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Documentary and Horror Films II: DEAR ZACHARY (Kurt Kuenne, 2008)

SPOILER WARNING: If you have not seen the new documentary Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father and do not know about the real life case it is based on, you should skip this piece until you've seen it. For reasons that will be clear from reading the essay, I need to discuss a major plot point in my argument.

A few months back I wrote a brief post about documentaries and horror films, inspired by Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and the work of Adam Curtis. I certainly didn't think I'd see a film so shortly after that would be even more fitting of a discussion along these lines, but Kurt Kuenne's Dear Zachary is even more direct and, as a result, more problematic in its use of the narrative and stylistic devices of horror thrillers. Very few recent films have affected me as much as this one, although probably not entirely in the way Kuenne planned. Dear Zachary is riveting and powerful, but it was disturbing not only because of the subject matter but also because of the heavily manipulative style at work.

Part of what is so capitivating about the work is the extraordinary circumstances . Kuenne, a filmmaker since childhood, set out to make a documentary about the murder of one of his best friends, Andrew Bagby. The main suspect in the case was a woman named Shirley Turner, his ex-girlfriend. The two had met in medical school in Newfoundland, Canada. Following the murder, which took place in the U.S., Turner fled to Canada. Extradiction procedures followed, and moved extremely slowly (any Canadian like myself understands this all too well). Then, the first twist occured: Turner was pregnant with Bagby's son. Kuenne follows the story of Bagby's parents, David and Kate, as they attempt to gain custody of the son. Kuenne then decides to dedicate the film to Andrew's son, named Zachary, to allow him to get to know his father by interviewing family and friends that were closest to him. Hence the film's title. But, and here's the big spoiler for those that don't know, this is a deliberate mislead on Kuenne's part. For we learn that Turner, let out on bail by idiotic decisions by the Canadian justice system, killed her 13 month old son and herself. It is at this point that the film turns into essentially a scream of rage by the grandparents and Kuenne, ending with their campaign for reform in the bail system in the Canada. Kuenne ends up dedicating the film to David and Kate Bagby after admitting that he almost stopped making the film after Zachary's murder.


Even before this narrative turn, Kuenne's editing is very staccato, to the point that it is at times jarring. Even when putting together fairly standard material recalling Andrew's life, Kuenne edits in a very hyperactive manner. Critics seem to be forgiving of this as a sign of Kuenne's heavy emotional investment in this material, and the argument can be extended into further examples of Kuenne's style and narrative. Obviously, Kuenne did not have to tell this story as he did, and indeed anyone who knew this story beforehand would not have been fooled by his baby murder "twist". So, a reasonable question would be: why structure the film this way? The main argument for the decision is that this puts the audience in the place of the victims: not only the grandparents, but all of Andrew Bagby's friends, including Kuenne himself. The desire seems to be to have the audience empathize as much as possible with the pain and anguish of the Bagbys, to pull the rug out from under the audience so that they have a strong visceral reaction. The problem is that this emotion is forwarded in support of a reactionary point of view.



This can be seen in the treatment of Shirley Turner, who as the film progresses is treated as pure evil, a monster, or, as Kate Bagby puts it, "the devil". This is where the horror techniques are on full display, with the use of ominous music (composed by Kuenne) and audio recording of Turner combined with distorted images of Turner with her son. This techniques are used earlier in the film to convey Andrew's murder, but they are amplified here. Particularly unsettling is David Bagby stating afterwards that the only way to have prevented this tragedy, given the inefficiency of the justice system, is to have murdered Turner himself, so that at least Zachary would be safe and Kate could possibly have raised him even if he went to jail. It is at this point where I think Kuenne lets the rage overwhelm him. Does this need to be in the film? Yes, of course, he thought it, and understandably so. But Kuenne seems to justify it, even if David Bagby himself realizes its madness, repeatedly saying that he shouldn't have to be having these thoughts. David and Kate Bagby would move forward within the realm of the law to reform bail in Canada, but the reactions the documentary provokes are of a far more vicious kind. In fact, to even bring up criticisms of the film is to provoke a backlash. Witness these two reviews and their comment sections here and here.

What seems particularly odd about the heavy-handed style is how unnecessary it appears. Shirley Turner does not need to be made into the devil to get across the basic point of the film: The legal system fucked up badly and needs to be fixed, and those that allowed it to happen need to be held accountable and to pay the price with at least their jobs. Which makes one think that this isn't Kuenne's goal, and that Kuenne is so full of rage that he needs to attack Turner. After all, who can defend a baby murderer? If one points out that Turner is probably not the devil but rather a deeply disturbed woman who should have been kept from harming her baby, one becomes part of the problem, a bleeding heart liberal, the type that allowed her out in the first place (the fact that I'm one of those northern "liberals" in Canada is proof of this). Such is the reactionary politics of this movie, yet this point of view that can be understood as so deeply felt that many will overlook it.

How to evaluate this movie? I would describe it as one of the best and one of the worst films of the year. But I won't forget it anytime soon, and perhaps a more intellectual approach such as I'm advocating for would not have been as compelling. Still, personally, I could have done with a little less excitement.

A nice take on the film, although more sympathetic than mine, is offered by David Edelstein.

MR. HOOVER AND I (Emile de Antonio, 1989)

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If I had to choose the greatest documentary filmmaker, I would probably select Emile de Antonio. He is also the director who I most admire in terms of his commitment to political filmmaking in America throughout the era of the Cold War. He began making films in 1964, with the compilation work Point of Order, which dealt with the Army-McCarthy hearings. He made ten films in total, finishing in 1989 with Mr. Hoover and I. Somewhat fittingly, he died at the end of the same year, just as the Cold War was concluding. His films are often difficult to find, but last year a 4 disc set was released by HomeVision titled "Emile de Antonio: Films of the Radical Saint." The set includes his masterpiece, In the Year of the Pig (1968), as well as three lesser known works: Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971), Underground (1976), and Mr. Hoover and I.

Mr. Hoover and I certainly feels like the final work of an artist, a closing statement of sorts. It is de Antonio's most personal movie, and a large percentage of the film consists of de Antonio addressing the camera in long take and telling stories about his own life and that of his "co-star", J. Edgar Hoover (Figures 1 and 2). The first sequence establishes the point of view, with de Antonio describing Hoover as one of the main villains in the history of the United States, more dangerous and harmful than Communist and Nazi spies because of the power he held. Hoover is set up as the antithesis of everything de Antonio believes. However, despite the title, the film is less about Hoover and much more about de Antonio and his views about life and art.

De Antonio cuts between the shots of him lecturing to the audience with three other spaces that recur throughout:

(1) de Antonio talking to John Cage about his art as Cage bakes bread (Figure 3);

(2) de Antonio lecturing to university students (Figures 4 and 5);

(3) de Antonio getting a hair cut from his wife.

In addition, there is archival footage of Hoover presenting Nixon with an honorary FBI badge (Figure 7). Almost all of these scenes are handled with sequence shots (especially the ones with Cage and de Antonio's wife), which is very different from the heavy editing of de Antonio's earlier work. But de Antonio avoids a direct cinema approach. He makes the audience aware of the camera's presence and act of filmmaking, explicitly arguing against the endless flow and technical perfection of most film and television. In addition to being a filmmaker, de Antonio was also a painter with connections to the New York art scene (particularly Andy Warhol), and he makes explicit his spiritual bond with not only Cage but also the experimental filmmakers of the "New American Cinema" led by Jonas Mekas. He mentions Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, 1959) as being a major influence. The very idea of making art for profit is seen as counter to his principles:

"Perhaps the only thing worthwhile is to make something that isn't really for sale except on your own terms, which is I made it, it's true, if you don't like it, the hell with you. I want you to like it or I'd be crazy. But I'd rather be crazy than have you like it because it was false, because it was what you wanted for me instead of what I wanted."

As this passage suggests, de Antonio is decidedly strident and confrontational in his views (which is exhilarating if you're sympathetic, but likely aggravating if you aren't). The other scenes are thus crucial for balance, not in terms of contrasting viewpoints but in regards to tone. Seeing de Antonio in private with his friend and partner, as well as delivering a lecture to a social audience, allows the viewer to place his political position in context.

Ultimately, despite its concern with the past of both himself and Hoover (who died in 1973), the message of the film is directed towards the future. The penultimate shot is the university audience emptying (Figure 8), over which de Antonio begins his final voiceover. The last image (Figure 9) contains de Antonio's final words to the viewer, and they provide an appropriate summing up of the past decades and a look towards a future that, unfortunately, de Antonio will not be a part of:

"We had politics in the 60s simply because a great many young people became tremendously involved with the hope of social change. And that's why we're in such a quiescent period now, because it failed. The system was strong enough. This is the strength of democracies, that they create the illusion of change. But in fact what they do is permit change, a certain kind of change."

"And when the students in the 60s got hard, they were crushed. Chicago, the 1968 Chicago riots were by the police, not by the students, and that police riot was planned. The point of that police riot was to go out over world television to say that the United States government would take no more of this. That if you were willing to have your skull cracked, if you were willing to spend a few days in jail, crowded like sheep, if you were willing to have your record destroyed forever and go into a permanent FBI file, then you could demonstrate in that way, and if not, not. And that's a simple and cruel way, and it took place all over the country."

"The nature of the police went back to the period of the 1890s, when the police beat, killed, mowed down, so-called anarchists in the Haymarket riots and those other riots. The police moved into that same position in the 1960s because the game was getting out of control, the game was no longer played by the government's rules. And Kent State was the height of it. When the National Guard could fire on harmless, peaceful demonstrators and kill them, a very clear message was sent to the young people of this country and to all people who were political in the sense that I use that word. You had either the end of the movement, or revolution, and of course it was the end of the movement and a kind of slow death for political ideas."

"We no longer have politics as I use that word. But I think we're on the verge of it, and that's why we're making this film. I think we're on the verge of a new kind of social change. History doesn't repeat itself, it only appears to repeat itself. The new change, the form of the new change cannot be predicted. We will be aware of that form when it takes place."

Recommended reading:

Douglas Kellner and Dan Streible (eds), Emile de Antonio: A Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Randolph Lewis, Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).

Documentary and Horror Films: ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED

The genres of documentary and horror seem to be complete opposites, yet there are many overlaps. Documentaries often call on the horrific: Blood of the Beasts (George Franju, 1950), Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955), The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (Stan Brakhage, 1971), the legend of "snuff" films, and the Faces of Death series all rely, in vastly different ways, on the ability of images to shock and disgust. Recent documentaries continue in this tradition, such as the great Paradise Lost films and many of the recent Iraq exposes, particularly Taxi to the Dark Side. I thought of this congruence when watching the recent Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (Marina Zenovich, 2008) which uses many clips of Polanksi's films (many of them horror films) to tell the story of Polanski's trial for statutory rape.

Watching Zenovich's use of Polanski's work, I was reminded of a recent article in the new Film Quarterly in which Jonathan Rosenbaum analyzes the documentaries of Adam Curtis. One of the points Rosenbaum considers is Curtis's use of film clips and music. One of these is a music selection from John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), which Curtis features in The Trap. The question then becomes about the manipulation of using something like a horror film score to discuss social and political material. My own response is that the very overtness of such music in a documentary cannot help but be ironic to some degree and thus not conventionally manipulative. Rather, I think the effect can be both visceral and reflective.

One example that comes to mind is the credit sequence to Michael Moore's now rather reviled (even by those on the left) Fahrenheit 9/11. I remain a defender of the film and think it is Moore's best. The use of music in this opening, along with the visuals of the Bush cabinet being "made up" for cameras, can be used as an example of Moore's manipulation. But in this sequence I think Moore is much closer to his more critically respected contemporary, Errol Morris. The overtness of the music signals dread and provides emotion, but it is hardly the classical "unheard melody". I think a similar effect is at work in Phillip Glass's music for Morris and in Curtis's use of Carpenter's score. I don't think these examples stop or discourage the audience from thinking, but perhaps the associations here with the horror film make us more suspicious.

As for Wanted and Desired, the use of Polanski's films works in a very interesting way. The opening credits feature written titles describing Polanksi's crime, scored with the opening music to Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. Certainly this can be seen as manipulation (and titliation) of the highest degree. But as the film progresses, Zenovich critiques this idea of associating Polanski's horror films with his character, which was done extensively by the press after his wife was murdered by the Manson gang. By the end of the film, Zenovich moves from clips of Polanski's horror films to another aspect of his work, his absurdist irony, that captures the spirit of his trial. The result is both a compelling story and a well executed documentary film that reflects intelligently on both Polanksi's career and his life.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Negotiating the Pleasure Principle: The Recent Work of Adam Curtis," Film Quarterly 62, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 70-75.

Link to Documentaries

I've added another link to a user with complete documentaries on youtube. One of these is The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema (Sophie Fiennes, 2006), a great film exploring cinema through Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is narrated by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek and distills many of the ideas discussed in his various books, most notably Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (1991). I just re-read Looking Awry after many years and I think it remains a fascinating read and about as accessible as Lacan can get.

LAKE OF FIRE (Tony Kaye, 2006)

After months of trying, I was finally able to track down, through bittorrent, Tony Kaye's abortion documentary Lake of Fire. The film has received praise as a relatively un-biased take on the issue, neither pro-life or pro-choice. I would agree to a certain extent. The film is not un-biased, as there is a clear point of view, but its perspective is not really pro-life or pro-choice. Rather, it is anti-pro-life.

During debates on pornography, there evolved a position that became known as anti-anti-porn. This described people who did not necessary support pornography but nevertheless disagreed with the anti-porn position, especially around the idea of censorship. I think Kaye takes a similar position regarding abortion. The film begins with a discussion by intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz, who describe the difficulty and complexity of the issue. Kaye also introduces Dershowitz's friend Nat Hentoff, an liberal atheist who is nevertheless pro-life. However, Hentoff's more intellectually legitimate position is not explored. Instead, Kaye focuses on the extreme religious right who support the shooting of abortion doctors and the bombing of abortion clinics. The only time Hentoff is shown again is when he argues that the pro-life position needs to be more consistent: not only anti-abortion, but anti-capital punishment, anti-war, etc. This is followed by the most persuasive argument of the film, put forth by Chomsky:

"It is very well established that as women have more opportunities, more education, as better medical care is available, as more family planning is available, fertility rates go down, abortion goes down, children are better cared for, women are healthier. Those things are known. Those are all things that are easily under social control and should not be controversial. I don't think there should be anything controversial about making sure that women have access to decent obstetric care. That alone would save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. If you want to do things to help women, there are very easy ways to do it. And it's not just true of women but also children. Unicef also reports that, if my memory is correct, 15 million children die every year from mostly easily treatable diseases, things like a lack of drinkable water, or dehydration, or diarrhea, things that can be very easily treated, and treatable for pennies a day from the rich countries. So, if you're serious about saving lives, about saving children's lives, there are easy ways to do it. On the other hand, if you look at the same people who are most militant about saving the fetus, are they calling for an increase in foreign aid? Are they concerned that the United States has the most miserable and miserly foreign aid program of any developed country, by quite a large margin? The country has plenty of wealth, the means are easily there, (but) the social policy is being designed to enrich the wealthy even further and let the poor suffer, let the children starve, let the mothers die, and so on. That's an overwhelming problem. People who are willing to address those problems we can at least take seriously when they talk about values. You can listen to what they say about other things, like abortion, which is a hard question. But I don't think we should be interested in discussing it with people whose values are such that they don't care about the massive problem of killing and harming women and children that they could easily deal with and are doing nothing about. In fact, making it worse, not doing nothing about it, but making it worse."

I would describe the film as anti-pro-life because it does not deal with people on the pro-life side who we can take seriously. People like Hentoff are not the focus, but rather easily dismissed zealots or political opportunists like Pat Buchanan (at the end of Chomsky's speech, Kaye cuts to a Buchanan speech at the American Life League, a political "shock" cut if there ever was one). This is not necessarily a negative, since the vast majority of pro-lifers cannot be taken seriously, and Kaye effectively critiques this position. However, he could also have interrogated the pro-choice position as well. Kaye does hint at this, since some of the pro-choice positions are not well argued (the female rock band, for example), but ultimately does not make this a significant part of his film (see Alexander Payne's Citizen Ruth (1996) for a more neutral critique of both sides of the debate).

Why, then, would I not describe the film as pro-choice? Simply, it is the graphic imagery Kaye shows of an abortion early in the film which resonates in the mind. This is not the shock imagery used for pro-lifers, which is also shown but doesn't have the same impact. Rather, it is a matter-of-fact procedure shown of an abortion performed after 20 weeks in which we see the hand of the fetus in a washing bin. The disturbance of this image is such that it can potentially overwhelm any other facts and cause hesitancy in any pro-choice position. This is deliberate on Kaye's part. Most abortions take place before anything resembling a actual human has been formed. What Kaye wants to leave viewers with are the questions of when this takes place and what consequences this decision has on what the law on abortion should be (if any).

Although Lake of Fire is over 150 minutes long, it seems to need a sequel in which Kaye would tackle the actual difficulty of the abortion issue without concentrating on individuals who do not deserve the attention they receive. Unfortunately, as long as terrorist groups on the pro-life side continue to receive support, they have to be dealt with, and Kaye does this well.