Masters of their universe

Weekends are special. Forget the sports pages, the first I read are film-reviews. Sunday delivered a serendipitous piece by Patrick Kingsley in the Guardian who interviewed Gianfranco Rosi about his latest masterful film Fire at Sea, which deservedly won the Golden Bear for Documentary in Berlin. If you haven’t read it I urge you so to do. It was Rosi’s mention of Michael Moore and the difference in their approach to film-making that determined my cinema-going this week as I was able to see both films at the same venue in a self-select double bill.
Rosi is a wonderful story-teller and his narration-free films are all lovingly crafted and are truly cinematic. He reinforces for me the true meaning of documentary – to document. Fire at Sea intercuts scenes that are naturally choreographed within a – mostly – static frame with unfolding veriteé of migrants being rescued from sinking boats off the coast of Lampedusa, home to the characters that are the core of his film. In some respects the scenes involving the citizens of the island remind me of Phil Agland’s 1994 series for Channel 4, China: Beyond the Clouds, set in a small town and a beautifully shot observation of ordinary life where the camera is still.
This stillness, unobtrusive observation of scenes that have been planned but of which the outcome is unknown at the start, and in which the unfolding drama tells its own story, allows us, the audience, to discover and explore our own interpretation of events on screen. Narration-free documentary is a rare beast these days, where television has conspired to dumb down content, presume the audience needs to be told what it is their seeing and what is coming next, otherwise they will switch channel out of sheer boredom. Rosi is interested in reality – his source of storytelling – and he is able to show us this by building an intimate relationship with his characters, usually over many months. Thus he knows them and the intimacy of his observation of them and their lives makes for utterly compelling viewing. Despite Meryl Streep’s claim that he has re-thought what can be achieved with the documentary genre, I feel this work continues a fine tradition of narration-free documentary story-telling – something that is explored in the Film Culture course and which has found many of its greatest exponents amongst American film-makers like Pennebaker and the Masles Brothers.

Which brings me back to America’s most successful contemporary documentarist, Michael Moore. Rosi refers to him in his interview with Kingsley. His approach is the antithesis to Moore, who likes to lead his audience by the hand through his polemic. More is more for Moore where as less is more for Rosi. But that doesn’t make Moore a lesser film-maker. Personally he infuriates me a lot of the time. He often nakedly manipulates an audience with his politics and his polemic. In the case of his latest foray, Where to Invade Next, when he attributes, without context, Republican hegemony to denying black Americans in the southern states the vote first by coming down hard on them as drug users and throwing them into jail, then employing them in prison as modern-day slaves and finally denying them the vote once released. But, apart from that, his latest film marks a change of tone in his approach to trying to reform the USA. Like Rosi’s film It is both hilarious and chilling. But observed it isn’t.
Moore is very honest in his intent and, for once, rather charming, but stylistically it couldn’t be more different to Fire at Sea. He succeeded in making me feel good as a European whereas Rosi challenged me to reflect upon the realities for the poor and dispossessed seeking a better life in Europe. I came away from a long evening at the movies wondering if the next wave of immigrants would be Americans seeking a better life here than in the USA.