"Guerrero"
As always, the Wisconsin Film Festival will feature a generous helping of documentaries. Here are three I know you’ll appreciate. Two concern legendary film directors, and one is about a horror in Mexico and its aftermath.
Stanley Kubrick was a notoriously obsessive filmmaker, and we know the toll his methods took on actors. They did take after take until their egos melted. But what about the people who labored for him behind the scenes? You won’t be surprised to learn from the evidence presented in the mesmerizing Filmworker that being on the Kubrick crew meant working weird hours, giving up family life and fretting over minutiae. Directed by Tony Zierra, Filmworker centers on Leon Vitali, the English actor who gave up performing to be Kubrick’s assistant in the latter stages of Kubrick’s career, which saw the release of just three features over 19 years.
Vitali was in the middle of a busy acting career when he was cast in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). Vitali approached the director about a job, and then followed decades in which Vitali cast films, worked with actors and, like Kubrick himself, was involved in seemingly every aspect of film production and distribution, down to the design of the DVD boxes. All that effort took a toll, as Vitali made great sacrifices in dedication to a man who apparently could be a cruel taskmaster. Was it worth it? The answer isn’t clear.
Speaking of obsessive filmmakers, Napalm is the latest effort by 92-year-old Claude Lanzmann, whose 10-hour documentary Shoah is a defining statement about the Holocaust. Part travelogue, part reminiscence, the fascinating Napalm finds Lanzmann visiting North Korea for the third time in 60 years. In early narration Lanzmann says he is drawn there for sentimental reasons, and at first I worried that Lanzmann, who declares an affinity with communism, has set out to whitewash a brutal regime. This turns out not to be the point, though he is sharply critical of U.S. military tactics in the Korean War. The focus instead is a long, poignant story told painstakingly in interviews by Lanzmann himself. The effect is haunting.
Guerrero centers on events that followed the 2014 kidnapping and disappearance of 43 students in Iguala, Mexico. Filmmaker Ludovic Bonleux follows a handful of activists as they organize community resistance and, out in the countryside, dig for the remains of their loved ones. This is intense, unsettling stuff.
Filmworker: Friday, April 6, Chazen Museum of Art, 1:30 pm; Thursday, April 12, AMC Madison 6, 6:30 pm
Napalm: Friday, April 6, UW Cinematheque, 3:45 pm; Sunday, April 8, AMC Madison 6, 1:45 pm
Guerrero: Wednesday, April 11, AMC Madison 6, 5:45 pm
