of Beckett, Keaton, and even Grove Press’ Barney Rosset, who commissioned and produced the project as one segment of a proposed but aborted three-part series made by notable writers under his imprint. Clocking in at over two hours, Lipman’s film is often demanding, drawing from his expertise as a film preservationist and restorer at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Perhaps recognizing the probable self-selecting nature of its likely audience, the film takes as a given a general familiarity of the work and life of the visionary Irish author, and at times strays too far down an associative path to contemplate only tangentially-related theatre pieces. This free association yields more satisfying dialogue on the film side, with clips from Eisenstein, Vertov, Buñuel, Chaplin, and, of course, Keaton, while more conventional behind-the-scenes stories about the production lend a welcome insight, as do newly rediscovered audio recordings made by Rosset of conversations with Beckett explicating his script. Even if FILM remains an esoteric curiosity, Lipman’s analysis serves as a thoughtful, and appreciative, work of scholarship.