Documentary filmmaking has come alive in recent years, and one reason is that the new digital equipment makes the physical part of filmmaking a lot easier. Like similar shifts to lighter equipment in the past, digital also creates, willy-nilly, a new aesthetic and a new relation of the audience to the spectacle. The invention, in the nineteen-twenties, of the Bell & Howell six-pound, handheld camera made it possible in the Second World War for combat photographers to throw themselves into battle alongside infantrymen. In the early sixties, the development of lightweight 16-mm. cameras with magazines holding four hundred feet of film allowed filmmakers to enter into volatile situations and continue shooting for ten minutes at a time. The heart of cinéma vérité, or “direct cinema,” was the existential self-creation of the filmmaker as he responded to the life unfolding around him. Filmmakers like Curry have taken this strategy a step further. He recorded the sound himself, and didn’t have lights or a crew. His little Sony PD-150 must have looked like a toy. The one-man filmmaker has passed from amateur to professional.

There are other good reasons for the documentary explosion. The commercial networks may have given up on documentaries, but public- and cable-television stations both finance and exhibit nonfiction films. And, as in the sixties, the political atmosphere is ripe for film journalism: public life is awash in scoundrels, liars, and deluded ideologues; all over the world, cultural conflict is playing out on the streets. The adventure of filmmaking has become irresistible again.

Another young director, Rachel Boynton, has also made a campaign film—“Our Brand Is Crisis,” which chronicles what happened a few years ago when some of President Clinton’s former consultants—James Carville, Stan Greenberg, and Jeremy Rosner—attempted to get Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, or Goni, as everyone calls him, back into office in Bolivia. Goni, a successful businessman who grew up in the United States, had been President of the country from 1993 to 1997, and had instituted a center-left program of privatization combined with social security and national health care. (He left office because Bolivian Presidents cannot serve consecutive terms.) When he ran again, in 2002, he hired the Clinton gang to apply the advanced technology of campaigning—polls, focus groups, advertising, branding—in a country that was sliding into populist and nationalist outrage over his practice of selling shares in Bolivian enterprises to foreign investors. As throngs of campesinos gathered in the streets, the Americans managed to get their man elected in a crowded field, but with only twenty-two per cent of the vote, and he resigned after a year. The movie ends with the exiled Goni back in America, sitting alone, staring at the Washington Monument in chagrin.

Like Curry, Boynton follows the campaign from beginning to end. But she also cuts in rueful interviews with the principals which she filmed afterward, so we get reflections on the disaster as we watch it unfold. Goni, it turns out, was a wealthy industrialist unable or unwilling to make a connection with an enraged people. But that’s only part of the problem. The Clintonites are caught in a painful bind. They may be right in their belief that Goni’s brand of capitalism-plus-benefits is the best way for Bolivia to climb out of poverty, but, for all their intelligence and sensitivity, they used campaign methods that, in a poor country in turmoil, were pathetically beside the point. Among other things, “Our Brand Is Crisis” is about the failure of good intentions—a potent American theme at the moment. As the movie suggests, this failure, born of American arrogance, embraces liberals as well as neocons, though the liberals, to their credit, do occasionally take responsibility for their mistakes. In a long, unhappy interview, Jeremy Rosner, pondering the futility of his actions in Bolivia, looks like an animal eating its young.

Something’s getting swallowed in Lake Victoria, too. Everything, in fact. The Nile perch, a huge exotic fish that was introduced there in a misbegotten experiment in the nineteen-sixties, has become a predator that has eliminated more than two hundred other species, and has turned a mixed economy that flourished around the lake into a voracious mono-economy. In “Darwin’s Nightmare,” another Oscar-nominated documentary, the Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper settled into the lakefront town of Mwanza, Tanzania, one of those anomalous, raffishly sinister Conradian places which dot the earth. There’s a big European market for the perch, which draws people from the countryside to work at the lake, but catching the fish is so dangerous that many young men die, and many others end up as servants or prostitutes. Every day, crews from a Russian cargo company fly hundreds of tons of perch fillets out of Mwanza, but the workers are so poorly paid that they can’t afford to eat any—they’re left with the head and bones. Yet, if Sauper is fired up by anti-globalist conviction, his instincts as an artist and as a man rule out any kind of rhetoric or cheapness. “Darwin’s Nightmare” is a fully realized poetic vision. The enormous Ilyushin cargo planes cast strange shadows on the water as they fly in and out; the town, which has been devastated by aids, is an incoherent gathering place of vulnerable fishermen, drunken pilots, prostitutes longing to get out, and orphaned children getting stoned on the streets at night. The dolorousness of the scene is overpowering, but so is the beauty of the faces and the landscape, and Sauper, moving in close, establishes an unusual intimacy with his subjects. The men, women, and children get a chance to explain their own roles in an inexorable process in which nearly everyone, sooner or later, becomes a victim. 


View on The New Yorker's website


Back to Press