Doc Corner: Andrea Arnold's 'Cow' and more at Hot Spring Documentary Film Festival

By Glenn Dunks

I recently ‘visited’ Arkansas of all places (virtually, of course) to sit on a jury for America’s longest-running documentary film festival. I got to judge on the 2021 Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival’s international jury with Andria Wilson Mirza and Jesse Knight and the three of us awarded the International Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize (phew!) to Andrea Arnold’s Cow with an honourable mention to Ali El Arabi’s Captains of Zataari. The U.S. Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize went to Angelo Madsen Minax's excellent North by Current, which we looked at earlier in the year.

So for this week’s column I wanted to look at a selection of the titles from songstresses in Cuba, professional wrestlers in Mexico and, yup, that damn cow.

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Doc Corner: 'A Cop Movie'

By Glenn Dunks

The release of Alonso Ruizpalacios’s A Cop Movie (Una película de policías) via Netflix was timed with a series hosted at New York’s The Paris Theatre. Named ‘New Directions in Documentary’, the series sought to highlight “the innovative films and filmmakers who have created new cinematic languages and forms by combining elements of fiction and documentary” (all Netflix titles, of course). Unsurprisingly, I have loved most of the films they played. Several of them (Strong Island, Shirkers, Bisbee ’17, Kate Plays Christine) made my own personal best of the decade list.

The series also recognised Robert Greene’s new film, Procession, which we will look at in the coming weeks. But Ruizpalacios’s feature—which directly taps into the series’ concept of playing with the concepts of artifice, performance, and the documentary filmmaking process—is an interesting inclusion. It’s the only non-American title for starters, from the director of Museo. It’s nice to see somebody recognise that innovation in doc filmmaking is happening everywhere.

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"Oh, a moving painting. But with sound."

I was painting a painting about four foot square. It was mostly black but it had some green plant and leaves coming out of the black. And I was sitting back, probably taking a smoke, looking at it and from the painting, I heard a wind and the green started moving. And I thought, 'Oh, a moving painting. But with sound.' And that idea stuck in my head, a moving painting.

David Lynch on discovering his calling at art school in Philadelphia in David Lynch - The Art Life (2016) currently streaming on HBOMax

Doc Corner: Todd Haynes and 'The Velvet Underground'

By Glenn Dunks

It feels like something of a miracle that The Velvet Underground is as good as it is. Music bio-docs are hardly the most invigorating brand of documentary these days, and the story of this band and their Factory adjacent avant-garde artworld has been told many, many times before. So much so that Andy Warhol, the emperor of this New York underground art scene, would have probably been impressed by the assembly line of documentaries that emerged about him and his assorted acolytes, hangers-on, and affiliated artists whose fame (and/or infamy) are directly tied to him.

That Todd Haynes has made a great movie out of this all is hardly a surprise, though. After all, he is the man behind the 1998 glam rock opera Velvet Goldmine. Having said that, the recent milieu within which he has been working in Dark Waters and Wonderstruck hardly signposted that he had something so frenetically electric in him. If we never get another documentary about The Velvet Underground then it probably wouldn’t matter because we have this.

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Doc Corner: Emily Cohen Ibañez’s 'Fruits of Labor'

By Glenn Dunks

A movie like Emily Cohen Ibañez’s Fruits of Labor doesn’t need to explicitly say the quiet part out loud. But it does anyway. In its early moments, sitting side-by-side are a scene of a second-generation teenage child of immigrants working to help feed her family by picking strawberries in the Californian morning sun followed by a scene of that same child, a high school senior, in class listening to her teaching discuss ‘working the fields’ and the class/social inequalities that come from this poorly-paid, but essential work.

Furthermore, one doesn’t need to extrapolate very much to see the unavoidable illusions to modern day slavery as Ashley Solis lives in a house where up to 12 families share living spaces and one single bathroom.

It’s not surprising that Oakland-born director Ibañez of Colombian heritage has a history in anthropology. She shows an obvious flare in observing the Solis family, sometimes in uncomfortable close-up. It’s also not surprising that this is only her second feature, following on from her 2015 documentary Bodies at War.

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