Wiseman is my favorite documentary filmmaker. He calls his work something like documentary fiction. I have a book somewhere. He passed the bar but never practiced. Went into film and never had releases signed. Hence the problem with 'Titticut' with the scene of a nude man being showered and it getting banned. But, Wiseman feels that he has a right to walk in on these public institutions and make his films. He edits carefully. Something you might forget or miss because if his films have a flaw, it's the terrible camerawork. No one talks to the camera. Life enfolds in front of you. 'Missile' is unbelievable and the scariest film I ever saw (well, that and Repulsion). We watch a group of people training to be the ones who 'press the button' when the President picks up the red phone. When the instructor (probably the nicest guy in the world) is telling them how to press the button and turn the key at the same time, you just cringe. But, when one struggles and the instructor explains that he'll get it and that it just takes practice--you realize that all is okay because the lunatics are running the asylum.

Back from BASIC TRAINING. Quite an experience. Unfortunately the Walker folks opted to have the film introduced by a pacifist priest & follow it up with a Q&A with 3 veterans (2 Vietnam era, 1 Korea) who wore their anti-Army biases prominently on their figurative sleeves. That latter session quickly turned into a soapbox diatribe on everything from the Bush Administration to corporate imperialism in Iraq with interjections from the priest on sourceless statistics citing minority exploitation in the Armed Forces. The predictable applause followed every pedantic point & I skipped out before the conclusion.

But back to the film. I was impressed. The print was grainy (probably to begin with) & there was a mishap in the projectionist booth when the film spool slipped off the reel, but these distractions were minor. True to the title, the film follows a group of draftees & enlisted men from the first day of boot camp through graduation. Most of them are just out of high school & their individual immaturities soon raise the ire of the instructors. There are some truly classic lines & scenes that couldn’t have been better if scripted or planned. In one, an instructor introduces two Army instructional films (one on the history of the service branch, the other on the current war climate in Vietnam) & reminds the trainees that they are part of an illustrious American tradition, an organization that has never lost a war & will most certainly not lose in Vietnam. In another scene the trainees are forced to watch a film on proper oral hygiene and emulate the onscreen instructions with their toothbrushes. The absurdity of the situation is repeated regularly throughout the film.

There are also the expected segments on weapons training- at the rifle range, with bayonets, etc. An instructor explains the specifics of a Claymore mine, comparing it to a “giant shotgun” designed to inflict maximum casualties on the enemy. Another gives particularly brutal demonstrations on how to snap/slit an opponent’s neck or pummel him to death with a blackjack. Watching the soldiers I couldn’t help pessimistically wondering whose names would end up on The Wall in D.C.

My favorite scene is an informal conversation between several officers on the rifle range where one opines on reincarnation & karma, speculating that due to their space-faring skills, the citizens of ancient Atlantis have been reincarnated as the scientists at NASA. Wiseman captures it all, the boredom, the brutality, the Army’s dogged insistence on integrating the recruits into the system, with a detached, but observant lens. Ted’s right about the editing, meticulous & in places absolutely brilliant.

The ironic thing for me was that the film better accomplished what the priest & the veterans were trying to do & without an overt agenda or heavy-handed speech-making. Next stop DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 2.

Wow. Are you going to see "Near Death"? That, along with "Belfast, Maine" seem like they'd be the most immediately appealing. But, "Missile" is scary as all hell, my favorite scene is probably the barbeque. If I remember correctly, it's one of the few that occur outdoors.

But Ted, why is it that you think the camerawork is so bad? With as small a crew as he works with, one would imagine that he would be forgiven for the long takes.

IMHO, Chris Marker is not only the best documentarian, but one of the great Aritsts of the 20th century, "Sans Soleil" being the greatest film ever. "A Grin Without A Cat" should stand out as one of the most intriguing and idiosyncratic cinematic studies of communism as it happened in the 60's and 70's, focusing on the New Left, as it arose, and fell (everywhere but in the Academy.)

Nirav, I’m still flagellating myself for missing Belfast and sadly Near Death isn’t on the festival schedule. But Domestic Violence 2 is screening tomorrow & looks to be a harrowing 159 minutes. I’m not familiar with Marker, please tell us more.

Marker is one of the more curious figures that cinema has seen; ostensibily he's a documentarian in that he makes films about things that are there- from Andrei Tarkovski, Alexander Medvedkin and Akira Kurosawa to Cuba post-Revolution, and the 1952 Olympics. His films tend to have voiceovers, but unlike most documentaries, they don't lead you to a description of the action onscreen, but away from it; on tangents, connections and secret paths. A good example is his 1992 film "The Last Bolshevik", which, on the surface, seems to about the blacklisted by Stalin Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, but actually ends up being a long meditation on Marker's personal disillusionment with the Soviet experiment (Marker's something of a Red, but he never preaches, or dogmatizes, think of it more like a Guevarian "trembleming whenever he sees an injustice", and then a need to explain, and understand that injustice.)

His most famous film is probably the most atypical of his work, the short "La Jetee", upon which Terry Gilliam's "12 Monkeys" was based. It's one of the very few perfect films around. If you've got an afternoon, watch that one, Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and then his film "Sans Soleil", which is a work that is truly beyond synopsis. I spent about 3 months watching, analyzing, researching and writing about it, and I still feel like I'm just scratching the surface. Really, there's nothing out there like it, there are parts of it that bring me to tears whenever I see it.

Thankfully, he's undergoing something of a rediscovery as of late: he's had retrospectives at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade theater and Anthology Film Archives, and two 10 page spreads in two consecutive issues of Film Comment. I think there are new prints of "La Jetee" and "Sans Soleil" that are touring right now, if not, I've heard there's a DVD of the pair that's either out, or out soon.