I’ve never seen Hoop Dreams before. Surprised? Me too. It comes up frequently in conversation with other documentary filmmakers. And despite being famously snubbed by the Oscar committee, it is “the most successful and critically acclaimed documentary in American history,” Roger Ebert wrote in 1995 (obviously prior to Michael Moore’s blockbusters). I finally sat down to screen the nearly 3-hour film for myself last night.

Synopsis: The story of two black kids from low-income neighborhoods in Chicago, who dream of one day playing in the NBA. The film follows their separate paths  through high school, chronicling their personal and professional challenges that include low grades, money problems, unexpected fatherhood, crime and drugs in addition to the main conflict, which happens on the court in a series of high-school playoff games culminating in state championship game.

Story Structure: The film begins a few moments before the film’s climax: in the final moments of a high-school state championship game. This let’s the audience know that something big is going to happen in the film – someone is going to make it to the playoffs. At this early stage there’s a great line from one of the characters: “When I get in the NBA…” This tells us he WANTS something, and provides the classic ingredient of a character-driven plot. It starts the story train in motion. And we’re willing to stay in our seats to see what happens.

We then flash back to pre-high school, where the story really begins. We meet Arthur Agee, who gets recruited by the same suburban high school that Isaiah Thomas played on before going pro. The film switches back and forth between the two main characters, using a mix of cinema verite and interview-driven storytelling. There’s also a limited amount of narration, provided by director Steve James, to guide us through key points in the story.

The story is helped by one incredibly powerful element: conflict. It is always palpable, arising from the gap between the reality the boys come from and the success they aim to achieve. Everyone plays a part in blocking them: their coach makes their life hell, and fails to see the talent in one of them. Injuries threaten to detail the other. Tuition costs force one of the boys to drop out of school briefly. One of the boys fathers leaves the family. One of them gets mugged. Friends become drug dealers. And of course, the opposing team is out to beat them every time. Perhaps the biggest conflict, though, comes from inside – with both boys struggling to barely maintain their grade point average at a level that will give them a shot at going to college.

Overall, this story follows a classic hollywood storyline: act one sets up the heros for their journey with a series of tests that show us they are up to the challenge. Act two shows them either overcoming or failing to overcome a series of increasingly difficult tests, which sets one of them up for the final  showdown in act three. After the climactic final game, the film wraps up quickly. We learn what happened to the two major characters in college in epilogue text prior to the credit roll.

Cinematography: I spent the better part of yesterday shooting 4th-7th grade kids shooting hoops at Eton School, for whom I making a series of short promotional web videos. So I can say with authority that it’s HARD to shoot basketball handheld in a way that isn’t blurry, shaky or out of focus (for me anyway). I was consistently impressed with the fact that Hoop Dreams made it look simple and easy (even in clutch situations during playoff games where they had only once shot at getting it right). They are helped by shooting wide, with what appears to be shoulder-carried cameras. Other cinematic standouts: tracking shots shot from car windows show the neighborhood, and the kids walking to school (with camera traveling a little faster than the person walking – as if they are falling behind perhaps). A pan down from the sky to the outdoor basketball court is how we first get into the narrative, from the early set up of playoff game. Nice tough! Remember to get shots like that – you’ll love yourself in the editing room.

I liked how the interviews were a mix of set up interviews, and off-the-cuff interviews, for example, Agee’s mom talking on her bed with arms under her staring at ceiling. Nice mix helps weave it all together into one storytelling experience. Also, I loved how they included the live camera shots of the orthoscopic surgery – that was very dramatic and made me wince. Also, there are two places in the film where big games are introduced with a shot from up high in the stands with the camera moving through a narrow doorway into the arena. This is a visual metaphor for getting through a “tight spot” and adds great dramatic effect to introduction of game, even though these are very brief shots.

Editing: This film was cut from 250 hours of footage, shot over a 5 year period. That’s a LOT of editing. In addition to just plain brilliant work in finding the thread of story in all of that film, there are a lot of techniques that I observed in this film. For example, one convention that we return to throughout the film is a stock evening shot of the outside window of Agee’s home, against dark blue evening sky. Night is falling. Darkness is gathering. And the editor is both setting the stage for some drama to unfold and telling us where the action actually happened at. A nice extra is that the editor could begin the sound of the family talking before we cut to them, which pulls us into the conversation at same time as informing us where it was taking place without having to use narrator to do so.

I also really liked the cuts that move us seamlessly from practice games into real games. This establishes the rationale for the practice – it really does pay to practice hard – or, in some cases, it doesn’t pay because you didn’t practice hard enough. Narration is subtle, with just enough to tell the story. I like it. Finally, I like the frequent mixing of closeup, medium and wide shots used throughout the film.

Music and Audio: There’s frequent use of music in the film to introduce dramatic moments and cue us that something important is going down. A lot of the dramatic effect background music is repetitive, interestingly. But there are a lot of great cuts in there too by performers like Snoop Dog. Audio is recorded well enough that I can’t remember much about it, which is exactly what well-recorded and -mixed audio should do.

This film, more than any other I’ve screened to date, incorporates most of the storytelling devices available to documentary filmmakers: narration, cinema verite, interview, still photos, news casts, newspaper headlines. Without feeling chaotic or unstructured. Together it all adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. No wonder everyone’s still talking about this film 16 years later.

Stanless Steel

I saw Strongman at the 9pm showing of it’s opening night at NW Film Forum here in Seattle, with director Zachary Levy in attendance. Just a handful of people showed up. Which surprised me, because it won Grand Jury for best doc at Slamdance last year.

Synopsis: An aging strongman, whose specialty is bending pennies and lifting trucks with his bare hands, struggles to hold his life together and earn a living in a world more interested in flashy showmanship that “true” strength.

Story Structure: The film is organized on a linear timeline, which follows events in the life of “Stanless” Steel, the main character in the film. We see him rehearsing for performances, with his family in New Jersey, and performing at events that vary widely from private weddings up to a trip to London where Stanless performs on a TV show with other strongmen. The film closely follows his rocky relationship with his girlfriend, Barbara, and the challenge of living with his low-income family and drug-using brother. What really works wonderfully well is the fact that his struggle to bend steel acts as a metaphor for his struggle to keep his life together. Add that that the fact that it’s also a metaphor for how difficult it is to make a cinema verite film, and you have a perfect storm of cinematic synchronicity.

Cinematography: The film was shot entirely by Levy, who used a hefty digibeta, shoulder-held video camera. Nothing about the way it was filmed really jumped out at me, which is a testament to the filmmaker’s intentions: to put all the attention on the events as they occur, rather than on how they were filmed. The quality is “good enough” – standard definition, much of it was shot in low light at Stan’s home. Levy told me that to light the scenes, he replaced the standard 65-watt bulbs in  the home with 100-watt bulbs, which provided just enough light, while keeping the scene appearing exactly as it otherwise would have had he not been filming. Great trick.

Editing: Levy edited the film himself in Avid. The editing is simple and straightforward, and calls no attention to itself, in keeping with cinema verite tradition. My only beef with the editing comes about 3/4 of the way through the film, where I think a much tighter edit of the final quarter of the film would have improved its story and mainstream audience watchability. I was ready for the film to end sooner than it did, and the ending really just trailed out, rather than ending with any finality or in keeping with classic story arc. But that’s probably how Levy intended it: because life itself doesn’t follow story scripts.

Music and Sound: Levy is a cinema verite purist. He wanted what actually happened to provide the soundtrack for the film instead of adding music himself. Music in the film happens in scenes where the characters are playing the radio. Levy claimed “fair use” to reproduce them in the film, rather than paying expensive clearance fees, which I think is a great strategy for documentary filmmakers. To take this approach, of course, reproducing the song has to be truly part of the scene and therefore the quality is going to be limited. But it’s very authentic.  Levy did use one song for this film, and it plays over the credits at the end, not during, the film.

He had just one crew member with him on all of his shoots: a sound guy, who used a shotgun mic on a boom pole to record the main characters. He hooked up the main character to a wireless lav, but almost always had the boom operator there as well to catch his interactions with other characters.

While Levy was in Seattle for the screening of his film, he was gracious enough to accept my invitation to dinner, and I learned a lot about the challenges of verite filmmaking and DIY film distribution. I met up with him at NW Film Forum, where he was asking staff to make a bigger sign announcing his presence in an effort to boost flagging attendance. When a man walked in to buy a ticket to another film, Levy unsuccessfully tried to talk him into seeing Strongman instead. That’s what I call working hard to promote your film!

Levy told me it took him 9 years to make this film – 3 years shooting, and the rest in post. I hope it doesn’t take him that long to do his next one.

New Brow, a film by Tanem Davidson, just finished a short three-day run at Northwest Film Forum. I caught it last night on it’s final evening in town.

Synopsis: Through more than 40 interviews with “low-brow” artists, gallery owners and collectors, filmmaker Tanem Davidson explores the cultural roots and evolution of popular art through the work of graphic designers like Shepherd Fairey, cartoonists and street graffiti artists. The film chronicles their DIY rise from the streets to the place where today they are poised to break into the “high brow” world that has until recently been unwilling to accept them as “serious” artists.

Story Structure: This film is a straightforward, interview-driven documentary film. There’s tons of visually interesting b-roll and always the voice of an artist in the background talking us through the story. Still photos are zoomed through, panned across, or pulled back from before cutting back to the person being interviewed. The film tries to cover the entire movement but sacrifices a clear story arc in the attempt. Some elements of conflict arise from artists describing their outsider status from big NYC galleries who until recently have not been interested in showing their work. But I left the film wishing more thought had been given to taking me on a journey with a clear beginning, middle and end.

Cinematography: The production value was not high. The interviews appeared to have been grabbed in a scattershot way without any stylistic cohesion, and most disappointing, some were just plain poorly lit. But one thing worked well: there’s a ton of great art in the film. And that really helped make it visually interesting. In particular, most of the art is shot up close, so it’s really in your face, which works for the subject. I found myself wishing the camera had moved more slowly on the pans – you can hardly pan or zoom too slow in my view. Side note: the cinematography in Up In The Air, which I saw Saturday night, was so powerful, in part, because the camera work was so subtle. There’s all these wonderful super slow tracking shots. I had to watch the edge of the frame to determine whether the camera was actually moving, and it almost always was throughout the film, which worked very well for a film about travel.

Editing: This film could have been editing a lot more tightly. A lot of the material felt repetitive to me, and I didn’t feel l like I was being guided through the huge amount of material by a master storyteller. There wasn’t a clear beginning, middle and end of this film, just a lot of interesting and historically significant material, that I think could have been focused much more sharply to greater effect.

Music and Sound: Audio was distractingly bad in some of the interviews. There didn’t appear to have been any attempt to control the setting of the interviews, resulting in cuts that transition directly from a quiet office to an echoing gallery so that you really notice the difference. And in some cases the audio was too loud relative to what came before and after – levels weren’t normalized.

What happens when filmmakers make a film about the same topic as another set of filmmakers at roughly the same time?  I’ve always felt that it’s best not to worry about it, because no film can be YOUR film. But this film is one thing that can happen. Similar material was covered, faster and with higher production values, in Beautiful Losers, which was released in 2008. I guess this goes to show that it pays to be first, or that if you’re going to come after, you have to find a way to put a new spin on the material. I don’t think this film achieves that. But what the filmmakers DID achieve is, they made a film! And that’s always an achievement worth celebrating.

Synopsis: Tarnation is Jonathan Caouette’s dark autobiographical film, which draws on home movie footage, phone messages and conversations with family members to recount his abusive childhood and his awkward relationship with his mentally ill mother, who herself was a victim of abuse. The film follows her losing battle to stay sane, and the filmmaker’s struggle to face his own fear that one day he too may suffer the same fate.

Structure: While this is a chaotic film, filled with disturbing and repetitive visuals, there is definitely a structure that propels the film forward. The film opens in New York, where Caouette establishes that he’s gay in the opening scene of the film by showing himself chilling with a male lover. Then he learns his mom has overdosed on lithium, which launches him on a trip to Texas to be with her. While on the trip, he uses footage of the passing landscape to begin flashing back to family footage from much earlier years. He uses a final transition in which the present-day passing landscape becomes pixelated and dissolves into the old family footage and we pull back out of an old TV where we find ourselves in his disturbing past. The film follows a mostly linear progression from the time of his childhood and catches up with the point where the film opens, then continues briefly past that to the present day, concluding with Caouette finally making an appearance as narrator speaking to the camera, giving voice to his fears.

Cinematography: This was an extremely low budget film. According to the film’s IMDB entry, it cost just $218 to make this film, but cost $400,000 to license the music and video clip royalties. But the fact that the quality is crap adds to the nature of the story, which is about someone whose life is pretty crappy. The footage looks super saturated and in many places solarized throughout the film, which helps it look stylized intentionally, rather than just plain low-quality. Stills and moving images are freely and frequently mixed together and that works well.

Editing: This film was edited on iMovie. It uses an array of simple editing tricks to create a sense of dislocation and disassociation. Highlights are blown out, pictures zoom in and out and multiply, and characters seem to disappear into mirror reflections of themselves, as if being turned in a kaleidoscope. There’s a long sequence of still photos early in the film that show Caouette’s early childhood, and they simply “flash dissolve” one after another (that is, one picture gives way to the next by quickly fading up to white, and down to the next image).

There is HEAVY use of text to narrate the story, and despite my general aversion to narration in films, I found myself wondering whether narration would have been a better choice. We learn later in the film that the filmmaker doesn’t trust himself to let go in front of the camera, which explains the awkward and repeated use of text to move the story forward.

Music and Audio: Lots of music in this film (which explains why it cost $400k to get all of it released) playing in the background while an endless number of quickly cut stills and short clips play on the screen. Lyrics like “I fell down the stairs, I wished you were dead, he handed me your head…”  support the mood of the film. One nice audio transition that I’ve heard before: a sudden change of scene behind which a sound like a plane landing that is suddenly cut off as the volume rises. I want to find a sound effect for that and use it somewhere some day. There’s a nice found music edit which begins with a scene in NY subway where a street artist is singing. The visuals quickly move on to something else, but audio stays with the street performance for awhile. Great reminder to keep that camera rolling on stuff longer than you think you’ll need it – and remember that the camera is basically a rape recorder, too, even if you’re not getting any visuals at same time.

This film was a huge hit at festivals from Canne to Sundance, not because of it’s technical prowess, but because it is an authentic story told in the way only this filmmaker could tell. The subtitle for the film is also an important message to documentary filmmakers looking for ideas: Your greatest creation is the life you lead.

Here’s a really great in-depth interview with Caouette about how this film was made.