Doc Corner: Anita Hill, O.J. Simpson and Timothy Conigrave highlight doc and narrative divide

Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we're looking at three documentaries and their narrative counterparts.

In the recently aired Confirmation (reviewed right here) about Anita Hill, director Rick Famuyiwa keeps the action to a very strict window of time surrounding the appointment of Judge Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court. What could have been a chance to explore the greater issues around Hill’s controversial moment in the spotlight ultimately becomes little more than a re-enactment that even so much as shrugging at committing to a belief that Thomas did or did not do what he was claimed to have done. The film only truly entertains when it goes backstage and peeks behind the Washington curtain of handshaking and decision dealing and by allowing us non Shondaland disciples the chance to watch Kerry Washington at work. The poster suggests "it only takes one voice to change history", but beyond title card lip service at film's end, they never explore this claim.

This isn’t an unfamiliar place for a film about Anita Hill since Freida Lee Mock’s documentary, Anita (2013), also suffered from a similarly narrow focus. Disappointing, really, since Hill and her story are fascinating and still so very relevant today as they were in 1991. [More...]

Mock’s film is a particularly frustrating case given she has no doubt faced sexism and racism in her industry and could have brought a particularly keen insight into not just Hill’s story, but that of the larger themes that it relates to. Both Famuyiwa and Mock (an Oscar winner for 1994’s sublime Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision) do their subject and the issues a disservice by being so point-a-to-point-b in their structures when there are any number of points among c-through-z that could be poked and prodded and investigated and added into the fabric of the film and allowed for greater scope. I would be curious to see how both compare to Julian Schlossberg's Sex & Justice, which I have not seen, but which came out in 1993 on the heels of the real story and, one would expect, couldn't just rely on being a trip down memory lane.

That both a non-fiction and a narrative film about Anita Hill have been produced and both disappointed, I was curious to compare them other stories that have had two incarnations. One that struck out to me was that of Timothy Conigrave. In the last year, Australian audiences have been treated to not only a feature adaptation of Conigrave’s excellent memoir, Holding the Man, but also a documentary about Timothy and his relationship to the high school athlete, John Caleo, in Remembering the Man. What was it about this story – boys attending a Melbourne Catholic school fall in love, are torn apart, brought back together, diagnosed with AIDS – that allowed for similar yet ultimately quite different films to succeed? It’s not just because of the subject matter; I may be biased towards LGBTIQ stories, but Hill’s story is no doubt the more sensational and ripe for cinema of the two.

Rather, I think that it’s because both Holding and Remembering use their central subject as a means of exploring the era they came about and telling a rich story that is bigger than any one person. Every audience member will bring their own experience to these films, but the opportunity to participate in a decades-spanning story such as Conigrave’s is a rarity. And thanks to each films’ respective directors – Neil Armfield on Holding, Nickolas Bird and Eleanor Sharpe on Remembering – use of time and space, video and sound, they ultimately have more to latch on to beyond the coming-of-queer-age story at its heart.

I will be super interested to see if general audiences take to O.J.: Made in America, the eight-hour documentary from Ezra Edelman that seeks to pick up where the acclaimed FX mini-series The People Versus O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story left off in the world’s thirst for Simpson related true crime. That film, as long as it is, will supposedly be getting an Oscar-qualifying run (according to the Vanity Fair Oscar podcast, Little Gold Men) despite the improbability of a film with such a length being nominated for anything other than Emmys. From all reports though, Edelman’s film is extraordinary and does completely different things to the television version that recently concluded its run. I hope audiences take a chance on it too – more likely when it screens on ABC over five parts in June and July – because despite the disappointing results of the Anita Hill story, there is most definitely room for both traditional narrative and documentary tellings of the same story to succeed and to even highlight and accent one another. That we're only going to see more and more cases like this (and already have, I chose but three examples) suggest this is a very real angle that filmmakers are going to have to think about.