Second Sight (2008, Director: Alison McAlpine): Through the wit and charm of near-80 Donald Angus MacLean, filmmaker Alison McAlpine explores the oral tradition in northern Scotland on the Isle of Skye. Donald “Angie” is quite a character, an entertaining rogue with an eye for the ladies and an ear for a good story. A former preacher, Donald drives around the town in his red car (his name written across the trunk), his dog in the passenger seat, visiting a few of the island’s even more entertaining characters. These residents reveal their stories of premonitions, spectres and ghost cars. Their ability to see what is unseen, known as second sight, is set against the hills, moors and mist that make up the island. However, these are not simply ghost stories—at least, that’s what the residents would have you believe. They tell their tales in earnest, retelling them as if what they witnessed happened only hours earlier. McAlpine certainly captures the overall eeriness of the subject while at the same time framing the beautiful landscape that is Scotland north. With a few laughs along the way, Second Sight will make you think twice about the things you cannot see.
At The Death House Door (2008, Directors: Steve James and Peter Gilbert): Directors Steve James and Peter Gilbert won were nominated for an Oscar for their work together on Hoop Dreams in 1995, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their latest collaboration isn’t recognized with at least a nomination at Oscar time next year. At the Death House Door introduces us to Reverend Carroll “Bud” Pickett, a retired Presbyterian minister in Huntsville, Texas. As he recounts, Huntsville used to be known for the rodeo, but over the past forty years or so, it’s become famous for all of its prisons. Reverend Pickett never intended to become a prison chaplain, but that’s what he ended up doing. For 15 years during the 80s and 90s, he served as the “death house” chaplain, the man with whom condemned prisoners spent their last day on earth. He would sit with them during the day, listen to whatever they wanted to say, eat their last meal with them, and, when the time came, just after midnight, accompany them the short walk into the room where they would be strapped down and lethally injected. Reverend Pickett did this 95 times, and after each execution, he came home and recorded an audio cassette with his thoughts. Unable to share the pain of this ministry with his family, and prevented by his hard Texas upbringing from crying freely, he poured his heart out for the tape recorder instead. Remarkably, with a few exceptions, he had never listened to these tapes again after making them.
Meanwhile, Maury Possley and Steve Mills, a pair of investigative reporters from the Chicago Tribune had begun writing a series about possible cases of wrongful execution. One of the stories they uncovered was that of Carlos DeLuna, a young man from Corpus Christi, Texas, who was convicted of the 1982 stabbing death of a gas station attendant. The police found him hiding under a truck shortly after the stabbing, and although he had no blood on him at all, and claimed innocence, he was arrested, tried, and convicted. DeLuna maintained his innocence and claimed that an acquaintance, Carlos Hernandez, was responsible for the killing, although no one, even his lawyers, listened. In 1989, he was executed at the young age of 27. Reverend Pickett was with him when he died, and despite claims that lethal injection is quick and painless, he reported that DeLuna didn’t respond to the first drug, a sedative, and took 11 long minutes to die.
Possley and Mills visit with Pickett and discover his archive of tapes. He tells them that of all the prisoners he knew, DeLuna was the one that he was convinced was completely innocent. Over the years, the strain of the job had nagged him, but especially the notion that he was party to the execution of an innocent man. Although he had been a strong proponent of the death penalty when he started the job, after accompanying so many men to the death chamber, his opinion had completely changed. Whether they were guilty or innocent, Pickett cherished the time spent with the men, even as it strained him to be so powerless over their fates.
We spend the majority of the film with Reverend Pickett, certainly a fascinating character, but there are some other characters, including DeLuna’s sister Rose, who still lives with the guilt that she should have done more. Pickett also introduces us to a younger colleague who worked as a death house guard until the strain of working in an institutional death factory drove him to a breakdown. Texas has executed more prisoners than any other state and it’s clear that capital punishment is not deterring anyone. Not only that, it’s creating more victims as we see the families of prisoners suffer. Worse, it dehumanizes everyone involved in the process, from the prisoner himself to the prison guards and chaplains who work for the state.
In one chilling scene, the camera floats around the prison as Texas executes its 400th prisoner. We watch from a distance as the man’s family are allowed access into the prison for their last visit, and then we see the guards bringing out the man’s personal effects in bags and dumping them outside the gates like so much garbage. Soon the man’s body will be taken out in much the same way. It’s heartbreaking.
Even as he came to strongly disagree with capital punishment, Reverend Pickett continued his ministry to these condemned men, firstly because he “wasn’t a quitter,” but more importantly, because they needed a friend at this moment, someone who would be there right until the end, even as their families were banished. Sadly, he informs us that the Texas prison system recently changed the system. Instead of having 18 hours with the prisoner, now they’re brought into the death house at 4:00pm, showered, fed, and then executed at 6:00pm. The chaplain barely has time to say a few words. One wonders if this change is meant to inflict even more pain on the prisoner, denying them any meaningful human contact at all.
At the Death House Door is deeply meditative, due in major part to the character of Reverend Pickett, a man who has been indelibly marked by his work. It has made him question his politics, his opinions, even his faith. It has estranged him at times from his wife and his children. But he made these sacrifices because he truly believes no one should die alone. Wherever you stand on the question of capital punishment, this film will make you think about the people we ask to do the unthinkable.
Here is the Q&A with directors Steve James and Peter Gilbert from after the screening:
Man On Wire (2008, Director: James Marsh): Winner of both the Grand Jury Prize: World Cinema Documentary and the World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, James Marsh’s stunning film brings an inexplicably obscure story to life in a fresh and exhilarating way.
On August 7, 1974, a young French wirewalker named Philippe Petit spent 45 minutes suspended on a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center. He made eight crossings before the police convinced him to return to safety. Though this story, according to the director, is part of New York City folklore, not many people outside the city seem to know anything about it. But what a fantastic story, and Marsh does a masterful job in telling it, mostly by letting Petit and his companions bring it to life.
Petit is a fascinating figure. An accomplished juggler, wirewalker, and pickpocket(!), he had supported himself since his teens by working as a street performer. A born storyteller, he brings the narrative alive, even almost 35 years after his great “coup.” But best of all, Marsh gathers all Petit’s accomplices as well and has each of them recount their own part in the story. Some were steadfast, like his lover Annie and his childhood friend Jean-Louis, and others fickle and cowardly, like Americans David Foreman and Alan Welner, who both abandon the quest at the crucial moment. All tell their stories candidly and all still seem enveloped in wonder that such a thing could be accomplished.
Petit and some of his companions had already planned and executed two other audacious feats of wirewalking, first at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and then on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia. But the Twin Towers had obsessed Petit ever since he’d read about plans to build them, and the team’s preparations are carried out like the planning of a bank heist, with one important difference. As conspirator Jean-Francois says, “It may have been illegal…but it wasn’t wicked or mean.”
Marsh artfully combines lively interviews (especially when Petit is on screen) with stills and film from each of the various events, and even some re-creations (which he later admitted were part of someone else’s aborted film on the subject). A haunting and beautiful score by Michael Nyman (composer for many of Peter Greenaway’s films) and featuring music by Erik Satie, among others, created the dreamlike atmosphere necessary to appreciate this beautiful “art crime.”
Of course, it would be impossible to see a film featuring the Twin Towers without thinking of the events of 9/11. Marsh wisely avoids making any connections, letting the footage of the buildings’ construction speak poignantly for itself. Petit’s feat seems even more wondrous when you consider that the fragile Frenchman survives while the mighty towers lie in ruins.
Here is the Q&A with director James Marsh from after the screening:
Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived (2008, Director: Koji Masutani): This film is somewhat awkardly titled. It’s not a re-creation of an alternate timeline where JFK survives. Rather, it’s a carefully-argued essay whose thesis is that, based on the way John F. Kennedy dealt with several military crises early in his presidency, he would not have escalated the war in Vietnam and that perhaps the tragedy of almost 60,000 American dead (not to mention 2,000,000 Vietnamese) could have been averted.
Narrated and written by Professor James Blight of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, who was Errol Morris’ advisor on The Fog of War, Virtual JFK examines six different crises faced by the young president in his abbreviated time in office. Two involved Cuba (the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962), one was European (the construction of the Berlin wall in 1961), and the other three involved Southeast Asia (two confrontations over Vietnam, one over Laos). In every case, Kennedy stared down the hawks in his administration and the military commanders who were advocating war. In every case, his caution avoided catastrophe, most notably in the Cuban missile crisis, which many historians believe was the closest the world ever came to nuclear war. Blight has every reason to believe that Kennedy would have prevailed on the subject of Vietnam as well. What he doesn’t discuss is the possibility that this had anything to do with JFK’s assassination, although that hypothesis has been circulated by more than a few people.
Overall, this was enjoyable and well-argued, but not exceptional. On a personal level, I enjoyed seeing so much footage of Kennedy’s press conferences. His charisma is clearly evident in his good-natured exchanges with journalists, even when he was under considerable stress. It also surprised me how much Kennedy had to deal with in such a short time. The world was going through some major upheavals, and we’re fortunate that Kennedy was guiding a restless America with such a steady hand. This film shows us how much more tragic his death was than we may have believed. Apart from all the usual sentimental stuff about Camelot and the loss of hope, America lost a man of caution who had been a warrior of peace.
Incidentally, some reviewers have complained that the film makes a blunt parallel with George W. Bush and his handling of the Iraq war, but the connection is never made overtly. In the times we’re living in, however, it’s hard not to find a critique almost everywhere we look.
Shadow of the Holy Book (Pyhän kirjan varjo) (2007, Director: Arto Halonen): I read about this film when it played at IDFA in Amsterdam and was so intrigued by the premise, I emailed Hot Docs programmer Sean Farnel immediately to ask him to bring it to Hot Docs. He emailed me back to say that he and the director had been drinking vodka the night before and that it would likely be screening here. What had me so excited? Here’s the premise: Turkmenistan is a central Asian country with huge reserves of oil and natural gas. It’s also one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world. After ruling since 1985, dictator Saparmurat Niyazov declared himself “President for Life” in 1999 and published a book called the Ruhnama in 2001. Turkmens are overwhelmingly Muslim, but Niyazov placed the Ruhnama above the Koran as a holy book and required all citizens to study it. So far, so bizarre, right? But the really interesting thing is that the filmmaker found that foreign corporations doing business in Turkmenistan had gained favour by “sponsoring” translations of the book into their own languages and by otherwise promoting Niyazov’s strange cult of personality. At least, that’s how they portrayed themselves to Niyazov. In reality, the companies kept all of this quiet in their own countries, not wanting to be seen as bribing a dictator just to gain lucrative contracts.
Despite the fascinating concept of exposing corporate mischief in a strange and repressive country, the film frustrated me at every turn. Finnish director Halonen enlists the help of American journalist Kevin Frazier and the two make an odd couple. The dour Finn and the nebbishy American with the slight lisp set out to contact many of the corporate villains but are hopelessly inept. Much of the film’s running time is footage of the two of them in hotel rooms in various cities failing to get through to the right corporate contacts. As well, the use of several tacky sound effects (a cash register “cha-ching” each time a corporation’s profits are mentioned, a typewriter introducing every on-screen title) drove me to distraction very quickly. By the time the filmmakers arrive in America to track down executives from Caterpillar and John Deere, the film enters Michael Moore territory, except without any of Moore’s (debatable) charisma. One baffling Moore-like stunt has Frazier reading Ruhnama excerpts on the New York City subway, after referring to America’s constitutional right to freedom of speech.
Overall, the travelogue approach wears thin pretty early. More promising were interviews with some Turkmen human-rights activists and political dissidents. Unfortunately, though, far too much use is made of some crude Flash animations created by the son of one of the activists. By the end of the film, we realize that the pair have not been able to put together a single substantial interview. Though they do get to travel to Turkmenistan on two occasions, they have to film clandestinely and are really only able to show us some of the massive construction projects awarded to the foreign firms. We learn later that the numerous English-language Turkmen “newscasts” and Ruhnama “reading circles” were re-creations.
There were some important allegations uncovered by the film, and some brave and dangerous undercover work was performed by a Finnish diplomat. Hopefully, some of the material uncovered in the film will lead to changes in corporate behaviour. But as a documentary film, I think Shadow of the Holy Book is a bit of a missed opportunity.
Here is the Q&A with director Arto Halonen and writer Kevin Frazier from after the screening:
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