The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll select three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘The Look of Silence’ (2015)
The director Joshua Oppenheimer, whose first fiction feature, “The End,” opens in December, grabbed the film world’s attention with “The Act of Killing” (2013), in which he invited self-proclaimed “gangsters” who had slaughtered opponents of Indonesia’s military regime in the mid-1960s to restage their murders. The killers participate in the re-enactments with apparent glee, leaving viewers with a disturbing picture of how readily brutality can be rationalized and repressed.
Arguably a flaw in the movie that it never fully acknowledges how the conceit might have encouraged the gangsters’ showboating. We’re supposed to be appalled at how openly they brag about torture and strangulation, but the presence of a camera — and of sets and makeup — can’t be ignored as factors in how they comport themselves. Oppenheimer’s superior follow-up, “The Look of Silence,” plays things straighter, and in some ways poses the more haunting question: Because supporters of the violence still hold political power in Indonesia, families of the victims and families of the killers live side by side. How do you grapple with the knowledge that your neighbors are former executioners?
The central figure in “The Look of Silence” is Adi Rukun, an optometrist whose older brother was among the slain. In more ways than one, Adi tries to get the killers to see clearly. A chilling scene finds him testing the vision of a man identified as the leader of a village death squad. While Adi tries different lenses (“Is this better?”), he presses the man about his past and the fact that he still inspires fear in others. Adi learns that his uncle guarded prisoners who were taken to be killed. The uncle downplays his role in their deaths; he says that if he had refused, he too would have been accused of being a communist — a label we understand to have been thrown around freely as a pretext for the executions. (Early in the film, we see that an anti-“communist” version of history is still being taught in schools.) Perhaps the most haunting scene comes near the end, when, after a man has confessed to multiple killings and drinking human blood, his daughter bids Adi a friendly farewell. “Please forgive my father,” she says. “Think of us as family.”
‘Filmworker’ (2018)
Stream it on Kino Film Collection. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home and Google Play.
The ultimate perfectionist filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, had the help of a tireless polymath assistant. The title figure of Tony Zierra’s “Filmworker” is Leon Vitali, who while playing Barry Lyndon’s stepson told Kubrick that he was interested in learning more about the technical aspects of filmmaking. He became something like Kubrick’s right-hand man until the director’s death in 1999. Even after that, Vitali worked to assure that Kubrick’s wishes were honored.
Matthew Modine, who acted in “Full Metal Jacket,” remembers perceiving Vitali as kind of an “Igor” figure, a jack-of-all-trades. At various points Vitali recalls being involved in casting, photography, sound, studio liaising, checking film prints and even setting up a video monitoring system for Kubrick’s ailing cat. (Kubrick’s last three features credited him as “assistant to the director.”) Vitali has boxes upon boxes of Kubrick-related papers. And although Kubrick accorded him what the film suggests was an unusually high level of trust, the flip side of Vitali’s usefulness was that Kubrick never stopped calling on him, for just about any task.
“I never handled Stanley,” says Vitali, who in some scenes sits with a Kubrick plush doll next to him. “I handled myself so I could exist in Stanley’s world.” Vitali’s grown children speak with a mix of understanding and mystification at how completely their father devoted himself to another person, sometimes at the expense of being fully present in their lives. Vitali describes his mentor in warm terms but also says he was the kind of man who, if someone offered him a right arm, would probably wonder, “Just a right arm?” But Vitali’s persistence made him an invaluable repository of Kubrickiana: There were few people on the planet (Vitali died in 2022) able to acquire more insight into the man’s precise wishes on aspect ratios, color timing and lens flare. Someone had to keep that perfectionism alive.
‘The Edge of Democracy’ (2019)
In “The Edge of Democracy,” the documentarian Petra Costa reflects on the events that culminated in the April 2018 imprisonment of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, the then-former (and now-current) president of Brazil. Much has changed since the film’s premiere at Sundance in January 2019. Lula was released from prison in November of that year, and he was elected president again in October 2022, defeating the far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, whose own ascension to power provides the backdrop of the film’s chilling coda.
But the movie’s broader warnings about the fragility of democratic institutions remain potent. Costa, working in a mode that owes something to the essay documentaries of Chris Marker, interweaves elements of her family history with the recent history of Brazil. She and the country’s democracy, she points out, are roughly the same age: She was born shortly before the end of the military dictatorship that had ruled Brazil for two decades, and her heritage is split between two aspects of the nation’s political makeup. Her grandfather was a founder of a construction company that flourished in the 1970s, a period her parents spent in hiding as militants opposed to the regime. Her mother recalls being jailed at the same place as the future president Dilma Rousseff, who succeeded Lula’s first stretch in office.
In addition to providing a cogent rundown of the timeline and the players involved in Rousseff’s removal from power and Lula’s incarceration — sham efforts, the film argues, orchestrated by political opponents with the help of an uncritical news media — “The Edge of Democracy” finds unusual ways into the material. Costa analyzes footage of Rousseff’s inauguration to show how Rousseff’s vice president, Michel Temer, is already keeping his distance. And Costa ponders the layout of Brasília, a would-be utopian city expressly built as the nation’s capital. “The perfect architecture forgot a main ingredient of democracy,” she narrates. “The people.”
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