Documentaries take us to other worlds

Every year, filmmakers from around the world produce documentaries that introduce us to worlds we may not encounter otherwise. These films serve not only to inform or teach us but to move us and even lead us to action.

I want to look at three recent documentary films now available on DVD (or through streaming). Each of these films is shot with skill and care, often on a meager budget.

Searching for Sugar Man (PG-13), which won this year’s Oscar for best documentary, tells the bizarre story of Sixto Rodriguez, a Detroit folksinger who had a short-lived recording career in the early 1970s with two well-reviewed albums that didn’t sell. Unknown to him,  he became a pop music icon and inspiration for generations in South Africa.

The film interviews a music journalist who used hints from song lyrics to track down where Rodriguez had lived. He was able to dispel rumors that Rodriguez had committed suicide.

Eventually fans locate Rodriguez, who goes to South Africa and plays to sellout crowds of thousands. But the film testifies to this musician’s humility and concern for justice. He remains a simple laborer who lives in the same house in Detroit for 40 years.

Detropia (NR, a combination of “Detroit” and “utopia”) looks at the economic decline in Detroit due mostly to the long-term changes in the automobile industry. Rather than offer narration, it primarily follows three Detroit residents: a video blogger, a nightclub owner and a United Auto Workers local president. All three are African Americans who articulate well both the difficulties they face and the hope they carry that things will improve.

The film recounts the huge changes over the decades. For example, in 1930, Detroit was the fastest-growing city in the country; in 2010, it was the fastest-declining city. We learn of 100,000 houses being torn down.

We see up close the effects of this decline on these and many other residents. The film shows their anger and their determination to remain in their city and help it survive.

An artist couple represents the growing number of younger people moving into the city’s center, buying up houses at vastly reduced prices. And the Detroit Opera is part of the revitalization going on there.

5 Broken Cameras (NR), co-directed by Palestinian Emad Burnat and Israeli Guy Davidi, is the remarkable first-hand account of protests in Bil’in, a West Bank village affected by the Israeli West Bank barrier.

Burnat shot most of the footage on five different cameras, and the film is divided into the periods of those cameras and recounts how each was broken, either smashed or shot.

Burnat gets his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son, Gibreel. At the same time, a barrier is being built on village land that will isolate the village from much of its farmland, which the Israelis will then confiscate to build a settlement. The villagers begin to resist this decision through nonviolent protests.

These protests continue through the next five years, and Burnat records them, obtaining damning evidence of the shameful actions of Israeli soldiers, including shooting to death several people, including an 11-year-old boy.

Burnat calls healing a challenge and says “it is a victim’s obligation to heal. By healing you resist oppression,” he says. “Forgotten wounds can’t be healed, so I film to heal.” These Palestinians’ courage and ability to remain nonviolent stands out in this powerful film.

Are machines taking over our work?

This may sound like the question a Luddite would ask. But several articles recently have addressed the fact that machines are doing more and more work that humans have done, and these articles ask, Is this good or bad—or a mixture?

I read a novel not long ago (Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles) that mentioned “the Singularity,” the moment when a computer “wakes up, becomes self-aware, gains consciousness.” This is also the premise behind the Terminator movies. But I’m not addressing that—not yet.

In a Jan. 24 Associated Press story, “Imagining a Future When Machines Have All the Jobs,” Paul Wiseman refers to the book The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford. Ford describes a nightmare scenario, Wiseman writes: “Machines leave 75 percent of American workers unemployed by 2089. Consumer spending collapses. Even those who are still working slash spending and save everything they can; they fear their jobs are doomed, too. As people lose work, they stop contributing to Social Security, potentially bankrupting the retirement system.”

“Smarter machines will make life better and increase wealth in the economy,” Ford says. The challenge, however, “is to make sure the benefits are shared when most workers have been supplanted by machines.” He recommends “imposing massive taxes on companies, which would be paying far less in wages thanks to automation, and distributing the proceeds to those left unemployed by technology.”

In a Feb. 2 New York Times article, “Raging (Again) Against the Robots,” Catherine Rampell cautions against alarmist views of new technology. She recounts some of the dire warnings over the centuries against automation that takes over human labor and notes how laborers welfare has improved in the past 200 years, due largely to new technology, something Ford does not deny.

She goes on to quote economists who range from an optimistic Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University, to a more pessimistic Erik Brynjolfsson, an economics professor at M.I.T. and co-author of the book Race Against the Machine.

Mokyr says: “Every invention ever made caused some people to lose jobs. … In a good society, when this happens, they put you out to pasture and give you a golf club and a condo in Florida. In a bad society, they put you on the dole, so you have just enough not to starve, but that’s about it.”

Brynjolfsson argues that we have reached a sort of inflection point in productivity growth and that “any job that can be reduced to an algorithm will [lead] to the displacement of workers in industries as diverse as retail and radiology.”

In the March issue of The Atlantic, Jonathan Cohn’s article “The Robot Will See You Now” shows how machines are replacing human workers in health care.

Cohn writes: “IBM’s Watson—the same machine that beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy—is now churning through case histories at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, learning to make diagnoses and treatment recommendations.”

This practice is becoming widespread. Cohn notes that “in Brazil and India, machines are already starting to do primary care, because there’s no labor to do it. They may be better than doctors. Mathematically, they will follow evidence—and they’re much more likely to be right.”

And one doctor says he doesn’t think physicians “will be seeing patients as much in the future.” They’ll become “super-quality-control officers.”

These changes will likely be good for some and bad for others. Rampell writes: “Historically, the children of displaced workers have benefited from mechanization, but the displaced workers themselves have often been permanently passé.”

This all makes me think of a line from a Bruce Springsteen song, how we all need "just a little of that human touch." And robots, like too much of our society, lacks a heart.

Facing death with love

Yesterday I finally saw Amour, the French-language film by Austrian director Michael Haneke that won the Academy Award last Sunday night for best foreign-language film. It definitely deserved that prize, as well as being nominated for best picture.

I would add that Emmanuelle Riva should have won the award for best actress. Her performance is amazing.

Amour (French for “love”) tells the story of an elderly couple in Paris, Anne and Georges, who are retired music teachers with a daughter who lives abroad. Anne suffers a stroke that paralyzes the right side of her body. She makes Georges promise her he won’t send her back to the hospital or to a nursing home. He cares for her, enlisting the help of a nurse for several hours a day.

Anne has a second stroke, which leaves her demented and incapable of coherent speech. At one point she makes clear to Georges that she doesn’t want to go on living.

In his usual way, Haneke focuses on the details of his characters’ lives, lingering on certain scenes that serve a symbolic value, as more than exposition. For example, after Anne dies, Georges buys flowers and carefully cuts off the stems from each one. This is not a fast-paced film but one that takes us through the agonizing process of a loved one’s dying. It shows the ugliness and pain of that process.

We in America (or the West, for that matter) tend to hide from the unpleasantness of death while at the same time sensationalizing it through frequent depictions of violent death. (But notice how those rarely go on to show how those deaths affect the victim’s family or community long after they die.)

Amour defies this tendency. It forces us to face on screen what we will all have to face at some point.

A major aspect of spirituality is facing the truth, and that truth involves the reality of death. Jesus certainly provided an example for us as he faced his (very ugly) death unflinchingly. Amour also helps in this task. It may also help us talk with our loved ones about what plans we want made for when we die or how we die.