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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In Mother Jones today, Kate Sheppard has the news that Dr. George Tiller’s abortion clinic in Wichita, shuttered after he was murdered at his church in 2009, will be reopening under the leadership of Julie Burkhart, who worked with Tiller when he was alive. In Burkhart’s conversation with Sheppard, she says that she decided to reopen the clinic in part because no one else would do it, and because she wants to reframe the debate about abortion care. “I think abortion is about motherhood,” she said. “Abortion is about motherhood because by and large women coming in to have abortions are concerned about the kind of life and the future for their children. Women are thinking in a very responsible manner when choosing that.”

These are important points, and ones made at greater length in one of the best documentaries I saw at the Sundance Film Festival in January, After Tiller. By first-time directors Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, After Tiller spends time not just with the four remaining doctors in the United States who are willing to perform late-term abortions—Burkhart’s clinic will not—but with many of their patients. It’s a set of perspectives that rarely enters the national debate about the legality of abortion procedures. The testimony of women and men who badly wanted children who have grown too sick to survive, and of doctors who help them when almost no one else will, may not convince the people who protest outside the four doctors’ clinics, and for whom the questions involved have simple and obvious answers.

But for anyone else watching the film, it will be clear, as Dr. Susan Robinson says, that no one ever wants an abortion, particularly not the kind that she and her colleagues provide. And the doctors in After Tiller are providing their services not out of some sort of attraction to the procedure that’s become their calling card, but out of a conviction that women shouldn’t be abandoned in their decision-making processes. After Tiller is a powerful reminder that abortion in America is less about desire than about need, and a matter not of carelessness, but the result of dreadful deliberations.

Many of the patients who agreed to have their consultations with the doctors filmed in After Tiller are facing the prospect of aborting children they planned to have, but whose pregnancies have gone terribly awry along the way. “It just didn’t seem fair to her,” say the parents of one child who would live in agonizing pain if she were born. Another describes a dreadful dilemma, saying “It’s guilt because we’re doing what we’re doing and guilt because if we brought him into this world he wouldn’t have any quality of life.” Monica, a patient whose child was diagnosed at 25 weeks with a debilitating illness that would cause his certain death if he were born, ultimately chooses to have an abortion rather than delay an inevitable decision to end her child’s life—better now, she ultimately decides, than to make him suffer before turning off his respirator so she can have had the experience of his brief, agonizing life. “It is hurtful because it was a planned pregnancy, and I did want this,” another patient explains.

Much of the focus of the consultations and on the planning for these families’ abortions is focused on giving them dignity and helping them process their emotions, both before and after their procedures. “The only time they get to say hello to their baby is when they have to say goodbye to it, too,” Dr. Robinson explains. As she runs through a checklist to help a couple prepare for their abortion and the burial arrangements for their child, I started to cry in the theater when the shot showed that “blanket requested” was one of the options on the list. There’s an incredible cruelty to the genetic lottery that forces parents to convert receiving blankets to burial shrouds, and an incredible courage to those parents who have their only time with a child after that child has died. Dr. Shelley Sella counsels two couples with ill children together, telling them “Both of you have babies who are really sick, and both of you have babies who would suffer a lot,” and giving them an opportunity to see that their experience is neither solitary nor shameful.
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This post discusses plot points from Fruitvale and Blue Caprice, both of which are based on true events.

Before The Weinstein Company bought 26-year-old writer-director Ryan Coogler’s debut feature Fruitvale, an examination of the 24 hours that lead up to the shooting death of Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale BART station on New Year’s Eve in 2008, Mike Fleming Jr. wrote on Deadline that “The feeling from buyers I’ve spoken to who’ve seen it is that Fruitvale has the potential to be one of those festival pictures that come out of nowhere — like Precious and Beasts Of The Southern Wild — to capture audience and critical acclaim.”

What Fleming didn’t note in his post is that Fruitvale, Precious, and Beasts Of The Southern Wild all star African-American actors, and both Fruitvale and Precious, which was directed by Lee Daniels, were directed by African-American men. Sundance has gotten more buzz this festival for the number of films in its narrative feature competition that were directed by women. But it’s equally important to note the festival’s role in creating buzz for films about African-American characters that translate into distribution deals and profits: Precious made $47.6 million domestically on a production budget of $10 million, while the even lower-budget Beasts has made $11.5 million on a $1.8 million production budget.

Two of the best movies I saw at this year’s festival, Fruitvale and Blue Caprice, an examination of the growth of a fictionalized version of the relationship between Beltway Snipers John Allen Muhammad (Isaiah Washington) and Lee Boyd Malvo (Tequan Richmond), directed by Kanye West collaborator Alexandre Moors, fell into that category. To a certain extent, they’re formally similar chronicles of deaths foretold. Both begin with footage of the real-world events they explore, Blue Caprice with a montage of news footage of Muhammad and Malvo’s killing spree, and Fruitvale with cell phone video of Grant’s shooting on the BART platform. But from there, they become complementary movies on separate paths. If Fruitvale is about how prejudicial suspicion of black men can inject deadly violence into a specific life at random, Blue Caprice explores how two men build a highly specific and fatal future.

In Fruitvale, Oscar (an exceptional Michael B. Jordan) is year out of prison and almost compulsively on the make, a young man attempting to close the gap between his considerable charm and his lack of discipline. As the movie begins, he’s just talked his girlfriend and the mother of his daughter, Sophina (Melonie Diaz) into taking him back after he cheated on her, though he’s less successful in talking the grocery store manager who fired him for lateness into giving him back his job, even when he tries to manipulate the man’s emotions and white liberalism, asking him “You want me selling dope, Brad?” At the store, he flirts with Katie (Ahna O’Reilly), a young white woman who’s gotten herself bollixed up trying to pick fish to fry for her boyfriend for a New Year’s Eve dinner. “It sounds like he’s black,” Oscar teases her, before putting her on the phone with his Grandma Bonnie, who sets Katie straight. When he finally comes clean to Sophina about losing his job, he does it two steps, first telling her that he’s unemployed, and finally admitting that he’s been so for several weeks. In between that admission and ditching a stash of marijuana he intended to sell to make the month’s rent, Oscar’s in a precarious, but hopeful position: he’s made some moves away from both dishonesty and criminality, but hasn’t started to look for legal employment or started to feel a serious pinch. As he tells Sophina, who explained to him of her New Year’s resolution to cut carbs that it takes 30 days to form a habit, he needs to “just not fuck up” for a month.
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I’m looking forward to heading back to Park City in January, but this news about the Sundance Film Festival’s lineup this year is making me particularly enthusiastic about getting back to the press tent:

In what festival programmers say is a Sundance first, fully half of the narrative features were made by women.

Culled from 1,227 submissions, the 16 dramas playing in the 2013 festival announced Wednesday cover a wide array of subjects and are populated by well-known actors (Casey Affleck, Daniel Radcliffe, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Biel) and complete unknowns. Many of the films, perhaps as a reflection of the gender of their directors, focus closely on personal, and often highly sexual, relationships.

“They are very much women’s stories,” said Trevor Groth, the festival’s programming director. In the 2012 festival, only three of the 16 dramatic competition films were made by women. According to San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, only 5% of the 250 highest-grossing films last year were directed by women.

It’s great that Sundance has hit this milestone, and hopefully now that they’ve gotten there, they’ll try to maintain the ratio. But it’s also an illustration of how easy it is to get these numbers right if you really want to. This isn’t even a matter of a couple hundred television writing jobs. It’s eight movies.

Ever since I saw Craig Zobel’s film Compliance, about employees at a fast-food restaurant who were talked into an abusing a co-worker, at Sundance, I’ve been eager to see it reach a wider audience. The movie follows a day in the life of Sandra (Ann Dowd), a manager at the restaurant for whom nothing seems to be going right, who receives a phone call from a man claiming to be a police officer, who tells her that Becky (Dreama Walker), a junior employee at the restaurant, has stolen from a customer. Over the course of the day, the man talks Sandra into detaining Becky, having her searched, and ultimately, another man into assaulting her.

Compliance is a powerful movie about our desire to gain police approval and our willingness, or lack thereof, to intervene when things are going terribly wrong around us. And it seemed to me to be misunderstood at the festival, where audiences complained that its depiction of what happened to Becky, which is based on a series of true events, was exploitative, or insisted that they couldn’t relate to characters who worked in the service industry. I talked to Zobel about art that makes people uncomfortable, what it means that we seek approval from the police, and feminist filmmaking. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to start by asking how you came to the source material. I’ve seen the Law & Order episode that’s based on these real events, so it’s floating around in the pop culture ether, but I was curious how you became interested in it.

It’s funny, I’m from Georgia, and one of the events took place in Georgia, so I kind of knew about it from that, but I hadn’t remembered exactly what the deal was. And I was reading about Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments when I stumbled upon it, so it was after the pop culture moment had happened.

I know Dreama Walker from her more comedic work, but she has been bubbling along in Gran Torino and everything else, so how did you come to work with her?

She read the script and was really interested, and it resonated with her. She was familiar with the original story as well. She came in, and we were casting, the casting for that role was delicate in a way. We had to up front lay everything out. This is what this movie’s about. She was interested and came in and auditioned, which was great. And than she and I sat down and had coffee, which I think quickly turned into beer because we were talking about some heavy stuff really fast. She just had the same questions that I did about the story and what it was all about…They just wouldn’t come in. It was a voluntary thing. Acting is a voluntary thing. Most of hte people I was seeing were people who were already fascinated by it in some sense. But Dreama and I talked a lot…She just was the right person. it made sense to me for a lot of reasons…She was kind of identifying certain things as the more interesting way to play this or that beat, or the way that was compelling though it was somewhat frustrating. We were talking about these things and kind of landing in the same places. When we started working together, it was very specific. These are the shots. This is what you’re going to do. Talking about that stuff before we were ever on set so there weren’t any surprises…

I first encountered this story and was very much, kind of what a lot of people’s reactions are, “Well, that’s fascinating, but I would never do that.” Truly a very condescending point of view, when you really think about it. Which has been interesting, to have the movie keep going, to listen to some people who very much distance themselves from the movie at Q&As and things like that, who point out how dumb the people were, how they’re from a different class, and all these things that I was not comfortable. I think my bullshit detector went off inside of myself when I was so condescending about how I would never do it. I think that’s what made me want to do the movie. It was “Why did I just act like that?”

That was one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because in one of the Q&As you did at Sundance, one of the members of the audience said “Well, I just couldn’t identify with these people because they were too dumb.” And it seemed like people, who normally wouldn’t fall back on class prejudice or gender prejudice had been scrambling to do that to avoid any suggestion that they could ever be complicit.

Or putting it back on me that it’s painted that way. I would feel like I fucked up if that’s what you really think, that these people are dumb. I would feel like I failed. I tried hard. I tried hard to avoid that. That was the one thing to avoid in my opinion. It’s condescending. Especially when it’s multiple people over a ten year period, and it’s these seventy cases you can look at, and it keeps happening. It’s like, man, it’s not that. There’s no way it could have been all the dumb people that got called. People do fall back on, I’m reading it the way your’e reading it, people are trying to distance themselves from the movie and don’t want to go there and want to put these people into boxes so they can be safe. We had a screening the other day where that came up, and it was funny, because it came from the very back of the stadium seating, and it was just the perfect place for it to come from. You’re truly looking down your nose at me and the people who made the movie. You’re actually physically looking down your nose at us.
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There’s been an awful lot of furor over Spike Lee’s declaration at Sundance, made with justifiable anger (and to my mind considerable accuracy), that Hollywood doesn’t know much about black people and doesn’t much care. The response to that statement, and a couple of other recent incidents, really seem to make clear how correct Lee is, and how loath the industry is to acknowledge his fundamental correctness.

Even before he got to Sundance, the Hollywood Reporter framed a Q&A with him by saying that Lee discussed “what he sees as a dearth of influence among African-Americans in Hollywood.” That kind of framing makes a fact seem like an opinion. During the Q&A, Lee asks his questioner multiple times to name an African-American in the entertainment industry who has the power to greenlight a movie, and the only person THR can come up with is an animation executive. All the studies of race and gender representation in the industry show that people of color are dramatically underrepresented in directing, writing, and producing positions. The only way that Spike Lee’s observations about race and Hollywood are an opinion rather than a fact is if the industry consensus is that it’s fine for people of color to be underrepresented in entertainment relative to their actual presence in the population. And if that’s the case, I’d really rather someone in Hollywood say that up front than listen to folks pretend that getting racial and gender diversity in positions of power is important to them.

And I think a lot of people in Hollywood want to believe they’re squarely committed to racial justice, or at least proportional racial representation. You see that in Charlize Theron trying to buck up Viola Davis after the latter says that not looking like Halle Berry makes it harder for black women to get good roles in mainstream entertainmentby telling Davis that “You have to stop saying that, because you’re hot as shit,” a statement that asks Davis to ignore the assumptions that have measurably governed her career and suggests that self-esteem can overcome institutionalized racism.

You see that in the affection for The Help, a perfect example of the kind of movie that Red Hook Summer co-writer James McBride is talking about when he says, “Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller– writer, musician, filmmaker. Being black is like serving as Hoke, the driver in ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ except it’s a kind of TV series lasts the rest of your life: You get to drive the well-meaning boss to and fro, you love that boss, your lives are stitched together, but only when the boss decides your story intersects with his or her life is your story valid.”

But complaining about this, even for 30 seconds, which is about as long as what the press has called Lee’s Sundance “rant” or “tirade” lasted. As McBride put it in that same essay, “When George Lucas complained publicly about the fact that he had to finance his own film because Hollywood executives told him they didn’t know how to market a black film, no one called him a fanatic. But when Spike Lee says it, he’s a racist militant and a malcontent.” The easiest way to marginalize a truth that would require you to make genuine changes if you accepted it is to marginalize the person telling it, to make him out to be crazy, or extreme, or whiny, or demanding rather than justifiably angry. That’s what’s happening to Spike Lee. Journalists should be thoughtful about what kinds of perceptions they’re abetting, and whether they’re framing the reaction to the Red Hook Summer session, or the reaction to The Help, or any other discussion of race in Hollywood in a way that’s the best representation of the truth, or a representation of a mass mentality that’s running scared.

Obviously this blog is sympathetic to the larger goals of the 99 percent movement. But sometimes, I’ve got my tactical disagreements, and such is the case with what appears to be the messaging of an Occupy Sundance counterfestival that’ll be taking place in Park City when I get there.

First, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to compare the festival’s acceptance rates (about 1 percent of films make it in) to the 99 percent-1 percent divide. Unless you can document that the 1 percent of movies that got in have some sort of unfair, cronyistic advantage that let them get in despite the fact that they’re not the kind of movies people want to see (which, if that argument is to be made, make it), there isn’t really a legitimate unfairness argument to be made here. Sundance has a limited capacity for the number of films it can screen and the number of locations it can screen them at and still be a coherent festival. Some indies, like Bachelorette or John Dies at the End, are going to have a bigger draw for audiences. That’s not evidence of some sort of plutocracy: it’s a capacity and market demand fact. Having artistic criteria and needing to make the event financially successful (Sundance is, after all, a non-profit) isn’t inherently a promoter of inequality or unfairness.

I do agree with Occupy Sundance organizer Daniel J. Harris that “Submitting your debut film to multiple festivals in the USA, is costly, grueling and a gamble.” But that seems like an argument to found more legitimate festivals, to organize a mentoring program that helps first-time indie filmmakers get critiques from old festival hands to improve their pitches, or a pool that can provide entrance fee money for filmmakers in need. I’m less compelled by his argument that “Pitching tents in the snow, and yelling cine-Marxist agitprop is always a better way to promote your film than by being co-opted by The Man. Hell, globally everyone is pissed off at anyone with authority, is it not time someone made a statement or is it maybe Americans filmmakers have nothing really left to say?” But maybe I’m wrong to believe that we can’t capture a bit more of Hollywood for ourselves.

Second, it’s pretty bizarre to me that an Occupy film festival would think it was sending a smart progressive message by featuring in its lineup Steven Greenstreet’s Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street. When he launched the tumblr that inspired the film, Jill at Feministe did a nice job of explaining why Greenstreet’s so-called promotion of the movement was so creepy given the problems women have faced staying safe in the encampments. Given the issues women face gaining employment in key storymaking roles in Hollywood, there’s something pretty depressing about Occupy Sundance giving screening space to someone with less-than-revolutionary ideas about women and gender — especially since of the movies it appears to be featuring, just one of the six is by a woman. Sometimes the occupation looks like the thing it’s trying to occupy. But I’ll see in Park City for myself.

I’m flying to Park City today, so if posting’s a little slow or I’m not totally on the uptake with email, please forgive me. And if there are movies you want me to make sure I check out while I’m at the festival, look through the film guide and holler at me in comments.