Documentary

Question time | 6 October 2016

At my wife’s first 12-week scan, I was expecting — and duly got — that much-documented sense of thrilled wonder at the grey blobby thing on the screen. What came as a genuine shock, though, was realising the scan also had the entirely undisguised aim of calculating the baby’s chances of Down’s syndrome, on the apparent assumption that, if they were high, we’d want to terminate. In the event, this wasn’t a dilemma we faced — which possibly makes it easy to take the moral high ground. Even so, the whole process left me feeling both uneasy and rather naive. How long had this been going on? Did everybody else

Fashion shoot

With documentary-makers these days, it can be hard to tell the difference between faux-naivety and the real thing. (Personally, I blame Louis Theroux.) Take BBC2’s Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue (Thursday), directed and narrated by Richard Macer, who often seems suspiciously dazzled by whatever he sees: the editor’s office! The editor’s chair! He also has a tendency to proudly offer observations that aren’t necessarily as startling as he thinks: that the magazine appears to be largely run by women, for instance. But where it’s even trickier to decide whether he’s faking or not is when his off-screen voice anxiously wonders whether Alexandra Shulman, the editor in question, wants him there

Rod Liddle

Blair witch project

I had been wondering where Gorgeous George Galloway might pop up next. Defenestrated from his seat in Bradford West, humiliated in the London mayoral elections — where he received 1.4 per cent of the vote — and no longer apparently an attractive proposition to the reality TV producers, his public life seemed sadly to be drawing to a close. But nope, here he is with a film about the person all left-wing people hate more than any other, Tony Blair. It’s a good film, too, in the main. The Killing$ of Tony Blair was partly crowdfunded and it may well be that the only people who watch it will be

The lying game | 28 July 2016

JT LeRoy was a teenage hustler who emerged from a childhood of abuse, drug addiction and homelessness to write about his harrowing experiences and become a literary sensation as taken up by Madonna, Bono, Winona Ryder, Carrie Fisher, Courtney Love, Lou Reed and Gus Van Sant, among many others. His back story was shocking — raped at five; pimped out by his prostitute mother at truck stops; HIV-positive; heroin-addicted …sit on that, Angela’s Ashes! — but the biggest shock, when it arrived? He did not exist. JT, it turned out, had been confected by Laura Albert, a 35-year-old woman from Brooklyn. This is Laura’s version of events, and whether you’ve

Darkness visible

Perhaps you have sometimes wondered: how would you even begin to make a film about going blind and being blind and what that means? How, when the subject is so profoundly and inherently uncinematic? Or maybe it’s other thoughts that keep you awake at night — such as when we all finally receive our £350 million a week plus free puppy, where will we be expected to keep them? — but even if that’s so you’ll still find Notes on Blindness to be a singular achievement, as well as a truly wonderful one. This is based on the audio recordings of John Hull, the academic, writer and theologian who was

Animal crackers

The other evening I was driving back in heavy rain from my pilates class when I noticed something rather upsetting in the gated road that goes through our estate. I stopped and got out of the car for a closer look. Yes, as I feared, it was a dead duck. Some bastard had squished her flat. What made me more upset still was that I could see her mate — a mallard drake — swimming forlornly in the ditch next to the road. I loved those ducks like Tony Soprano used to love his ducks. Especially the stupid way they waddled blithely across your path, forcing you to slow down

Memories, dreams, reflections

Heart of a Dog is a film by Laurie Anderson and it’s a meditative, free-associating rumination on life, loss, love and dogs, with particular reference to her and her late husband’s (Lou Reed, who died in 2013) beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle (who died the same year). It follows no linear logic. It’s a visual collage, a cine-poem, a dreamy documentary essay that was screened in London earlier this week to owners and their dogs — to rave reviews. ‘It’s great!’ said a golden retriever, but as he said the same of ‘a ball’ and also ‘a pizza crust’, he may not be the most reliable of critics. (This is why

What Afghan soldiers really think – the same as us

‘The NATO Commander in Eastern Afghanistan has said that this year 54 foreign bases have already been closed…’ Last December Channel 4 aired a documentary entitled Billion Dollar Base: Deconstructing Camp Bastion, the predominating ‘takeaways’ from which were a) what phenomenal amounts of money we’d spent on our eight-year operation in and around Helmand Province, and b) how unimpressed the Afghan brass were by what ‘little’ we were leaving behind. I found myself watching most of it through gritted teeth; but it was hard, nevertheless, not to have some sympathy for the incoming Afghan soldiery. A new documentary film has now taken up that very story. Tell Spring Not to

That’s entertainment | 5 May 2016

The big returning show of the week began with servants laying out the silverware at a large country house in 1924. But rather than a shock comeback for Downton Abbey, this was — perhaps even more unexpectedly — Tommy Shelby’s new home in Peaky Blinders (BBC2, Thursday). Which explains why so many of the guests were carrying guns, and why the family matriarch was using the word ‘fuck’ a lot more than Lady Grantham ever did. When we last saw gang-leader Tommy (Cillian Murphy), he was still based in the Birmingham backstreets. He was also having a fairly tough time — what with juggling two women, trying not to get

Special delivery

Five Star Babies: Inside the Portland Hospital won’t, I suspect, have been a hard sell to BBC2’s commissioning editors. Childbirth and rich people are both reliably popular subjects for TV documentaries. So why not combine them into one handy package by showing us life at the UK’s only private maternity hospital? And yet, however artificial the programme’s conception, any sociologists studying contemporary Britain’s peculiar attitudes to the very wealthy could have done a lot worse than to tune in to Wednesday’s episode. ‘Parenthood: the great leveller,’ began the narrator — somehow managing not to add a hollow laugh. This sense of irony, though, was short-lived. Like most documentaries about luxury

An inconvenient truth | 28 January 2016

On the face of it, the Netflix documentary serial Making a Murderer should only take up ten hours of your life. Judging from my experience, though, its ten episodes will prove so overwhelmingly riveting that you’re going to need at least two more days to scour the internet in an obsessive quest for every scrap of information about the Steven Avery case — and several evenings to discuss it with any fellow viewers you can find. If the fuss about the series has so far passed you by (and if it has, it probably won’t for much longer), you may have to trust me that the story it tells —

Sins of the fathers | 19 November 2015

This is a documentary in which three men travel across Europe together, but they’re not pleasurably interrailing, even though there are often times they probably wished they were. For two of them, Niklas and Horst, the journey is about confronting their fathers, who were high-ranking Nazi officials responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews, while for the third, the eminent British human-rights lawyer Philippe Sands, it means visiting the place where his grandfather’s family was exterminated. This place, Galicia, which straddles the modern-day border between Poland and Ukraine, is the exact place my own grandmother’s family were murdered. Her father lost every one of his seven siblings. She lost

Self-pitying, despairing, often delusional: the real Marlon Brando

Listen to Me Marlon is a documentary portrait of Marlon Brando that has him burbling into your ear for 102 minutes, but if you have to have someone burbling in your ear for 102 minutes — and there is no law saying it’s obligatory — you could do a lot worse. This isn’t one of your regular documentaries. There are no talking heads, and it’s not blah-blah-blah and then he did this and then he did that and then his BMI got ridiculous, and so on. Instead, it is based on the hundreds of hours of personal audio tapes Brando made in his lifetime, which haven’t been heard until now,

Was BBC1’s Rooney hagiography more scripted reality than documentary?

Close to the Edge (BBC4, Tuesday) feels very much like an idea conceived during a particularly good night in the BBC bar. Why not take the ‘scripted reality’ methods of such youth hits as The Only Way Is Essex and apply them to a group of over-65s living in Bournemouth? So it is that the chosen oldies are given one main characteristic each, and required to act out events from their own lives — events that might or might not have happened if the cameras weren’t there. Or as Tuesday’s opening caption rather optimistically put it, ‘Some of the scenes have been constructed purely for your enjoyment.’ Which scenes these

Nuclear overreaction

When I was growing up in the 1970s, my three main fears were: being blown up by the IRA; being eaten by a Jaws-like great white shark; being vaporised by a nuclear bomb. I expect it was the same for most kids of my generation. The first two, obviously, were a function of the Birmingham bombings (et al.) and the Peter Benchley/Steven Spielberg axis of shark terror. And the third was the product of the relentless propagandising of CND as rehearsed faithfully on pretty much every BBC programme going from John Craven’s Newsround to The Archers, Animal Magic and Roobarb and Custard. I don’t actually remember the notorious episode where

Dead behind the eyes

With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done, but now he’s returned with a second film that is equally stunning, equally riveting — in its horrifying way — and equally unforgettable. To have one such film in you, but two? I think it is now safe to conclude: there are good documentary makers and there are excellent documentary makers and then there is Joshua Oppenheimer, who is amazing. The Act of Killing showed Oppenheimer tracking down the ageing, unrepentant, positively gleeful members of the Indonesian civilian militia who, with the approval of the army and government, carried out

Sexed-up pacifism

Big-screen documentaries never change the world. Blackfish has not shortened the queues to see maltreated killer whales leap through hoops at SeaWorld. Super Size Me reduced neither the all-American waistline nor the profit margin of McDonald’s. The Cove did not prevent the Japan whale industry slaughtering dolphins. So what possible chance, more than a decade after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, has a mere film of bringing about that most chimerical of holy grails: an admission that the case for invading Iraq was knowingly built on a lie? We Are Many revisits the anti-war marches of 15 February 2003. On that date there were demonstrations in 789 cities across 72 countries,

The lying game | 14 May 2015

My favourite scene in the first episode of the new series of Benefits Street (Mondays, Channel 4) — now relocated to a housing estate in the north-east, but otherwise pretty much unchanged — was the one where the street’s resident stoner and low-level crim Maxwell has to attend a court summons. Really, if the whole thing had been scripted and faked by the film-makers (as I’m sure it wasn’t: no need), it couldn’t have worked out better. With just 15 minutes to go before Maxwell’s court hearing seven miles away, his brother turns up to give him a lift on his motorbike. But there’s one small problem. Maxwell’s brother is

I always think I’m going to hate Baumbach’s films and never do: While We’re Young reviewed

Every time I sit down to a Noah Baumbach film I think I’m going to hate it, but I never actually do. From the French New Wave idiosyncrasies of 2013’s Frances Ha to the growing pains of his semi-autobiographical breakthrough The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach always manages to stay just the right side of pretentious, creating lively hipster-filled worlds that amuse as much as they annoy. Nowhere is this delicate balance more on display than in While We’re Young, a heartbreaking and cautiously funny swipe both at unwelcome middle age and the follies of youth. For Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts), the childlessness of their forties has

Jon Snow on skunk: ‘I felt utterly bereft’

Jon Snow previously investigated the effects of taking ecstasy in a Channel 4 documentary. Now, in the interests of investigative journalism, the newsreader has been filmed taking skunk for a follow-up programme. Although Snow could not remember being filmed at the time, he has now written a blog detailing the identity crisis that occurred after he inhaled the strong strain of cannabis. ‘I knew within five minutes, or so, of taking the first two balloons, that I had taken skunk. What was happening to me outstripped anything I have ever experienced. I have been passed the odd spliff of cannabis in the distant past perhaps a dozen times. But this of course in a social context, in which you