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.

Why is Downton Abbey so popular?

Why are so many U.S. viewers so enamored with Downton Abbey, which ended its third season on PBS last Sunday?

This British period drama television series, created by Julian Fellowes, is set in a fictional Yorkshire country estate of Downton Abbey and depicts the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants in the post-Edwardian era.

Like the popular series Upstairs Downstairs, which aired on PBS over five seasons, 1971-75, Downton dramatizes the lives of the aristocratic family and of their servants, as well as their interactions.

Class is entrenched in British life, set according to what family one is born into, while Americans like to deny its reality, believing anyone can climb the ladder of success. Downton accentuates this difference at times with the presence of Cora, Countess of Grantham, an American heiress married to Robert, Earl of Grantham, whose estate is facing financial problems in season three.

Perhaps part of the appeal of Downton is this strange interplay of characters from the upper and lower classes.

But no, that’s true of just about every British product on TV. And besides, the show is equally popular in Great Britain. In fact, it has become one of the most widely watched television shows in the world.

Critics, while lauding the show’s acting, have not been unanimous in their accolades. In “Brideshead Regurgitated” (The Atlantic, January/February), James Parker calls Downton a “ludicrously popular aristosoap” and says its motto might be: “Footmen have feelings, too.”

Parker goes on to call Downton “a harmless, anachronistic masque of manners, in which the players keep obediently to their roles and thereby gratify the innate conservatism of the audience.”

Others include Simon Schama, the British historian, who complained in Time that Downton misrepresented how awful World War I was, along with other historical inaccuracies.

But Downton is not a documentary; it is, as Parker says, a soap opera. Fellowes has created characters that, on the one hand, tend to be all good, like Anna (a housemaid) or Bates (a valet) or Mrs. Hughes (a housekeeper), or pretty bad, like Thomas (a footman) or O’Brien (a lady’s maid). On the other hand, he introduces some changes in certain characters as they face adversity and respond in either heroic or tragic ways.

The fact is, audiences love characters they can boo and those they can cheer. And while we’re being manipulated by melodrama, we often don’t care.

Mondays have found Facebook posts commenting on the previous night’s episode. The setting and the travails of these fictional characters from another era that is also quite fictional, despite its occasional historical signposts, take us away from our mundane or less interesting lives for a moment each week.

That’s what entertainment does, whether it’s a PBS soap or a football game or a concert or a murder mystery. Humans throughout history have sought diversions from their day-to-day lives.

Are such diversions bad? Not as long as we don’t accept them as some kind of Truth (with a capital T).

Downton may not present an accurate sense of what life was really like on estates in post-Edwardian England or present realistic characters. But it’s fun to watch, an enjoyable diversion before heading back to work. 

Life's too-quick passing

Turkish novelist and screenwriter Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in 2006. His works have sold more than 11 million copies in 60 languages. Many of his novels, including Snow and My Name Is Red, as well as some of his nonfiction works, have been translated into English. But Silent House (Knopf, 2012, $26.95, 334 pages), his second novel, first published in 1983, is just now out in English.

 

Pamuk’s narratives are complex and often deal with the conflict between Eastern and Western values. Most are set in Turkey, whether contemporary or historical, and reflect issues and conflicts within that nation.

Silent House, though not as complex as later works, is set during a tense time in Turkey before the military coup of 1980. The point of view of its 32 titled chapters alternate among an array of characters who come together in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near Istanbul.

Fatma is a mostly bedridden widow who resides in an old mansion she owns. She has lived there for decades and recalls her husband, an idealistic doctor who died years earlier. Waiting on her is her servant, Recep, a dwarf and the doctor’s illegitimate son. They depend on each other but are not friendly to one another.

Fatma’s three grandchildren—her son also died years before—make their annual summer visit and at one point go with her to visit her husband and son’s graves. They do not share her Islamic faith but go more out of duty.

Faruk, the eldest, is a budding alcoholic and obsessed with history. He visits the local archive and tries to write a coherent history. His sister, Nilgün, is a leftist who likes to go to the beach each morning in this resort town. Metin, the youngest, is in high school and hangs out with his wealthier schoolmates while fantasizing about going to America, if he can only talk his grandmother into selling the house, moving into an apartment and giving her grandchildren the profit.

The other character we hear from is Hasan, Recep’s nephew, a high school dropout who has fallen in with right-wing nationalists and carries an unrequited love for Nilgün.

Fatma, the grandmother, spends sleepless hours in the “silent house,” which is falling apart, ruminating about her atheist husband, who sold her jewelry, piece by piece, in order to pay for his project of writing an encyclopedia. She inhales “the smell of old age that rises up, and in the alligator darkness [her] little dry hand fishes for [her] handkerchief and [she dabs her] poor dry eyes.” She tells herself, “I’ve spent my whole life in pain” and looks forward to death.

The younger folk all long for a different life, for something to change. Faruk drinks and thinks of his wife, who left him, and calls out “desperately for someone or something, as if trapped in a nightmare that [he] can’t wake up from and escape.” Later, he thinks: “I wished my whole consciousness could be erased. I wanted to escape from my own awareness, to wander freely in a world outside my mind.”

Hasan, the son of the doctor’s other bastard son, feels the separation from his cousins, is in love with Nilgün and wants to impress his fellow nationalists. He says in his mind: “I don’t know yet what it is that I’m going to do, but you’re all going to be amazed.” Yet he, too, ends up alone.

Recep, who seems the most content of them all, nevertheless must endure taunts from others about his size. He reflects: “I sometimes think it would be nice to have a friend I could be silent with.”

Pamuk deftly combines these characters’  internal struggles with the political turmoil going on around them. One character, referring to politics, says, “No matter where you go, it grabs you by the collar.”

Following a tragedy, Fatma recalls her childhood, when she found solace in a book, because “no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you’ve finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn’t understand before.”

Silent House is not Pamuk’s best work, and without a better understanding of Turkey’s turmoil in 1980, it may be difficult to understand. Nevertheless, his characters’ struggles grab you by the collar and make you care about them and about life’s too-quick passing.

How much military spending is enough?

As discussions continue about the federal budget and how to reduce spending, we hear little about the so-called defense budget. And if we do, some congressional leader often bemoans even considering cuts in the military.

In “The Force” (The New Yorker, Jan. 28), Jill Lepore asks, How much military is enough? She reports on the House Armed Services Committee, whose chair, Howard P. McKeon (R-Calif.), though he has never served in the military, “believes that it’s his job to protect the Pentagon from budget cuts.”

Lepore points out that “the United States spends more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined” and that “between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled, reaching more than $700 billion a year.”

She then reviews the history of U.S. military spending. “Early Americans,” she writes, “considered a standing army—a permanent army kept even in times of peace—to be a form of tyranny.” And in fact, the United States did not establish a standing army until World War II. And the Armed Services Committee was formed in 1946.

With the onset of the Cold War, military spending ballooned, and in the 1950s it “made up close to three-quarters of the federal budget.” Much of that increase was also pushed by military contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, who “argued not only for military expansion but also for federal subsidies.”

At a hearing on the future of the military on Sept. 8, 2011, John Garamendi (D-Calif.) read aloud from a speech by President Eisenhower from 1953 in which he said, “This world in arms … is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. … This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.”

Eisenhower, Lepore notes, was “the son of pacifist Mennonites who considered war a sin.” In his farewell address in 1961, he said “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

“If any arms manufacturer today holds what Eisenhower called ‘unwarranted influence,’ it is Lockheed Martin,” writes Lepore. Its contracts with the Pentagon amount to about “$30 billion each year, and it “spends $15 million a year on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions.”

Lepore quotes from soldier-critics who oppose the endless warmaking and excessive military spending that has occured in the past decade. The most persuasive of these, she writes, is Andrew J. Bacevich, a career Army officer and now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

Bacevich argues that Americans “have fallen prey to militarism,” which “defines the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.”

He blames much of this on intellectuals, both conservative and liberal. “The resort to force,” Lepore writes, “is a product of political failure” and a failure of political culture.

She notes that Bacevich has lost patience with “CNN loudmouths, neocon opinion-page columnists, retired generals who run for office, Hollywood action-film directors, Jerry Falwell, Wesley Clark, Tom Clancy, Bill Clinton.” Bacevich, she writes, “deplores their ego-driven mythmaking, their love of glory, their indifference to brutality.”

As Bacevich notes, militarism is like an illness that romanticizes what is barbarous. Our government needs a dose of sanity as it considers the exorbitant amount being spent to feed this illness.

Stories of dignity and complexity

Called by some—and I wouldn’t disagree—one of the greatest living writers of short stories, Alice Munro, who is 81, keeps producing fiction of the highest quality.

Dear Life (Knopf, 2012, $26.95), the Canadian writer’s 13^th story collection, includes 14 stories, though the last four, she writes, introducing a section called “Finale,” “form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.”

Yet even these last four each have a structure, a pace and an epiphany that make them good stories, even Munro stories, despite her comments in “Dear Life,” the final story, that “this is not a story, only life,” and, “It wouldn’t do in fiction.”

As I and others have noted, Munro’s stories have the feel of novels. They often encompass a character’s lifespan. And while they develop through a series of scenes played out in both physical and psychological detail, she suddenly will often move the narrative forward or backward several years or even decades.

For example, in “Train,” one of the book’s better stories, though it’s difficult to rank one higher than another, after following Jackson and Belle through many years of living together in a nonsexual relationship, he abandons her, and we’ve moved years ahead. Then we suddenly go back several decades to when Jackson was in high school. We’re in a different, though related narrative that provides insight into the one we were reading. Then we return to the present, and the entire story now makes better sense.

Munro often uses trains in her stories, including three here. Trains involve movement, provide means of escape and often lead to encounters with strangers.

In “To Reach Japan,” a woman leaves her husband in Vancouver and gets on a train with her daughter to go to Toronto, where she hopes to find a man she met at a party. She sends a message to the newspaper where he works that reads, “Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle—and hoping it will reach Japan.”

In “Leaving Maverley,” another of the better stories, Ray, a night watchman, is asked to walk a girl home from the movie theater where works on Saturday nights as a ticket taker. These two end up leaving the town of Maverley for different reasons. Leah, the girl, runs off with the minister’s son, a saxophone player. Years pass, and scandal follows Leah, who leaves the minister’s son for a minister, who eventually leaves her for another minister. Meanwhile, Ray marries and, years later, goes to visit his wife in a hospital, where she lies in a coma. When she dies, he carries with him “something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.”

Many of the stories are set in the 1950s, while often spilling forward into the 1970s or beyond. And Munro punctuates the stories with comments from the narrators about how things were back then. Greta, in “To Reach Japan,” notes that “feminism was not even a word people used.” And in “Amundsen,” the narrator mentions butter and comments that “it was called butter but it was really orange-streaked margarine, colored in the kitchen as was the only legal way in those days.”

Her women characters often face a world in which their options for work are limited to housewife, office worker, teacher or nurse, but they tend to find ways of fighting these limitations.

Munro’s language is so accessible and engrossing that it disguises the complexity of her stories. She also captures characters with apt descriptions. In describing Greta and her husband, Peter, she writes: “She avoided anything useful like the plague. It seemed he did the opposite.” And later: “His opinions were something like his complexion,” which was light-colored, never flushed.

In “Pride,” a story about two sad, lonely people who move into a sad, lonely old age, the unnamed narrator, a man with a harelip who has cut himself off from friendship, describes Oneida: “She was laughing almost soundlessly, a laugh that might even indicate that she was in pain.”

We as readers are sure that these two will end up together, but in the end his pride keeps them apart. Munro wrests the story from being depressing by ending with an arresting image of baby skunks playing in a birdbath in the backyard. Oneida says, “Have you ever seen such a sight?” The narrator says, “Never. I thought she might say another thing, and spoil it, but no, neither of us did. We were as glad as we could be.” 

This is what Munro does in all her stories. She takes us into characters’ lives so that they feel real. She takes them through various experiences that don’t usually go where we expect. And while she refuses to concoct happy endings, her characters often come to places of deeper understanding that also bring readers a greater sense of the complexity and dignity of people’s lives.