The documentary director’s chair: seat belt required
The problem with making a documentary film is that the subject tends, by definition, to have a life of its own. And if you take your job seriously — by definition, to document that life — then your main challenge is to stay on top of your subject as it barrels and shifts beneath you.
At least two best-in-show examples of documentary filmmakers who not only failed to fall off their subjects — but who in fact hung on and wound up with rides to remember — are featured in the second annual Film Festival at Little Washington, a Rappahannock Association for Arts and Community-sponsored event on April 8-10: Patrick Gavin’s “Nerd Prom” and Ironbound Films’ “The Anthropologist.”
“You work on these things for, like, ages,” says Seth Kramer, speaking of “The Anthropologist,” the 2015 release that he and fellow Ironbound Films co-directors Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger actually brainstormed, filmed, wrote and edited — not in that, or any, particular order — for close to four years.
“And until they’re done,” he adds, laughing, “they’re a mess.”
CORRESPONDENTS’ DINNER OR . . . DOG SHOW?
In the case of longtime Washington journalist Gavin, who quit his job at Politico in 2014 to make his feature documentary debut, the sudden freedom to delve deeply into a subject led to some fairly unsettling revelations.
Gavin’s subject was the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and what’s become a frenzied week of related “festivities,” which he’d covered from a social standpoint for years as a reporter. When he realized no one had ever done a serious documentary on the defining week of Washington’s spring season, Gavin set out to do an in-depth profile, or “portrait,” as he says, “just to see what it’s all about.”
“Then I started interviewing people . . . and all the things people said the weekend was about . . . weren’t holding up. That to me was a more interesting story,” he says.
The revelation at the center of his 2015 documentary, “Nerd Prom: Inside Washington’s Wildest Week,” is that the whole affair turns out to be rather ugly —a celebration primarily of branding and consumerism, of corporations and other interests promoting their products and causes at great expense. It’s all rather far from the WHCA’s original intention, shared by the 50 attendees at the first correspondents’ dinner in 1921, to honor and support White House journalists, and to allow reporters and sources to briefly let down their guards and get to know each other better.
All but lost amid the nearly 2,700 celebrities, politicians, corporate-sponsored guests and Presidents who now attend — and not even counting the week of surrounding parties and events (including at least one White House correspondents-themed dog show) — is also the organization’s mission to raise scholarship funds for the White House journalists of tomorrow.
(Not that they’ll be needed tomorrow, seeing as the White House already has 6 million Facebook followers, as Gavin points out in the film. The future of journalism doesn’t appear particularly bright under Gavin’s lights, though his own clear-eyed, slightly ironic style is some cause for hope.)
“Nerd Prom,” which is narrated by Gavin and follows him on his difficult quest to gain access to some of the parties (speaking of irony), concludes that the WHCA needs to drastically change its priorities and redirect its energies — citing, in the most alarming case, the fact that the organization raised a mere $100,000 for scholarships in 2014, while paying its executive director $140,000-plus.
During the presentation of scholarship awards at the dinner, we watch in embarrassment as several familiar faces at the podium repeatedly ask that crowd, which is engaged in welllubricated conversation and paying no attention whatsoever to the non-Presidential, noncelebrity-comedian proceedings, to please quiet down so that student recipients can hear their names being called.
Gavin, 38, remains convinced — as he muses in a final monologue, delivered conversationally during a symbolic drive home from the last party — that Washington’s defining event should not be marked by product placement, brand-based parties and reporters asking celebrities what they thought of Michelle Obama’s dress (something Gavin includes clips of his younger self doing, repeatedly).
“I don’t begrudge L.A. for the Oscars, or New Orleans for Mardi Gras,” he says. “In a lot of ways, those events are the heartbeats of those cities. But Washington, literally by design, is supposed to be a bit different. This town was built on public service. Our biggest moment in the limelight every year should at least try to stay faithful to that.”
Has his film made a difference in the event (which goes off again later this month)?
“No,” Gavin says, his level gaze coming across even over the phone. “If anything, it’s gotten worse. They’re giving less in scholarships, and they’re paying their executive director even more. I’ve asked if they’re getting rid of the red carpet, and they say they’re not.”
Gavin says he doesn’t yet have a plan for his next feature-length documentary, but does plan to work
Digging deeper turns up the unexpected in ‘Nerd Prom’ and ‘The Anthropologist’
on shorter stuff for a while — including a correspondents’ dinner update.
“Sadly, [the film] is still relevant,” he says. “That’s good for me, but bad for the country.”
EMOTIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE
Seth Kramer says he and his partners wanted to make a film about climate change — but not in the usual way. “Documentaries about climate change, they’re very political, or they approach climate change as this science lesson to talk about the mechanics, fossil fuels and carbon footprints, and what’s in the atmosphere, etc. We wanted to do something completely different.”
Enter Susie Crate, a cultural anthropologist from Fairfax County, Va., and a George Mason University professor, who’d just released her book, “Anthropology and Climate Change,” a look at the effects of climate change on cultures — on people, on their relationships with each other and the environment, from prehistoric times to today.
Once the filmmakers had found her and started to get to know her, Kramer says, it became clear that Susie had a teenaged daughter, Katie, whom she hoped to bring along on her field trips — to Siberia, where farmers try to cope with rising water tables as the permafrost layer beneath the soil slowly melts, to the South Pacific, where a tiny island copes with the possibility that its homeland could be entirely underwater sometime in this century, and to the Peruvian Andes, where shrinking glaciers affect both agricultural livelihoods and human spirit.
So Kramer says it became Katie, who was 15 when the project began — filming continued through her departure for college at 18 — on whom “The Anthropologist” began to turn. A typically rebellious and skeptical young woman at first, she accompanies her clearly serious and straightshooting (but clearly caring) mother to remote corners of the globe, where everything and everyone is different but, as she slowly learns (and so do we), shared human traits — love of family and homeland, resourcefulness, adaptability — begin to alter her perception of the world.
What “The Anthropologist” turned out to be, Kramer says, is “a film about climate change — but, at the same time, it doesn’t have to be.”
Then, Kramer says, the filmmakers saw a need for “a time machine, to sort of fast-forward into the future to see where this motherdaughter relationship might lead,” and they thus came upon Mary Catherine Bateson, the daughter of the famous American anthropologist Margaret Mead — who, it turned out, had a very similar relationship with her uber-focused mom when she was a teenager and young woman.
Bateson went on to become an anthropologist herself.
And it’s her gentle recollections and wryly pertinent observations that help make sense and give wider meaning to Susie and Katie’s adventures.
“In documentary filmmaking,” says Kramer, who’s now made four feature-length docs with his Ironbound partners, “you can think of an idea, and you might pursue the idea for a year or longer, and then decide it wasn’t so interesting and dump it. Or you can experience what happened to us in this film, which is: encounter all these surprises, and make a film you couldn’t dream of having made.”
What “The Anthropologist” turned out to be, Kramer says, is “a film about climate change — but, at the same time, it doesn’t have to be. It sort of depends what you, as the viewer, want it to be. If you want to focus more on this motherdaughter drama, you can allow yourself to do that.
“It’s a very philosophical film — but you can choose not to focus on that, either. We were conscious of that as we were weaving together multiple stories into a single drama. So now, you hear two people as they leave a screening talking about it, and it’s almost like they were watching two different movies.”