Documentaries pretend to be objective examinations of people or issues, but in reality there is no more personal a form of filmmaking or expression. Actually, experimental films tend to be more personal, but those are usually shorts and for the purposes of this column I’m talking about feature-length movies. Documentaries are the true independent films of today, seeing as they can take years to make and there’s no real market for them. Lucky is the documentary filmmaker who makes his or her money back. The reason these movies get made is because somebody believes they HAVE to make them. Which means part of the fun of watching a documentary, especially one that’s not a narcissistic look at the filmmaker’s own life, is trying to find the filmmaker within the text of the film.
For some reason, experienced BBC documentarian Jason Massot felt the need to make his first feature-length documentary about seamen in Rotterdam, the world’s largest port. The result sounds interesting and very different from your typical TV doc, and it will be playing Thursday and Friday, February 17 and 18, at 911 Media Arts. In Seafarers, he follows four merchant seamen–a Swede, a Croat, a Polynesian, and a Nigerian–on shore leave as they bide their time in and about the streets of Rotterdam. Each has been affected by the globalization of the shipping industry, often in economically negative ways, while their fantasy of life at sea has effectively worked as an escape from reality. One has lost his family to his need to live at sea, while another has lost all his wages to gambling and needs another job quickly.
Described as an examination of male solitude, the film is said to include beautiful long takes of the near-empty streets of Rotterdam at night, as it cuts between the sailors doing not much of nuthin’. Judging from some of the better films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, loneliness is one of the trends of current independent filmmakers, after Lonesome Jim and Tony Takitani and others. As you watch the themes of alienation and subtle politics of globalization, don’t forget that there’s a filmmaker out there who needed to express all this. In a sense, it’s a self-portrait. I don’t know what that says about Massot, really, but it should be an interesting filter to watch his movie through.
Speaking of interesting filters, on Friday, February 18, over at the EMP, the Science Fiction Museum is showing Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil, as hosted by Charles Mudede. Made in 1985 during a rash of IRA bombings in downtown London, Mr. Mudede puts forth that the movie reflects an increasingly bureaucratic government responding to terrorism through a systematic depersonalization of its citizens. As we go through our own war on terror, with our government’s attempts to decrease our rights and privacy for our own good, the movie has become relevant once again. Afterward, you can catch the Egyptian’s midnight screening of The Goonies, also made in 1985, which has a very different take on terrorism.