Doc Hollywood

Full Frame celebrates documentaries and the critics who ... make them?

by Sam Adams

TYPECAST: Gary Hustwit's Helvetica explores the ubiquity of the flawlessly designed font. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Critics get used to being asked about the script everyone assumes they're working on, but I've never been mistaken for a filmmaker more than during four days at the Full Frame documentary film festival in Durham, N.C. I'd like to think it's that piercing look in my eyes or my artfully bohemian style, but the more likely reason is that at Full Frame, everyone's a filmmaker.

Not literally, of course: With some 26,000 tickets sold during this year's festival, there have to be a few innocent bystanders (as well as a few of those parasites who only write about movies). But it did seem that everywhere you looked, there was some titan of documentary cinema. Drop into the hospitality suite for some free barbecue and grab a table next to D.A. Pennebaker and Mira Nair. Stop by the front desk for directions, and there's Ross McElwee busily typing on his laptop.

As the festival, which ran from April 12 to 15, wound on, new faces were added to the old, like Jason Kohn, a former researcher for Errol Morris, who makes a striking debut with Manda Bala, a visually striking and metaphorically rich exploration of Sao Paolo's kidnapping epidemic. Interweaving shots of a frog farm where the stronger specimens literally eat their young, the movie, co-produced by Penn grad Jared Goldman, deftly shifts between the city's gleaming skyscrapers and the shantytowns sprawling below. From the soaring price of bulletproof sports cars to a surgeon specializing in reconstructed ears (often severed by kidnappers as proof of capture), the movie emphasizes how kidnapping has become an industry, both underground and above.

As artfully designed if less stomach-turning, Gary Hustwit's Helvetica uses the ubiquity of the titular typeface as the jumping-off point for a wry exploration of the way design transforms the world and our experience of it. Intended to emphasize modernism and rationality, the Swiss-designed style has become nigh-on ubiquitous, as Hustwit demonstrates with an increasingly mind-boggling series of shots. From corporate logos to the New York subways to the back of European garbage trucks, the sleek, serif-less font seems to be literally everywhere — which may not be such a good thing. The designers interviewed for the movie split between those who find Helvetica's perfect proportions a source of limitless possibility and those who see its dominance as tyrannical, even quasi-fascist. If you've never parsed the political implications of typesetting before, you're in for an eye-opening.

Celebrating the festival's 10th anniversary, the "Power of Ten" series invited a decade's worth of Full Frame alums to present an influential film from their past. Most showed up in person to do the honors: Mira Nair testified on behalf of The Battle of Algiers; Michael Moore chose Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, a ragged, nervy portrait of a Japanese World War II veteran hunting down officers who executed soldiers for desertion weeks after the war had ended. Moore, who joined Hara for a Q&A after the screening, described the "long walk back to the editing room" of Roger & Me after seeing Army for the first time. Considering that the movie's righteous stalker is revealed as volatile, violent and possibly mentally unbalanced, one wonders what sobering lessons Moore took from his viewing. Also in the "Power of Ten" series was Haile Gerima's epochal Harvest: 3000 Years, a rhythmically structured parable of Ethiopian class revolt, presented by a videotaped Martin Scorsese. (The print was a new restoration; a DVD is due out later this year.)

Bridging past and present was Moving Midway, the first film by Godfrey Cheshire, a critic who actually did make a movie. A transplanted North Carolinian, Cheshire returns home to witness the uprooting of his family's ancestral Midway Plantation, now surrounded by shopping malls and big-box stores. Unable to resist the metaphor offered by his traveling homestead (what critic can?), Cheshire unearths his own family's history, including that of the former slaves who are his cousins. (One is Robert Hinton, associate director of the Africana studies program at NYU.) Flanked by his family, familiar and newly discovered, Cheshire wrestles with the past, real and mythic, the latter embodied by excerpts from antebellum melodramas like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. As Midway is lifted from its foundations and trundled off to a new home, the history of the Old South, good and bad, seems to travel with it. Its replacement? A mall, of course.

As the festival wound down and awards were distributed (two each to The Monastery and The Devil Came on Horseback), a nor'easter swept into town, a reminder of the frigid climate awaiting back home. But one canceled flight and a bummed ride later (please go to aliveinbaghdad.org and repay my benefactor), I'm safe and warm, ready to go back next year come hell or high water.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)