Doc Corner: Werner Herzog's 'Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin'

by Glenn Dunks

Is it a coincidence that I watched Werner Herzog’s Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin on the same day as Nomadland? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Maybe it was more just serendipitous that I turned my screener of Herzog’s film off just before leaving the house to go and see Chloé Zhao’s Oscar favourite. Maybe I am just feeling emotional about the very idea of being out in nature and enmeshed in a broader human existence, but both left me quite affected.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this double feature left me with the desire to walk home under the glowing blue sky with earth and tar and grass and cement under my feet...

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Doc Corner: The other Khashoggi film of 2020, 'The Dissident'

By Glenn Dunks — No column next week as I will be taking a week off for rest and relaxation over the Christmas season.

Not for the first time this year, the story of Jamal Khashoggi has been told in a documentary that tries—excessively, exhaustively—to be as thrill-a-minute as a Hollywood blockbuster. I wasn’t a fan of it last time and I’m not a fan of it this time, either. Bryan Fogel’s The Dissident is better than that earlier title, Rick Rowley’s Kingdom of Silence; it’s better than his 2018 Oscar winner, Icarus, too, but that isn’t saying much.

What is it about Khashoggi that makes filmmakers think they’re directing an episode of Homeland? Is it simply the key settings of Saudi Arabia and Turkey that inspires such busy and scattered movies?

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Doc Corner: A 'Mayor' in Palestine

By Glenn Dunks

Documentaries about bureaucracy can be tricky. Not everybody has the luxury of being Frederick Wiseman and be given over four hours to luxuriate in the minutiae of a major city’s political processes like he did in this year’s City Hall. And if nothing particularly interesting happens then all you’re left with is a movie about people pushing paper around for 90 minutes, which would thrill me by doubtful many others. American director David Osit is at something of an advantage with Mayor, however; set in the city of Ramallah in the Palestinian West Bank.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Osit has missed the obvious story right in front of his face. For the opening stretches of Mayor, about Ramallah’s Mayor Musa Hadid, the director is seemingly content to focus on administrative nonsense including an amusing, extended narrative strand around Hadid’s inability to grasp the concept of city branding (as a public servant myself, I related). I was beginning to think that this film would be just a curious diversion showing how life in the Palestinian National Authority does carry on.

But Osit proves to be much smarter than that in how he has structured Mayor...

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Doc Corner: 'Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist'

By Glenn Dunks

We’re back with another film about the making of a classic movie (after last week's Television Event), this time a title that's streaming right now on Shudder. It is Alexandre O. Phillippe doing his thing; a horror behind-the-scenes-doc majestically titled Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist. Artistically speaking, it is probably his best movie yet. (But from me that’s faint praise indeed.)

The problem with a director like Phillippe is that he tends to take incredible works of art and then bleeds them dry. 78/52, his most well-known feature to date, somehow turned the shower sequence of Hitchcock’s Psycho into a routine film school dissertation. He takes iconic horror and performs a very practical (to the point of strict orderliness) dissection. The intellectual passion is there, but that doesn’t necessarily always make for the most scintillating of viewing.

It would have been easy to make a more traditional making-of documentary about The Exorcist. Hell, there’s enough of them out there to prove that. (I would recommend the Exorcist episode of Shudder’s Cursed Films if you want more of the making of style).  What makes Leap of Faith interesting is that Phillippe has done something of the opposite...

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Doc Corner: Crime and (in)Justice in America at DOC NYC

By Glenn Dunks

In our final report from this year’s virtual DOC NYC festival, we’re looking at films about crime and (in)justice. Make sure to check out our reviews of three festival titles that are also competing for Best International Feature as well as The Day After making of doc, Television Event, all of which are highly recommended.

A Cops and Robbers Story

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but themes of crime and (often in)justice have been popular in documentary lately. Maybe we can consider it an artform’s attempt to counteract the many, many years of not just racial discrimination by the police, the law, and American society more broadly, but the silence and misinformation that has come with it...

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