Oscar docs, pandemic poems, border essays

Also: author bios, Poetry Thoughts, Nonfiction Issues

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to spend less time on these, and more on projects that feel more worthwhile at the moment, like the book I’m theoretically writing. I liked just recommending some stuff last month, so that’s all I’m going to do this month, and maybe for a while.

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Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, dir. Johan Grimonprez. (Available on Amazon and elsewhere.)

I’ve been working my way through this year’s Academy Award nominees for documentary features.¹ I watched Soundtrack before the nominees were announced, and although it’s brilliant, I didn’t think it would make the cut, because it seems like the same ghettoization that plagues text-based nonfiction afflicts documentary film as well: it can’t just be art, it has to perform some public service. It has to be about Issues.

This film is about Issues, but they’re old ones, and it demands a lot from its viewer: it’s a two-and-a-half-hour, deeply sourced, text-forward, lyrically structured historical account of colonialism in the Congo—particularly the concerted Western effort to undermine and kill Patrice Lumumba—told through the lens of, and scored by, noted jazz musicians of the 20th Century. That’s probably not a very appetizing description, so how about this one: it’s also one of the smartest, most innovative and rigorous and startling documentary films I’ve seen in the last few years, and I’ve seen a lot.

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No Other Land, dir Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor (Available … elsewhere.)

I watched this one after the Oscar nominees were announced. I’m going to be completely and unflatteringly honest here and say that I did not expect this film to be very good. I assumed it might be one of those aforementioned Issue films, one chosen by the Academy for its content and/or timeliness rather than its aesthetic quality. (Another of the best doc contenders, which shall remain unnamed here, is a good example of what I mean: a real snoozefest of portentous nature shots and stagey conversations, string music playing constantly in the background, explainy chyrons every other scene.) 

But in the immortal words of Samuel L. Jackson’s character in The Long Kiss Goodnight² (link is very NSFW), you know what happens when you make assumptions. No Other Land would be an Oscar-worthy documentary based only on its technical merits: it has a forceful and coherent vision, an eye for the unexpected, compelling characters, and—maybe the rarest quality in the work of first-time nonfiction storytellers—an understanding of its focus and scope.

If you also consider the conditions of its making, it becomes something more than just a great documentary. The four people who made this film had nearly no budget, and Basel—the main character, who also filmed much of the movie and was one of its writers and directors—made it while he was living in a village that kept getting bulldozed, being hounded and arrested and assaulted in raids, and watching his relatives get shot. The crew, all four of them, weren’t even primarily filmmakers; they seem to have decided to make a movie more or less on the fly. 

The result, a story of a family, a friendship, and a small village in the West Bank under constant threat of destruction, is astonishing. Somehow, this film feels like an act of hope: its creators believe so resolutely in the power of their own story, and are willing to risk everything for it, literally death.

The fact that you can’t legally stream No Other Land in America right now says a lot about the current state of … well, everything. Thankfully, it’s not that hard to find.

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Rick Barot, Moving the Bones

I read what I like to think is a respectable amount of poetry, and I’ve always felt a certain kinship with and admiration for poets. But I don’t write it—I took a few poetry classes in undergrad and clearly didn’t have a talent—and I don’t really feel like I can talk about it in the same way I can prose. That’s a big part of the genre’s appeal for me: I can still respond to it on a gut level, by intuitively liking or disliking it, and not have to think about it too analytically.³

That’s all to say that I don’t know exactly why I loved this book, but I did. Rick directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, but I promise this is not PR—that was a factor in me choosing to read this book, because I’d heard Rick read some of the poems at last summer’s residency, but that wasn’t why I loved it. The thing I like most about good poems is their sneaky little bursts of insight and beauty, lines you recognize or might have thought, but not with such elegance or concision. Anne Carson could have been describing those moments when she wrote: “Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark.”⁴

This book is full of those moments; I must have marked a few dozen. Here’s one: I looked at photographs and suddenly understood that a photograph was a letter to someone in the future. Here’s another: Often I am moved by all the information / I’ve gathered but don’t know what to do with.

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Dagoberto Gilb, Gritos

Many years ago, when I first entered the literary world, sometimes author bios would list all the shitty jobs they’d had. One of my earliest attempts bragged about having been a busboy, landscaper, line cook, sandwich topping man,⁵ and so on. Some people found those annoying, and I often did, too—a lot of it was posturing, and it’s not like anyone was listing the real class determinants, their parents’ occupations or where they went to college or how they paid for it (never that!). But now that most author bios are bloviated lists of publications and fellowships and prestigious institutions, I find myself missing those halcyon days when writers foregrounded their jobs.

I was thinking about that as I read Dagoberto Gilb’s Gritos, an essay collection from 2003. Gilb worked construction for more than a decade before beginning his writing career, and for most of the time covered in this book was living and writing about places—El Paso, pre-techbro Austin, the Southwest and borderlands in general—that were or are typically ignored by the literary establishment, or willfully misunderstood so as to pander to distant, well-heeled urban readers and their ignorant preconceptions.⁶ 

This book feels dated—a few of the essays are downright repellent in their approach to gender and sexuality—and it’s like any collection made up of magazine pieces, uneven and scattered and padded. But the best few essays are as good as anything, and I’ll take pieces about cockfights and construction sites over most of what passes for contemporary essays any day.

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A couple late-breaking bonus links: 

• I’ve written before about how this time of year at work we get to choose the writers we’ll get to work with for two years and then watch go on and publish and succeed and how meaningful that is etc etc etc—it’s corny, I know. But for example, get a load of this amazing Longreads piece about Twin Peaks, which combines the work of not one but two recent grads: reporter/essayist dynamo Katie Cusumano and multimedia marvel Riley Yuan. 

• Speaking of the latter, he also wrote this eloquent op-ed about firefighter pay, which ran alongside some of his wildfire photos in High Country News.

1. I don’t care who wins—awards are almost as bad as lists—but the nominees are a useful filter for what contemporary films to add to my ongoing documentary-watching project.

2. One of my favorite films as a teenager.

3. A grad student once asked me if I can still read prose for pure enjoyment. I think about that question a lot. It rarely happens, almost never with nonfiction, and when it does, it’s usually with something really good and really weird.

4. She also might have been referring to something else—I don’t presume to know what Anne Carson means.

5. At the now-defunct Sparky’s Subs. They wouldn’t let me run the slicer. I quit after one shift.

6. See, for example, my least favorite article ever written.