42UP
Not
Rated
Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave., 223-4515. 7 and 9:30 pm Friday-Thursday,
additional showings 2 and 4:25 pm Saturday and Sunday, April
7-13. $6.
Titicut
Follies
Not Rated
Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton St., 238-8899.
7:20 pm Friday and Saturday, April 7-8. $6.
For those wanting
to prepare for 42UP, both Trilogy and Movie Madness
carry 28UP and 35UP on video.
Titicut Follies
kicks off a monthlong tribute to documentarian Frederick
Wiseman. High School, Law and Order and Meat
will follow, running Friday and Saturday nights at the
Clinton Street Theater.
If you're a documentary lover, the last several weeks must
seem like a dream that you hope won't end. First there was
Errol Morris' complete oeuvre on display, and now, starting
Friday, two more ground-breaking documentaries open in Portland.
On the surface, Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies
and Michael Apted's 42UP appear to be disparate.
Fundamentally, however, both films examine how institutions
shape our existence.
Controversial and banned outside of educational screenings
for more than 25 years, Titicut Follies remains a
thoroughly unsettling, unblinking peek into a nearly unlivable
Massa-chusetts asylum for the criminally insane. Like his
fellow direct-cinema pioneers D.A. Pennebaker (Don't
Look Back) and the Maysles brothers (Salesman),
Wiseman abandons narrative explanation, voiceover commentary,
music, a traditional storyline and other similar structural
devices. Instead, he plops you, completely unprepared, into
this bleak, harrowing world without a guide.
Wiseman sought to become invisible, so when you watch this
study, the role of passive viewer is abandoned; you eavesdrop,
gather information, decipher juxtaposed images and become
part of the action. The approach is minimalist, the atmosphere
suffocating in its clinical, stoic depiction of emotionless
doctors treating their patients like lab rats. Wiseman exposes
this physical institution as a series of sophisticated relationships
between power, authority and behavior patterns, and, as
in his depiction of education in High School, or
the army in Basic Training, he suggests that these
relationships extend to all aspects of American society.
42UP, by contrast, is a far more conventional documentary
in terms of structure. But that's the only conventional
thing about Apted's project. The UP series is a cinematic
original and the longest-running "film" in history. In 1964,
Apted interviewed 14 British children for the TV documentary
7UP. All of the kids were 7 years old (a nod to the
Jesuit theory, "Give me the child until he is seven, and
I will show you the man"), and since then, Apted has returned
every seven years to chart their lives. Now 42 years old,
11 of the 14 subjects still agree to be filmed.
Whereas Wiseman tries to mask his involvement in his work,
Apted is the driving force in 42UP. He narrates the
action, giving us background on his subjects. He conducts
the on-camera interviews, and you get a sense that he is
as much a friend (or therapist) as a documentarian (many
of the subjects call him Mike). Their rapport is understandable;
like Apted, we who have been following these unremarkable
people for years and years look forward to seeing how they've
changed. If you haven't seen the previous installments,
42UP does a decent job of catching you up, though
specific details are getting sparser as the series continues.
While Wiseman's concern is dismantling tangible institutions,
Apted presents his subject's lives as dominated by conceptual
institutions. In all cases, life revolves around marriage,
work and family. These institutions provide comfort and
progress markers for the subjects of 42UP, and it's
somewhat sad to accept Apted's view that this is all that
constitutes worth in life. If the predominant theme running
through 35UP was how many of the subjects were coping
with the death of their parents, the change now, for many,
is how they're adjusting to parenthood and the idea that
their children will soon be leaving them behind.
Though tinged with nostalgia, 42UP nonetheless is
the most optimistic installment of the bunch, suggesting
that perhaps life really does begin at 40. And in the case
of Neil (who was last seen wandering Scotland, homeless
at 35, and is now a city councilman), the film affirms the
belief that it's never too late to reinvent ourselves.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 5,
2000
|
