This year’s film festival features three documentaries about strong-willed, opinionated and fascinating women. Dan Slevin has seen them.
Arguably the greatest film critic in history, Pauline Kael. Photo: NZIFF
In this movie reviewing profession we have a couple of patron saints. The great humanist Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote from 1967 until his death from cancer in 2013. Meanwhile, at the New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, there was the testy and feisty Pauline Kael. If you were ever thinking of getting into this game, start by reading those two, not because their opinions on film are to be imitated (although that’s always a possibility) but because the way they write about film opens the subject up like a splash of water on whisky.
In the end, we film reviewers are only arguing for our taste and our success depends on how successfully we can do that. Kael’s fans understood that her taste – like everyone’s – was going to be inconsistent and maddening but every good reviewer has a way to make you see something differently, whether you agree or not.
I wish What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, Rob Garver’s biography of her, was a less frustrating documentary. There’s a parade of luminaries – some critics, some filmmakers and some playwrights – lined up to pay her tribute and her own voice gets plenty of space via her television interviews and Sarah Jessica Parker’s vocal interpretation of her writing, but I couldn’t help feeling that an opportunity had been lost to attempt a deeper analysis. The famous battles – the films she championed and the classics she disparaged – are all there but it felt a bit ‘greatest hits’ and I wondered how she might have reviewed it had she still been around.
It seemed to me that her famous irascibility – the combative, hard-boiled dame persona – was something of a front, a way to stay alive and keep working in the tough, male-dominated, New York media world of the 70s and 80s. Making a living was a constant struggle – the New Yorker in those days had the scarcely credible setup that their film reviewers would split the year, six months on and six months off, meaning Kael, the single mother, had to find another source of income for half of every year.
Alongside her early – unpaid – reviewing, she ran the Berkeley Cinema Guild in California, a kind of repertory film society where she programmed her favourite classic movies until they became everyone else’s too. She must have moved in some interesting circles in that university town in the late 50s – the cinema inspired murals painted on the walls and ceilings of her house at the time still exist and feature in Garver’s film – and her home movies were shot by the doyen of the American avant-garde, Stan Brakhage.
What She Said is edited like a trailer – very popcorn-sized pieces with a constant annoying soundtrack of nothing-music – but the movie clip selections are often not the film under discussion but commenting on the story, as if the films are somehow in conversation with her, talking back to the reviewer. I think she might have appreciated that.
Maria Callas Photo: NZIFF
Taking a much more leisurely approach to biography is Tom Volf’s Maria by Callas, a film about the opera singer composed only of archive material – no explaining talking heads – and her own interviews and letters.
Unlike the Kael film (and Ron Howard’s biography of Pavarotti which is still in cinemas), Volf lets several arias play out in full so you can really get the full sense of her talent and presence. Much better than having someone tell you how good she was. The same is true for much of the archive material, including newsreels, home movies and what we now call promo footage. It breathes.
By the end we have a tender portrait of an artist who struggled all her life with what she called her nerves – depression, anxiety, the knowledge that her career was always a second choice to a traditional family life which was a life that she was never able to have.
There’s a lovely piece of filmmaking where Volf layers Joyce DiDonato reading one of Callas’s letters about her great love for Aristotle Onassis over newsreel footage of Onassis with his new girlfriend, Jackie Kennedy. My companion leaned over to me and whispered, “the great skunk!”
It’s impossible to watch Maria by Callas and not have huge sympathy for a woman who tried to stand up to the forces around her but who, in the end, was defeated by them.
Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer in Ask Dr. Ruth, a Hulu and Magnolia Pictures release. Photo: NZIFF
Successful documentaries rely on at least one of the following things: an amazing untold story, a unique vision, a great subject, unprecedented access to that subject. The previous two documentaries in this list haven’t achieved the access question – their subjects are deceased – but that’s the main strength of Ask Dr. Ruth, about the renowned media sex therapist Ruth Westheimer.
Westheimer is a wonderful subject. At under 1.4m tall and 90 years of age, she is like your grandmother – if your grandmother was famous for giving advice about oral sex on late night television shows. Ask Dr. Ruth also ticks the “untold story” box because in this film she finally addresses her childhood as a refugee from the Holocaust, the loss of her family and then her time as a paramilitary in the Haganah in Palestine, fighting for Jewish independence.
Ryan White’s film succeeds because Westheimer is a spectacular human – and polished media performer – but it approaches its subject in a traditional televisual (i.e. not very cinematic) way except for the use of some animation by Isaac Rubio.
The New Zealand International Film Festival opens in Auckland on 18 July and versions of it make their way around 12 other centres until 18 September. Details of all the titles (including ratings where they are known) can be found at the NZIFF website.
