By Tom Ryan
December 1, 2023 — 11.00pm
When filmmakers make autobiographical movies, they almost always look back to their childhoods, albeit in a fictional guise. In The Fabelmans (2022, Netflix), for one of many examples, Steven Spielberg (with the help of award-winning playwright Tony Kushner) gives us an alter ego, Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), growing up in Arizona in the 1950s amidst the turmoil of his adolescence. Along the way, he learns about life and the movies with help from his parents (Michelle Williams and Paul Dano), a nightmare-inducing encounter with The Greatest Show on Earth, and his father’s 8mm camera.
However, when writer-directors become the subjects of documentaries, the films are inevitably less intimate. They usually provide glimpses of their subjects’ personal histories, but are more concerned with what they’ve become best-known for. A batch of releases that have bypassed the local cinema circuit and gone direct to the streaming services neatly illustrates a range of ways in which they work. They all focus on major filmmakers, two on Alfred Hitchcock.
Steven Spielberg filming The Fabelmans.Credit: Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment via AP
Directed by Kent Jones, formerly the editor of the prestigious Film Comment magazine, Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015, Apple TV+ rental) is by far the better, its title borrowed from the famous book-length interview done with the legendary director in 1962 by French filmmaker Francois Truffaut. As is customary in films of this kind, we’re given a loose overview of Hitchcock’s career, but Jones has shaped his material with a clear purpose in mind.
Extensive use is made of the interview tapes as well as of illuminating comments from other directors (David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Richard Linklater) about what they’ve discovered in Hitchcock’s work and learned from it. All are interviewed separately, but the result is a lively interaction about what constitutes the art of the cinema, what Hitchcock has brought to it and what he means when he says, “I’m never satisfied with the ordinary.” The points they make, frequently illustrated by carefully chosen clips from Hitchcock’s films, also illuminate their own work.
French New Wave director Francis Truffaut and the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.
Made by Canada’s Network Entertainment in its ongoing “I am” series about high-profile artists and politicians, I Am Alfred Hitchcock (2021, Binge) follows a less interesting route. Citing the director’s explanations of his intentions – “I believe in putting the horror in the mind of the audience” – Joel Ashton McCarthy’s film briefly surveys Hitchcock’s career, extracting a few highlights (Rope, Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds) but never giving us much insight into them. In the mode of a “Hitchcock for beginners”, it’s slick but slight, fleshed out by contributions from contemporary filmmakers, including Spielberg, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright and William Friedkin.
Clara and Julia Kupperberg’s The True Story of Dorothy Arzner (2022, Binge) persuasively explains why Hollywood’s first great female director deserves her reputation. Primarily guided by the insights of a couple of very articulate critics, film historian Tony Maietta and academic Shelley Stamp, it looks back to the 1930s and early ’40s when Arzner was living in an openly gay relationship in the Hollywood Hills with her life partner, choreographer Marion Morgan. She made 16 films before walking away from a hard-earned career, dismayed by the HUAC-inspired blacklistings inflicted on her profession during the post WWII era.
Drawing on concise readings of Arzner’s films and interviews with her, the Kupperberg sisters’ film identifies the reasons for the correspondence between the interest in her work and the rise of women’s movements. As Stamp puts it, “The films really focus on female communities… women’s colleges, women’s boarding-houses, women’s dance troupes… It’s the complicated sometimes conflict-ridden relationships between women that are at the centre of her films.“
Made for the BBC, Louise Osmond’s Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach (2016, DocPlay) offers a compelling chronicle of the life and times of the now 87-year-old Midlands-born director who, unexpectedly, turns out to be something of a soul-brother to Arzner. According to longtime producer Tony Garnett (who died in 2020), Loach saw his career in film as an opportunity “to stir up a bit of trouble”. Which he has done for more than 50 years, examining the plight of displaced people, championing workers’ rights and, with an heroic consistency, earning the wrath of Tory politicians for controversial TV dramas and feature films, such as Cathy Come Home, Days of Hope, Kes and Land of Freedom.
David Bradley in the film Ken Loach’s Kes.Credit: PA
Following Loach’s life back and forth across the years, Osmond interviews him, members of his supportive family and his collaborators (primarily Garnett but also writers Nell Dunn and Paul Laverty and actors Gabriel Byrne and Cillian Murphy). The result is the portrait of an artist who appears self-effacing but is fiercely uncompromising. “I had expected a more Oliver Stone kind of presence,” Byrne explains, adding that he quickly discovered that he didn’t ever want to cross him.
Along similar lines, Matthew Miele’s appreciative Alan Pakula: Going for Truth (2019, Apple TV+ rental) is a study of a major American filmmaker seen largely through the eyes of those who worked with him. It’s part biographical but more concerned to probe his personality. For second wife, historian Hannah Boorstin, his so-called “paranoid trilogy” – Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men – suggested a filmmaker with a mission. “It wasn’t done by a dark man,” she says, “(but) by a man who was reaching for the truth.” Pakula himself retrospectively likens the recurring concerns in his films to “underground rivers that keep pulling you into things”.
Robert Redford, right, and Dustin Hoffman in Alan Pakula’s All the President’s Men.Credit: AP
Collaborators including Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Candice Bergen and James L. Brooks are unanimous in their admiration, praising Pakula as “an intellectual” (Hoffman) and “a feminist” (Fonda), enthusing about his “methodical curiosity” (Streep), reminiscing about his “endearing quirks” (Bergen), and remembering being overwhelmed by “his everpresent intelligence and everpresent grace” (Brooks).
Robert Mann’s Altman (2014, Apple TV+ rental), a profile of Pakula-contemporary Robert Altman, suffers from haste as it skims across the surface of the Hollywood maverick’s life, featuring abundant film clips (in immaculate condition) and a voice-over narration largely gleaned from interviews with him and his wife, Kathryn Reed.
The film’s structuring principle is smart. Actors who worked with the director (Michael Murphy, James Caan, Sally Kellerman, Elliot Gould, Keith Carradine, Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams, Bruce Willis, Philip Baker Hall and Julianne Moore) are asked to define from the word “Altmanesque” means to them. Their answers – “Showing Americans who we are” (Carradine), “Creating a family” (Tomlin), “Kicking Hollywood’s ass” (Willis) – serve as headings for the film’s chapter-like consideration of his artistic inclinations.
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Of his time in Hollywood, Altman says it best: “I make gloves and they sell shoes.” But that there was also a less rebellious, much mellower side to him is evident in Let’s Begin Again, the song he composed, which is used at the start of the film and over the closing credits, and which could easily have come straight out of The Great American Songbook.
Perhaps the most formally ambitious of all is David Lynch: The Art Life (2016, DocPlay), directed by Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes and editor Olivia Neergard-Holm. And, one suspects, Lynch, who spends a large part of the film, wordlessly posing for the camera, chain-smoking, wandering through his house, smearing paint on his canvas and other works in progress, while reflecting in voice-over about the significant moments in his life (like reading Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit), and the course it took up to when he began pre-production on his first feature, Eraserhead.
The film’s adventurousness lies in its attempt to find its own equivalent for Lynch’s filmmaking strategies, creating an unsettling (and sometimes infuriating) air of mystery around his creative processes and their allusive and elusive meanings. There’s no attempt here to explain what Lynch’s work is about. Instead, David Lynch: The Art Life sets out to make us experience it in the way we might a Lynch film, in the process offering us an invigoratingly fresh approach to how one might simultaneously introduce and pay homage to an artist’s craft.
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