It’s documentary season in SA and film lovers are gearing up for the 25th Encounters South African International Documentary Festival, which opens on June 22 with a screening of Milisuthando, director Milisuthando Bongela’s deeply personal cinematic essay that debuted to critical acclaim at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Ahead of the festival’s jam-packed programme of a variety of documentary expression from across the globe, here are three from the vast archives to highlight the innovation and creative experimentation that’s kept the non-fiction cinematic universe one of the medium’s most interesting and varied spaces over the course of its long and productive history.
The arthouse essential:
San Soleil — Mubi.com
When he died in 2012, the reclusive French cinematic genius Chris Marker left a legacy that will remain unmatched in cinematic history for generations. Marker almost single-handedly invented the film essay form and no work in his distinguished oeuvre remains as singularly brilliant, intellectually intriguing or densely complex as this, his 1983 masterpiece.
Framed as a series of letters sent by an invisible friend in Japan to a French woman, San Soleil (Sunless) is a lovingly rendered portrait of the eccentricities and beauty of Japan, that reaches across time and space to offer a series of poetic meditations on memory, technology and the alienating absurdities of hyper-capitalist society.
Marker combines a number of familiar and recognisable tropes from historical documentary to travelogue and home movies into a web of reflections on the ways in which humanity is both connected across history and culture, while also being more disconnected than ever before. The focus of the film remains predominantly on Japan, but in the course of its 100 minutes Marker makes forays to Iceland and Africa and into film history as he paints a complicated portrait of a world that’s both recognisable and otherworldly.
Endlessly rewatchable and newly rewardable on each new viewing, San Soleil remains one of cinema’s great experimental achievements and continues to cast a long shadow of influence on generations of filmmakers and audiences.
The stone-cold classic:
Chronicle of a Summer — Mubi.com
A pioneering work of the cinema verité movement, director and anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin’s film breaks down the traditional relationships between observers and subjects in ethnographic film to unique and memorably moving effect.
The summer in question is that of Paris in 1960, with a brief sojourn to the holiday city of San Tropez.
Rouch and Morin begin with a discussion with Marceline, the woman who will conduct the film’s interviews about issues relating to the politics of on-screen representation in documentaries and the question of whether the presence of the camera indelibly means that it is impossible to capture sincerity on screen.
From there the film weaves a complex and ultimately devastating portrayal not just of its subjects but more broadly of the psychology of post-war French society as a whole from ordinary people’s answers in response to the seemingly flippant and simple question: “Are you happy?”
When the camera is turned on Marceline, the interviewer becomes the subject, her answer to the question and her own tragic history as an Auschwitz survivor take over the film and push it into a new and wholly unexpected direction.
Filmed in long takes with determined and ultimately rewarded patience, the results prove far more complex and philosophically challenging than the film’s creators could have foreseen and it remains a pivotal film both within the history of documentary and more broadly within French cinema, where it would prove to be a seminal influence on the work of the New Wave, which exploded towards the end of the 1960s.
The diamond in the rough:
Chris the Swiss — Mubi.com
Director Anja Komfel mixes animation and personal reflection to great effect in this meditative documentary about the brief, mad life of her Swiss cousin Christian Wurtenberg, who was an adventure-seeking war reporter who met his tragic end in mysterious circumstances at the age of 27 while covering the war in Yugoslavia in 1992.
Komfel, who was trained as an animator, uses her skills in that medium to create a deeply personal imagining of the last moments of her cousin’s life against the broader backdrop of the despair and senselessness of one of the 20th century’s last and most terrible conflicts. Her animations also serve to offer a child’s-eye-perspective on the chaotic circumstances surrounding Chris’s death that reflect how she felt at the time and provide a hard-hitting counterpoint to the brutal realities of the archive coverage of the war.
Technically adept and quietly devastating, it’s a deeply personal exploration of the story of Komfel’s cousin and her own attempts to come to terms with it decades later. The film stays with you not because of the answers to the question of what happened, but rather the means used to try to find something resembling closure.
