Doc Corner: 'Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami'

By Glenn Dunks

Documentaries about musicians can feel like a dime a dozen. It’s no wonder, too, since they’re such easy sells for festivals and home entertainment in a market that is over-saturated with exhibitors and distributors in need to properties that don’t require elaborate marketing campaigns -- just a hope and a prayer that they will ‘catch on’.

Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami is not exactly one of those films. It is unconventional as rock docs go in a whole host of ways, but it’s also a film that even its subject’s fans may struggle with. It eschews a typical birth-to-death narrative and instead focuses on Grace’s experiences in Jamaica and Paris recording her 2008 album Hurricane, recorded in garish lo-fi digital video, juxtaposed against richly filmed concert footage that echoes her 1982 One Man Show. It’s a documentary that leaves questions – like what exactly are “Bloodlight" and "Bami” (I had to look them up)? Why did it take so long to complete? 

 It drifts by for 115 minutes on its own sort of trippy wavelength which is, if you think about it, entirely appropriate for a documentary about Miss Grace Jones, one of the most enigmatic and exciting pop stars of the 20th century...

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Doc Corner: 'Leaning Into the Wind'

By Glenn Dunks

As a medium, film is a record forever. An actor can give a stunning performance on a stage, but without a camera to capture it, it remains somewhat in the ether – a happening, an instance, a moment in time that can only truly live on in the mind of those who witnessed it. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less valid or worthy, but it’s something worth considering as we watch movies that they, even fictional ones, are ultimately a document of the emotions and the energy and the craft that was put into it, captured forever for anybody to experience.

I thought of this as I watched Thomas Riedelsheimer’s Leaning into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy because it is a film that will live on as the only document of some of Goldsworthy’s work. The artist is known predominantly for his works that incorporate nature and are often finite in their existence.

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Doc Corner: Andre Leon Talley and Jayne Mansfield Lead the Melbourne Queer Film Festival

By Glenn Dunks

Down here in Melbourne where I live, the Melbourne Queer Film Festival is gearing up for its 28th year. It's got the best line-up I have ever seen for the festival, and in particular the documentary section is full of must see titles. I know The Film Experience readers like to hear about LGBTQI cinema so I thought I'd choose three that focus on the movies and pop culture worlds to look at that will hopefully make their way to cinemas and VOD soon: The Gospel According to Andre, Mansfield 66/67 and Queerama.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ANDRE

Shame on me, I suppose, for putting on The Gospel According to André and expecting a breezy 90 minutes of glam connoisseur André Leon Talley dishing cutting fashion commentary in caftans and calling everybody “darling” while rattling off designer names like he’s Edina in that Pet Shop Boys song about Absolutely Fabulous. Names! Names! Names!

Talley is, after all, a mainstay of fashion documentaries since his appearances in the classics Unzipped and Catwalk from 1995 on through the likes of The September Issue, The First Monday in May, Valentino: The Last Emperor and the recent House of Z about Zac Posen. What I did not expect from Kate Novack’s documentary was a film that takes the story of one of the American fashion world’s most iconic and recognisable names as a launching pad for an exploration of race and racism through history via the POV of a gay black man.

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Doc Corner: 'The China Hustle'

By Glenn Dunks

There is immediately something to be admired in a film that begins with a talking head stating very matter-of-factly that “There are no good guys in this story, including me.” I mean, well damn, okay. The China Hustle is a film that begins and ends in a pit of greed and contempt, charting how the financial crisis of 2008 and the rise of the Chinese economy played rather conveniently into one another and how a brand new variety of stock fraud is being committed on the American people.

Directed by Jeff Rothstein who was Oscar nominated in 2010 for his documentary short Killing in the Name, The China Hustle exposes the growing problem on the American stock exchange of Chinese companies over-inflated their worth and effectively dropping a timebomb on the market with the help of shell companies and China’s lax company laws aided by pure old fashioned greed as auditors and lawyers blatantly misrepresent and mislead the public for their own profits.

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Berlinale: Three queer docs and one all too brief feature

Seán McGovern's continued reporting from the Berlin International Film Festival. Click back to part one if you missed it the opening film "Isle of Dogs". Here are notes on four more films playing at Berlinale 2018. 

Shakedown (dir. Leilah Weinraub, 2018)
This slightly chaotic documentary charting the history of a Los Angeles lesbian dance club in the early Aughts is dope-tempered and energetic. Leilah Weinraub's confident and assured filmmaking features several years of footage of Shakedown's nights – the women who performed and the women who watched. There are plenty of anthropological documentaries about queer subcultures, but Weinraub's doc is anything but...

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