Yesterday Joy Moses, one of my colleagues here at the Center for American Progress, wrote about the importance of A Place At The Table, a documentary about food security, that premiered just as the sequester began, cutting hundreds of thousands of recipients from the Women Infants and Children food program. And so I was struck today when AV Club critic Scott Tobias used the movie as a hook to argue that we’re more tolerant of stylistic stagnation in documentaries than we are in feature films, in part because we’re more likely to privilege the information in them over the way they’re presented. He writes:

I’ve often argued that the “movieness” of movies is undervalued—that we accept the indifferent, workmanlike craft of deliberate mediocrities over flashier, more conspicuous failures. But the “movieness” of documentaries rarely becomes an issue, which only encourages the stereotype of the documentary as a hearty gruel of talking heads and archival footage, spooned out as artlessly as the school lunches A Place At The Table criticizes so vociferously.

The thinking that documentaries need merely to seek or present some kind of truth, regardless of how those truths are presented, strikes me as dated at a time when the elasticity of the format is constantly being tested. Why should documentaries be forgiven any more than fiction films for failing to use the medium expressively or dynamically? Why give a pass to bland info-dumps like A Place At The Table?

I was curious to read the piece, in part because since I got back from the Sundance film festival, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what makes an effective documentary. One thing I think Scott may not necessarily be acknowledging about A Place At The Table is that, to a certain extent, it is a deviation from the norm to turn the camera on poor people and to treat them as if they’re experts, even if only on their own experiences. And I think I’m significantly more tolerant than he is of using documentary film to make arguments, something he acknowledges that he’s leaving out “entire categories of documentary unaccounted for, like acts of investigative journalism (the Paradise Lost movies, for example) or essays both personal (like the films of Ross McElwee or Michael Moore) and editorial (like Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job or No End In Sight),” though I’m surprised that he’s comfortable with Kirby Dick’s powerful The Invisible War, a movie I think is as polemic and argumentative, and as designed to provoke action as much as A Place At The Table is. But I want to make a different argument: attention to the craft of filmmaking can strengthen documentary film’s ability to convey facts and to convince audiences. But it can also trade off with getting the facts across in a way that’s not just dishonest: it’s damaging.

I was struck most strongly by this problem watching Zhao Qi’s Fallen City at Sundance. The film is a beautifully-shot exploration of how a number of families are trying to rebuild their lives after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, an 8.0 magnitude event that killed 68,000 people in the region. Its lingering shots of buildings that have literally sunk into the earth, often shot from the hills far above the city where the movie is set, images of ruined structures being taken back by trees and grass, and chronicles of the construction of a replacement city are both gorgeous as photography and give a strong psychological sense of what it must be like to have your entire world disappear in front of you. But for all the time the movie spends on these striking visuals, Zhao literally never once mentions a factor that is critically important to understanding why the devastation is so severe, and why his subjects are responding to the events the way they are: in the earthquake, schoolrooms collapsed at a rate disproportionate to other construction, killing rural children at a high rate, and leading many parents and activists to believe that corruption contributed to shortcuts in school construction.
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The video in this post contains spoilers for Season 5 of Breaking Bad, up to & including the September 2 episode.

It would be a usurpation to write up the closeout episode of season 5.1 of Breaking Bad with Alyssa vacationing. I won’t try to do that, but the folks at Press Play have a gorgeous video essay up stringing together some of the best bits of cinematography we’ve seen this season and making an argument about what it all means. Take a look:

The accompanying text is well worth your time too. Praising the show’s “visual literacy,” Derek Hill writes that “it draws on the muscular richness of past masters of the action genre, such as Sergio Leone, John Sturges, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah, William Friedkin, and Michael Mann, to deliver the goods.” That’s quite a list, and I think I agree — especially when Hill contrasts the use of cinematography to flesh out character psychology in Breaking Bad with the way that an adroit stylist like Tarantino employs some of the same techniques.

Hill goes on to narrow the argument about the show’s cinematography a bit too far for me, however:

Actors in the frame are typically juxtaposed with advertising signs or dwarfed by urban architecture, a sort of primetime visual semiotics. Although the show ostensibly explores Walter and Jesse’s trajectories through the seedy, violent world of drug dealing and crime, it’s really about capitalism at its most savage. Walter’s justification for his involvement in the meth business has always been his need to financially support his family. That’s what he tells himself and his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn). It’s a lie, however, since Walter has had many opportunities to walk away with the fortune he’s made. Greed and the American need to dominate have taken root in Walter now.

Hill makes a strong argument and you should read the whole thing, but I disagree that capitalism is the core of Breaking Bad. For me, the constant visual evocations of Westerns and action flicks point a different direction: gender panic. Walter gave up on his startup only to get stuck teaching bored teenagers the basics while his former partners earn billions pushing the boundaries of the science he loves. He’s so ill-compensated he takes a carwash job that inverts the status his education would seem to confer, and spends his evenings getting yelled at by strangers picky about their cars.

Yes, it’s late-stage American capitalism (and Walt’s decisions within it) that put him in this position. But his break into criminality and his gradual dedication to not just sufficient profit but kingpin status are compensatory. Walt’s been deprived of even the opportunity to play an alpha role in his professional life, and clings to the illusion of one in his personal life to such an extent that he’s outraged and wounded when Skyler wants to go back to work. He compensates for what he feels are years of deprivation by launching himself towards the opposite end of the masculinity spectrum, where he feels he deserves to operate. No one ever calls him on the reality that he made the choices — or at least the primary choice — that left him juggling jobs to support his family. Rather than floating towards some kind of equilibrium point along the scale of “kneeling carwash employee” to “The One Who Knocks,” Walt’s been relentlessly pressing toward the outward bound of the alpha-male self identity he carries in his head. He’s been going all one direction for four and a half seasons (and a year of his life). The show has illustrated this lunge for idealized man-ness with car explosions, ruthless poisonings, manic self-confidence, various forms of aggressive/threatening sexuality, potted plants thrown through windows.

Insofar as the show is about Walter White, it’s about a wild-eyed monomaniacal lunge for status and control. Insofar as the show is about America, Hill’s spot on. The visual language of Breaking Bad is working on a bunch of different tasks at any given time. It’s almost too gorgeous to digest in a single viewing, and as tough as it is to wait a year for the conclusion, that gives us all time to watch and rewatch this singular set of visual achievements.

Hemingway & Gellhorn, HBO’s splashy biopic of Ernest (a mustached Clive Owen) and journalist Martha (an ass-baring Nicole Kidman) has been thoroughly filleted by my fellow critics, and I’m not going to replicate their complaints against what I found to be an oddly trite movie. But there was one thing I found rather striking about it, though more as a cautionary tale than as a thing to praise: the shifts between dramatically different styles of cinematography. Watching Hemingway & Gellhorn felt more than a little like flipping through an Instagram stream, though to less evocative effect.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with juxtaposing these different styles and signaling changes in tone for a pair of extremely mercurial people. When Hemingway battles a marlin in Key West, the frame is saturated in blues that in a final shot are soaked in red to mark his suicide by shotgun. In Cuba, and in the throes of marital bliss, they’re captured in blurry pops of color. The image takes on an HD sharpness when it lingers on the breasts and buttocks of dancers in a club who inspire Hemingway and Gellhorn to slip away from a drunken twist, the sight of these beautiful women in their act and changing costumes heightening their mutual desire.

But when it come to the couples’ work, the stylistic showiness of Hemingway & Gellhorn ends up distancing us from the emotion it wants to convey rather than strengthening it. When Hemingway and Gellhorn are working together in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, she filing dispatches for Collier’s, he shooting The Spanish Earth, the movie captures them in the sepia tones and occasionally jerky moments that replicate the kind of footage he and his crew are capturing. When Gellhorn sees a burned baby in China or encounters a young girl with a pet turtle in an opium den, they’re in black-and-white, which lends a documentary cast to her encounters, but also means we don’t have to reckon with the full, horrifying state of the baby’s skin, the damage done to the young girl. And when Gellhorn flees the sight of the horrors at Dachau, she stumbles through a Brothers’ Grimm-style forest cast in mossy grays. Maybe the show’s budget prevented a full-scale or even minor-scale recreation of a concentration camp, but the sequence ends up treating her more like a fairy-tale heroine than a correspondent bearing witness. She sees ugliness, her capacity to bear witness to it is one of the things that defines her, but the movie can’t bear to show us anything but loveliness even in the midst of Gellhorn’s trauma. Both of these sequences would have had much more power had they been presented straightforwardly, if we saw what she saw with a Hollywood approximation of how she saw it.

The thing that’s fun about Instagram is that we can use it to make our lives look more heightened and dramatic than they usually are. But Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn’s lives are supposed to already be as exciting as we’d like to make ours look. The flashiness of the cinematography in Hemingway & Gellhorn feels like an indication of lack of confidence in their story, rather than the deployment of available tactics where they’re needed. Just because you can saturate something with color or swath it in sepia doesn’t mean you have to.