The Open City Documentary Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Darragh O’Donoghue

The Open City Documentary Festival in London—held this year from September 7–13— is one of the more highbrow events on the circuit. Subtitled “The Art of Non-Fiction,” it flourishes at the intersection of the documentary and the artist’s film, and its venues include high culture centers such as Tate Modern, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Birkbeck University, and LUX, the artist’s moving image agency where Open City festival head María Palacios Cruz was previously deputy director. The festival is based in the anthropology department of University College London; this institutional support means that it can seek out the genuinely original or off-center, without having to chase processed, streaming-friendly, narrative- or personality-driven documentaries. Like most festivals, Open City includes extratheatrical events such as talks, workshops, and exhibitions, but unlike most festivals it also programs academic study days devoted to key figures in the history of nonfiction cinema. This leaves it open to charges of elitism—every screening I attended was full but, judging by the questions asked after and postevent chatter, was mostly comprised of students, academics, curators, filmmakers, and the like. The festival’s commitment to an “inclusive,” “expanded,” and “non-aligned” vision of documentary and the “real” was put unexpectedly to the test early on when it was announced before one film that the Queen had died. The main screening venue for the festival was the ICA, which is on Pall Mall, the avenue that leads to the monarch’s official residence, Buckingham Palace. While thousands of mourners gathered outside, festival organizers were more worried about whether audiences would be able access the building. This is hardly surprising—like most progressives today, the festival is avowedly anti-imperial, committed to decolonizing the gaze and abolishing inequitable hierarchies; an attitude completely out of step with the national mood of deference. Here were two adjacent worlds, not speaking to each other.

The festival’s great glory is its series of comprehensive retrospectives dedicated to filmmakers of different generations from different parts of the world, with works screened where possible in original formats (a sad rarity these years). This year’s subjects were the globe-trotting Ecuadorean street photographer-turned-artist’s filmmaker Alexandra Cuesta (born 1980), the New York underground provocateur-turned-Hollywood special effects whiz Betzy Bromberg (born 1956), and—the subject of this year’s study day—Noriaki Tsuchimoto (1928–2008), sponsored filmmaker-turned-radical activist and chronicler of the southwestern Japanese coastal village Minamata and the eponymous disease caused by corporate malfeasance. The Tsuchimoto retrospective, years in the planning, travels to New York’s Museum of the Moving Image this month. Other archive works were integrated into thematic programs, with classics by Djouhra Abouda & Alain Bonnamy, Neil Goodwin, William Greaves, Med Hondo, and Judith Noble, screened with new films.

Tsuchimoto has been widely written about, while Cuesta’s own work was, to this viewer, eclipsed by the classic films and works by her contemporaries that she generously included in her three programs. This report will concentrate on the third retrospective. Betzy Bromberg has often been called a “punk” director (most recently in Rachel Garfield’s 2022 study Experimental Filmmaking and Punk). The odd sweary title aside (Ciao Bella, or Fuck Me Dead), however, and a deceptive DIY aesthetic, there is nothing particularly “punk” about her work, if we mean by punk a raw, direct, and abrasive address. There is nothing simple about Bromberg’s films, either thematically or formally. More satisfactory musical analogies might be with the postpunk New Wave, especially a band like Talking Heads, or early hip-hop, or even the tape-based classical music of Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Bromberg takes a heterogeny of sampled and original audiovisual materials—home movies, cinéma vérité, found footage and sounds; pop music, MOR, and electronic screen; alienated but lively female voice-overs; excerpts from radio and television—and mixes them into new, compelling, and musically structured forms. 

This would be achievement enough, but the flexibility of Bromberg’s approach, her genius for salvaging pertinent and resonant materials, and her uncanny feel for the zeitgeist, makes films like Petit Mal (1977), Soothing the Bruise (1980), and Body Politic (God Melts Bad Meat) (1988) remarkable time capsules. Petit Mal explores the clash between feminist ideals and the sexist real world of family, relationships, and work. Soothing the Bruise documents the disintegration of the Carter presidency simply by using radio extracts—news, speeches, advertising, sports—as commentary over the informal images. Body Politic parallels the various institutional attempts to control female bodies with animal experimentation and imminent ecological catastrophe, three issues we are still failing to deal with forty years later. Between Petit Mal and Body Politic we can trace the hardening of the American public sphere, from the plurality of experimental identities still possible in the mid-1970s to the ideological fault lines of the 1980s.

In Bromberg’s early films, culminating in Az Iz (1983), the hectic and contemporary subject matter was offset by mysterious sequences wherein the mood and tempo altered. Fish-eye lenses held surfaces in extreme close-up, resin screens distorted the shot, and unnatural filters took the atmosphere out of the present into the “eternal.” These sequences become the sole subject of Bromberg’s later films. The man-made, inauthentic, plastic, and disposable (by day, Bromberg works on special effects for Hollywood movies) are replaced by the biological and geological. Raucous everyday sounds and music give way to more contemplative, minimalist music. Such sequences were effective complements to the other modes that made up the patchwork of the early shorts. In later films, stretched out over feature length with little variation, the result is enervating. Beauty, it turns out, can only take you so far.

No stranger to beauty is Robert Beavers, the Boy Wonder of American experimental film. His 16mm films of interiors, architecture, faces, and flowers, could as easily have been made in the late 1960s when Beavers emerged as an avant-garde prodigy, as the period 2007 to the present, when the six films in his program were made. Beavers’s films are deeply unfashionable, full of references to high culture, untranslated quotations from Germanophone literature, and titles like Pitcher of Colored Light and Listening to the Space in My Room. If Cuesta’s films extend her practice as a street photographer, then Beavers’s are those of a painter—and the painter that Beavers most resembles is French intimiste Pierre Bonnard. With the best will in the world, a street photographer can only ever show the surface of things. True portraiture and evocation of place require a deep embedding in place and with subjects. Such embedding is offered by relatives (two of the films portrayed Beavers’s nonagenarian mother), friends, and familiar places. What Beavers loses in modish ideological engagement or flashy formal innovation, he gains in patience, breadth, and decisive framing, camera movement, texture, rhythm, light, and, above all color. The intense, glowing color you can get only from 16mm. You may learn little about the world from Beavers’s films, but you will learn everything about his world, which is ultimately more rewarding. 

If the festival celebrated only old filmmakers, it could be accused of nostalgia or worse. Its celebration of past excellence, however, is designed to generate a continuum within which emergent talent can situate itself. Two new films from South America stood out from a strong program: opening-night screening It Is Night in America by Brazilian Ana Vaz, and Camouflage by Argentine Jonathan Perel. It Is Night in America begins with a staggering prologue. A blue screen appears to burn as a cacophony of unearthly screams fills the auditorium. These are not sounds from a horror film or science fiction, but the cries of animals, abandoned, maimed, or lost in and around Brasilia, the capital of Brazil and Vaz’s home.

Planned as the utopian, modernist center of a huge, unwieldy, “primitive” country, Brasilia had inequality built into it as builders and other service workers, mostly from the poorest indigenous regions, were separated from the city’s elite in so-called “satellite” towns. This disparity was documented in Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Brasília: Contradictions of a New City (1968), made in the shadow of the military coup four years earlier. It Is Night in America shows what happened when Andrade’s warnings went unheeded. It is a sci-fi in a way, as it charts Brasilia’s decay from utopia to dystopia, from man-made marvel to a ruin reclaimed by nature.

A nature it had nearly succeeded in destroying. Built in the middle of the jungle, Brasilia was the first city to be designed around a zoo. Soon, the zoo became a refuge for the animals displaced by large-scale construction, their habitats destroyed by pollution and human malevolence. Although Vaz, in a personable postscreening Q&A, claimed that the film was conceived as a fable of the human cost and inequities of Brasilia, its great achievement is its attempt to decenter the human and approximate the worldview of the animals affected.

It does this in three ways. First, by avoiding the anthropomorphising and artificial storytelling of nature documentaries familiar from TV and Web series. Instead, following theorists such as John Berger and Jacques Derrida, Vaz tries to respect the “animal-ness” of animals—by accommodating their long, unflinching gaze at the camera (and, by extension, at the viewer), and by using techniques such as the long take and slow motion to create a sense of “animal” time. This centering of animal sensibility is contrasted with the shifting of the human outside the frame. People—the military police responsible for the welfare of these animals, and the people who contact them; the vets who treat the animals; the unseen constructors of the concrete jungle within the real jungle—are displaced onto the soundtrack, shown in fragments, or wearing dehumanizing face masks (much of It Is Night in America was filmed during COVID).  

This does not result in a crude opposition of good animal versus bad human. With model intersectionality, Vaz celebrates the subaltern communities marginalized by Brasilia in particular, and global capitalism in general. The film’s title reclaims the name of America from its rote identification with the United States. Indigenous voices are articulated through an inverted language developed to facilitate communication away from oppressive authorities. The seemingly garbled subtitles—reminiscent of the “Navajo English” abbreviations Godard used for international screenings of Film socialisme (2010)—force the viewer to slow down and think differently in order to grasp what is being said. This indigenous speech is an ethical equivalent to the animal time. Whether there are ethical problems with such an alignment of the animal and the indigenous against an oppressive norm is another matter. 

The film’s third methodology is formal, in the disjunction between images, and between image and sound. Vaz makes no attempt to “naturalize” her disparate materials—elegant traveling shots and jerky handheld cameras, interviews and poetry, landscape photography and bird’s-eye viewing, stately classical music and unnerving silence, all shot on multiple reels of discarded and decaying film. The abrupt transitions between each sequence keeps the viewer in a state of alert tension, unable to lose herself in the film’s often astonishing beauty. A tension that only finds an ambivalent release in the film’s final sequence, a slo-mo pan up and down a gushing waterfall, at once a surrender to the mind-less sublime and the silent scream of nature to echo the cacophony that opened the film.

Camouflage begins and ends with a man running. His occasional voice-over throughout the film is delivered breathlessly, speaking as he runs. In the film’s last set piece, he participates in an obstacle course race, and seems frazzled by what is going on around him. The overall impression is of a man running around in circles, or in a maze; constantly retracing his steps but getting lost. Such discombobulation is hardly surprising. Writer Félix Bruzzone spends the film traversing Campo de Mayo near Buenos Aires, site of the main concentration camp during the Argentine military junta (1976–83), where it is estimated that thirty thousand people, including Bruzzone’s mother, were imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared. Bruzzone speaks to relatives—beginning with the grandmother who raised him—friends, locals, and eyewitnesses, as he tries to comprehend the invisible horrors that were enacted among a landscape that today looks so mundane.

In its modest way, Camouflage takes up the documentary challenge of Claude Lanzmann. Despite the reverence shown Lanzmann’s epic Shoah (1985) and its ancillary films, it has not had the salutary effect on documentary filmmaking that its maker intended. Documentaries today tend to be as slick, editorial, intrusive, narrative, and manipulative as they were before Shoah. Camouflage aspires to Lanzmann’s sparing approach. Bruzzone is a discreet listener, allowing his interlocutors to speak in their own time, Perel filming them in long takes. There is no emotive music, stock footage, archival “evidence,” or rhetorical camerawork—no accursed drones that are the bane of modern cinema! Simply a respect for the sites where things happened, to people. The disjunction between brute fact and banal aftermath, the metaphysical gap between invisible memory and visible forgetting, is such that watching the film is like walking by the sea with a tactful tour guide only to find yourself looking down the edge of a cliff. A sensational film in its lack of sensation. And exactly the kind of overlooked gem that this festival exists to champion.

Darragh O’Donoghue, a Cineaste Contributing Writer, works as an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

Copyright © 2022 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 1