From Fact To Friction

By Richard Schickel, RICHARD CORLISS

THE ATROCITY AUTEURS

STALKING AND TALKING

Fiction--who needs it? Not when real life is so gripping, so bizarre, so very real. TV went the reality route long ago; now movie audiences are finding that Superman is no match for Grizzly Man. Some gifted directors (Martin Scorsese, Michael Apted, Werner Herzog) commute easily between fiction films and documentaries. They know that good stories don't always come from a writer's imagination. JT Petty makes horror movies for a living. (He also writes video games and children's books.) But he was haunted by a real story from his youth: a neighbor had been stalking and taking movies of local women. Decades later, Petty couldn't get the man to talk on camera, but he did track down several directors of grimy, no-budget films in which women appear to be tortured and killed. The result is S&Man (as in sandman), the year's most instructively icky documentary. Are these atrocity auteurs, and their pathetic victims, for real? Can we believe what we see? Petty explores the appetite for sick sensation that lurks in many a moviegoer. And it won't help if you keep repeating, "It's only a documentary ..." --By Richard Corliss

AS THE YEARS GO BY

SEVEN LITTLE LIVES

Just over four decades ago, Michael Apted was asked by Britain's Granada TV to help make a show that aimed to say something about the effect of the country's class system on a disparate group of little kids. It gathered a lot of attention, and seven years later the network asked him to revisit his subjects. Thus was born the Up series, perhaps the most original and innovative enterprise in the history of documentary film. Apted, who has gone on to a distinguished career in features, has just released the seventh in the series, 49 Up, which brings his subjects well into middle age, and says he'll keep going back to them "as long as I'm compos mentis," in large part because his subjects keep surprising him.

And us. Class consciousness has turned out to be less a factor in shaping these lives than he thought. It is energy and accident that have made all the difference. A cabdriver who Apted was worried might succumb to criminality has become a mini real estate mogul in Spain, a man who was for some years homeless is now a minor government official, a librarian who works with the severely handicapped continues to stick to her idealistic guns, while a schoolteacher who worked extensively in the Third World is back at the traditional public school he once attended in England (and he's still playing cricket).

The series has a long history, which means its subjects have developed an ambiguous self-consciousness about their participation in it. But that only adds depth to the films, which are now being duplicated by other hands in other countries. Watching these lives unfold has been for Apted something like "living in a Victorian novel"--one that he says "becomes more intimate and emotional" for him (as it does for us) as the years accumulate. --By Richard Schickel

TALKING IN TONGUES

Ecstasy in the Heartland

Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady weren't looking for controversy. They just wanted to make a documentary in which they "explored faith through the eyes of a child," as Grady puts it. But their search for that true-believing youngster took them to Becky Fischer ("her name kept coming up") and the summer camp she runs for evangelical children in North Dakota. What they found themselves recording for Jesus Camp were 8- to 10-year-old kids in the throes of religious ecstasy--including talking in tongues--and some unexpected connections between that primitive religiosity and hard-line conservative political beliefs. At camp, a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush is venerated as if it were the Shroud of Turin.

The inherent power of their film did not dawn on Ewing and Grady until they began working with their footage in the cutting room. In a sense, Jesus Camp is a record of a crime--the theft of childhood by possibly well-intended but narrowly ideological adults. Its subjects, of course, don't see it that way. Fischer has said it's great publicity for her endeavors. And Ewing sees her point. "It's hard not to respect people who have deep passions," she says. Neither she nor Grady can entirely fathom why the Evangelicals feel so profoundly threatened in a largely tolerant U.S. They speculate that casual, unthinking secularism, represented by everything from the TV schedule to Wal-Mart's groaning shelves, makes these Evangelicals feel encircled and unheeded despite their relative prosperity. The directors also wonder, as Grady puts it, "if these parents can hold back the tide of natural rebellion and cultural engulfment" that will threaten their kids in adolescence. Who knows? But in the meantime we have this coolly objective and well-made film to contemplate. And reckon with. --R.S.

IN PURSUIT OF MADNESS

Dreams and Demons

Werner Herzog's passions are the stuff of moviemaker legend: the time he walked 400 miles, from Munich to Paris, to help a sick friend live longer; or when, having told budding director Errol Morris that if the young man ever completed a film Herzog would eat his shoe, and Morris did, Herzog ate the damn shoe.

A charismatic dreamer with inexhaustible curiosity and a mile-wide stubborn streak, Herzog, 64, might be a character from one of his own classic movies--Fitzcarraldo, or Aguirre, the Wrath of God--in which a man is seized by some outsize ambition and just about kills himself trying to realize it. But those were fiction films, which constitute less than half of Herzog's output. In his documentaries he is just as driven to make film heroes out of real men with their own crazy dreams.

Often, the dream is to fly: on skis (The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner) or in an airship (The White Diamond) or in a U.S. Navy plane (Little Dieter Needs to Fly). That last film--about a German boy who arrived in America with the dream of flying, flew missions over Vietnam, was captured and tortured, and escaped--had so much natural drama that Herzog turned it into a "real" movie, Rescue Dawn, with Christian Bale as Dieter.

He located another kindred spirit in Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man), who lived with wild bears for 12 summers and was mauled to death by them in the 13th. But whether Herzog is filming auctioneers, televangelists or Saharan herdsmen, he always finds the drama. Sometimes he invents it, staging scenes to underline some point. He finds the standard documentary form boring and banal--"the truth of accountants." What he deeply believes in is "poetic, ecstatic truth ... that can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization."

That's the artful cunning behind the great ecstasy of filmmaker Herzog. And over 40 years, his audiences have found that ecstasy can be contagious. --R.C.

A CHALLENGE TO SANCTIMONY

THE BLAND FACE OF EVIL

The recent release of director Amy Berg's Deliver Us from Evil, a profile of defrocked priest Oliver O'Grady, the most notorious pedophile in American Catholicism, has already resulted in front-page news stories and in O'Grady's departure from exile in Ireland, where newspaper accounts of the film made him a marked man. It renewed interest by the Los Angeles County district attorney in prosecuting the church hierarchy for its cover-up role in a narrative that both breaks the heart and angers the blood.

That's not bad for a documentary film that, given the nature of its medium and its distressing subject matter, is bound to have limited audience appeal. But, of course, serious documentarians never work for money or fame. Since the beginnings of the genre, their aim has usually been to call attention to injustice and, if possible, correct it. Berg got onto this story by making segments about the topic for news programs, then found she could not avoid making the O'Grady case the focus of her first full-length film.

Her coup was getting him to grant several long interviews in which he is cheerfully "disassociative," as Berg puts it. Why would he so expose himself? Because, she thinks, he went in and confessed to the church and was granted absolution, which doesn't encourage one "to really punish yourself." In a way, that's also true of the visibly squirming Roger Cardinal Mahony, shown in a videotaped deposition as he tries to defend himself (and his church's wealth and power) from the scandal. Whether or not legal consequences derive from it, that footage alone makes Deliver Us from Evil one of the most powerful indictments of hypocrisy in high and trusted places you are ever likely to see. --R.S.