I don’t know very much about documentary cinema, I must say. Since starting this blog in 2015 I’ve written about a few documentaries, but usually only in the context of a festival dispatch or an anthology of capsule reviews, and there’s only one piece, about Wang Bing, solely focused on the medium. I even went to FIDMarseille, ostensibly a documentary festival, and rather than parsing new non-fiction works by directors like Ignacio Agüero and Andrew Kötting I wrote about two narrative features and Jason and the Argonauts. Needless to say, this is a knowledge gap that I fully intend to rectify, and, if only by circumstance, this year’s edition of Sheffield Doc/Fest presented an opportunity to do just that. The novelty of even going to a festival is, frankly, more than enough for me at this point, so being able to physically travel to one so intriguingly programmed as Doc/Fest without having to leave the country in the twilight days of a pandemic, while also grappling with a form of cinema I’ve never really engaged with, is an enticing prospect to say the least.
I was only in Sheffield for three days so, to an extent, my viewing choices were made for me, but one virtue of this kind of predetermination is that unless you do diligent research beforehand everything you see becomes a surprise. Nira Burstein’s intimate fly-on-the-wall Charm Circle and Natalia Garayalde’s harrowing investigative essay Splinters (Esquirlas), two films programmed to screen on the same afternoon, in spite of their completely different subjects, forms, and approaches, became linked by their similarly intense depictions of the strength, love and resilience of the family unit in the midst of a crisis, while Viera Čakányová’s White on White, a video diary filmed to process the isolation and loneliness felt by the director during an extended visit to Antarctica, features as many playful penguins and desolate landscapes as conversations with AI chatbots about the purpose of art to humanity — Lars von Trier is, apparently, a very successful filmmaker from the perspective of thermodynamics.
This is all to say that the idea of expectation is meaningless at a well-programmed festival, and it will always be interesting to see a film that does something unexpected. The only film I saw in Sheffield that I had any idea of beforehand was Chantal Akerman’s Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton, a mid-length portrait and study of the titular classical cellist and long-term partner and collaborator of Akerman, made for French TV in the early 2000s. Akerman’s work is a blindspot for me, another one, but her name carries so much weight that it’s hard to approach her work without grappling with her reputation as one of the great artists of cinema. This is, by all accounts, a comparatively minor work, yet even in the shorter, more restrictive format of the one-hour documentary there’s something immediately striking about Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton that suggests the work of a filmmaker able to take any subject, style or idea and make something uniquely their own.
The film is constructed in three phases, and Akerman uses each of them in turn to provide a different perspective of her subject: firstly, an introduction to the artist by the director via voiceover, then the artist in her own words discussing the roots of her passion for music, and finally the art itself, displayed through several filmed performances featuring the artist both alone and as part of an ensemble. It’s in the last of these three sections, by far the largest, that the film really begins to take shape. Akerman places Wieder-Atherton in a frame within a frame during each performance, focusing the camera’s gaze on the artist and leaving the rest of the image in darkness, while the camera is always in motion, gradually zooming in on her hands as she plays, or zooming out from her face to a wide shot, or even just moving side-to-side across the stage. There’s no real biographic detail here, nor is there much in the way of historical or artistic context. Instead, Akerman’s focus is wholly on Wieder-Atherton’s artistry. She breaks down the frame to emphasise the physical actions that create the music, and in doing so the virtuosity and dynamism of these performances, musically at first, and then echoed cinematographically, becomes impossible to ignore.
Paula Gaitán’s Riverock (É Rocha e Rio, Negro Leo), much like Akerman’s film, is a portrait of a musician, in this case Brazilian avant-garde multi-hyphenate Negro Leo, but, beyond the generic similarity, Gaitán’s approach to presenting a subject couldn’t be more different. The film takes place almost entirely inside the house that Leo shares with his partner, musician Ava Rocha, and their daughter, and Gaitán simply provides a space for Leo to talk, breathlessly and at length, in freewheeling (near) monologue about art, history, politics; all framed in medium close-up and sometimes held for around 20-30 minutes at a time. This could easily be an exhausting exercise, a terrible 157 minute lecture, but Gaitán isn’t interested so much in what Leo is saying but in how he’s saying it, and this is where the fixed single camera setup and the extended duration becomes a virtue. The stillness of each shot draws attention to the way Leo moves as he speaks, his hand gestures, his sniffs and sneezes, his yawns and stretches. He’s a frenetic thinker, and his body moves just as erratically as his mind. At one point, Leo goes through his record collection and picks music to play, but nothing is on the turntable for more than 10 seconds. He’s thought of something else to play already. It’s an intimate and revealing portrait, both physically and intellectually, of a fascinating artist and thinker. And fittingly, much like Akerman, Gaitán ends her film with a performance by her subject, leaving the confines of Leo’s apartment for the first time to join him on a stage, where the chaotic energy of his mind is laid bare in his music.