EIFF documentaries round-up: Jesus Christ Saviour; Dreams with Sharp Teeth; Of Time and the City; The Order of Myths

Published on Tuesday 24 June 2008 21:07

HAVING started life as a documentary showcase, the Edinburgh International Film Festival has long retained a strong interest in the format, and as we pass the festival's halfway point, it's certainly shaping up to be a year for films that not only reinforce the value of documentaries, but challenge the conventions of the form as well.

Of course the latter isn't always a good thing, as last week's inclusion of Chris Waitt's depressingly narcissistic A Complete History of My Sexual Failures proved. I've already written at length about what was wrong with that film, so I'll say only this: if it ends up being successful at the box-office, expect a flood of similarly self-obsessed documentaries from other failing, but desperate-to-be-famous directors; the era of Big Brother filmmaking is truly upon us.

Actually, the extent to which Waitt's life was an unworthy subject for a documentary is thoroughly reinforced by two excellent films about proper artists with extreme personalities: Jesus Christ Saviour, a long-unseen live performance by mad-as-a-badger German actor Klaus Kinski; and Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a portrait of the spleen-venting science fiction writer Harlan Ellison.

Directed by Kinski biographer Peter Geyer, Jesus Christ Saviour captures with extraordinary intimacy an astonishing and controversial theatrical monologue that the actor, best remembered now for his wild collaborations with Werner Herzog, delivered in Berlin in 1971.

Minutes after Kinski takes the stage to deliver his revision of "the greatest story ever told" – the New Testament's Jesus Christ Saviour – it's clear the audience are out for a fight. As they hurl insults and derisive comments, there's an uneasy sense that they're refusing to distinguish between the actor and the character he's playing.

Kinski doesn't help matters of course. Wide-eyed and manic, he immediately takes the bait and begins directing the word of Jesus against his hecklers, eventually storming off in disgust just ten minutes in. It's a pattern that is repeated over the next 70 minutes with Kinski returning and retreating to and from the stage, growing ever more frustrated, angry and delusional. It's an unsettling record of a unique event, one that also captures the raw emotions that feed into great art.

Harlan Ellison has inspired plenty of extreme reactions too, but unlike Kinski, he seems to revel in confrontation and certainly seems better equipped to deal with it.

Described by Neil Gaiman as a living piece of performance art, his outsized personality, prodigious work rate and ability to live almost entirely in the moment, makes him a lot of fun to spend time with in a documentary.

Dreams with Sharp Teeth director Erik Nelson gives him plenty of opportunity to rant about his life, his family, the art of writing, religion, Republicans, idiocy in America, television, movies, fans, foes… you name it.

With no dissenting voices in the film to counterpoint the testimonies from Ellison's friends and admirers, this does make the film a bit of a celebration of his bad behaviour. Still, he's so open and opinionated about everything that the film doesn't suffer (Nelson has said in interviews that Harlan is his own worst enemy).

What's also interesting about the film, though, is the way Nelson intersperses the interviews, archival material and fly-on-the-wall footage with scenes of Ellison giving readings from his work. Directly addressing the camera while CGI effects reflecting imagery from the stories he's reading fills the background, it's a nifty attempt to reduce the barrier between his written work and the mind that produced it.

If I had to put money on it, I'd bet Nelson borrowed this technique from Errol Morris, who was in Edinburgh over the weekend presenting his latest film, Standard Operating Procedure. At the lively on stage interview, Morris talked at length about his famous Interrotron, the special camera he developed that allows to him to have direct eye contact with his interview subjects while they look straight down the lens of his camera.

The idea behind it was to enable him to have more revealing conversations and the evidence is certainly there in Standard Operating Procedure which brings us into uncomfortably close contact with the "the few bad apples" in the US military whose pictures of Iraqi prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib have become the most widely viewed photographs in the history of the medium.

Interspersing his interviews with elaborate visuals and reconstructions that are now almost Michael Bay-like in scale, Morris has been much criticised by documentary purists for this film, but these techniques, which he first started using on his history-changing 1988 documentary Thin Blue Line, help provide not only context, but also a sense of his interviewees' states of mind that arguably conveys the truth of the matter more effectively than just talking alone would have done.

Terence Davies's Of Time and the City, a sentimental eulogy to his home city of Liverpool made up of collages of images tied together by a witty, sometimes over-the-top, always pithily entertaining monologue from Davies, was a fascinating, impressionistic childhood memoir revealing the forces that shaped his early artistic life.

There's a very strange take on pageantry in the still-to-screen The Order of Myths, Margaret Brown's exceptional film demonstrating how adherence to tradition has resulted in the town of Mobile, Alabama, becoming one of the last visible strongholds of racial segregation in the US.

The divide is a symptom of the annual Mardi Gras, which is celebrated separately by the town's white and black communities, though it is only the white celebrations that are actively exclusionary.

Mixing a verit approach with intelligent interviews, Brown brilliantly illustrates the way the same historical traditions have very different connotations for both groups in the community, but she also captures the feelings of hope that exist that things might change for the better.

&149 Jesus Christ Saviour, tonight 10pm and tomorrow 10:15pm; Dreams with Sharp Teeth tonight 7:40pm and 27 June at 5pm; The Order of Myths 7:25pm tomorrow all at the Filmhouse.